YouTube Introduces 60fps Video Support 157
jones_supa (887896) writes Google's YouTube announced that it's adding two new features that will especially benefit people who enjoy watching gameplays and those who stream games live. Most excitingly, the site is rolling out 60 frames per second video playback. The company has a handful of videos from Battlefield Hardline and Titanfall (embedded in the article) that show what 60fps playback at high definition on YouTube looks like. As the another new feature, YouTube is also offering direct funding support for content creators — name-checking sites like Kickstarter and Patreon — and is allowing fans to 'contribute money to support your channel at any time, for any reason.' Adding the icing on the cake, the website has also a number of other random little features planned, including viewer-contributed subtitles, a library of sound effects and new interactive info cards.
Firefox + 60fps = No Go (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately YouTube's 60fps support pokes a pretty big hole in the current state of Firefox.
To play back 60fps videos you need to be using the HTML5 player and stream the 1080p version. The Flash player will not work here.
The problem? Firefox doesn't support Media Source Extensions [w3.org], which is what YouTube uses for DASH adaptive streaming [ghacks.net]. Mozilla's developers are working on the matter, but only for WebM [mozilla.org] for now. H.264/MP4 MSE support will have to wait.
The end result is that 1080p60 playback works great on Chrome, Safari, and even IE11, but is all but useless on Firefox.
I don't want to slag the Firefox devs too badly (hey, it's a free browser), but once again FOSS orthodoxy is getting in the way of practical feature development. H.264 support took an embarrassingly long time to come, and now Firefox is the only browser that that can't play back 1080p60 on YouTube.
Between this and their constant attempts to turn Firefox into a Chrome-alike, it's getting harder and harder to justify using Firefox.
Too bad Framefree never caught on (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a way to do video compression so that frame rate doesn't matter. It's called Framefree. [memberclicks.net] (PowerPoint, unfortunately). With that, you can crank up the playback frame rate as high as the output device can go.
Framefree was developed at Kerner Optical, which was spun off from Lucasfilm. Kerner went out of business a few years ago, and although there was a web site "framefree.us" and even a browser plug-in, it never caught on.
The idea is that the intermediate frames between key frames are mesh-based morphs, rather than MPEG-type block updates. Compression is compute-intensive, and playback requires a GPU. You can generate as many intermediate frames between keyframes as you want. Intermediate frame generation means interpolating the mesh points and then warping the image pieces to fit. So not only can you have very high display frame rates, you can also have ultra-slow slow motion. No MPEG-type blockiness, either.
While Framefree compression never caught on (probably because a high performance GPU in every set top box and DVD player was too expensive back then) the technology is used in sports programming to generate ultra-slow slow motion without using ultra-high frame rate cameras. Maybe it will make a comeback in the era of "4K" video with 60FPS frame rates.