The amateur video giant has been supporting 720p “high def” for a while now, and while uploaders could get a 1080p video onto the servers, display rubbed up against that maximum output. No more, apparently.

YouTube’s HD mode will now offer 720p and 1080p, depending on the resolution of the source video file. (1080p is what you get from a Blu-ray.)

YouTube is even going back to re-encode 1080p files already uploaded to get them into proper resolution.

“For viewers with big monitors and a fast computer, try switching to 1080p to get the most out of the fullscreen experience,” a YouTube engineer suggested on the official YouTube blog. OK here, we go. (Don’t waste your time trying this on your iPod, which doesn’t do 720.)

A sample video of Pennie the Dog’s nose is offered as a 1080p preview. Kind of underwhelming, but get a load of this 1080p high definition test of some square in Maine put up by a consumer. Big and beautiful. To get the full 1080p (apparently), add this to the end of the URL string: &fmt=37

Terrific, but … here are the potential downsides: Eternal upload times (even at the 11-minute limit), constant buffering during viewing due to server slowness, and audio playback that’s the pits compared to the video. Everyone banging on the YouTube servers could share in the HD strain.

“How about making it so that videos load fast enough on NORMAL QUALITY first?” one crank commented on YouTube’s blog posting announcing the news.

YouTube is making the inevitable move to full 1080p support now, probably figuring enough people have full-HD home video cameras to justify the expense and hassle. The whole area of online video is one big Beta anyway — let’s enjoy the bumpy ride.

Now about that crappy audio …

– Steve Jobs, Oct. 14, 2008

The Apple chieftain’s decision to wait until Blu-ray “takes off” means we should be seeing some movement regarding the high definition format right about now. Blu-rays are consistently selling at the same rate as DVDs these days, at least on top-tier titles, and DVDs are feeling increasingly like the cheap seats.

Any speculation about Apple’s plans has to be viewed with skepticism, in part because there’s so much of it, but there is an alignment between a couple of unsourced pieces of info floating around out there.

Throw reports from Tech Crunch, Boy Genius Report and AppleInsider in a blender and your info-smoothie has it that iTunes 9 will contain support for the Blu-ray format, aligning with new iMacs that play the true high def format. This is all “rumor and speculation,” of course, but you have to wonder what is taking the tech colossus of Cupertino so long to get with the program.

True, Blu-ray remains shaky in some ways, with continuing annoyances on several fronts for consumers. HD DVD used to market itself against the Blu-ray camp with the proclamation that it was the only “market ready” format. Locked-down Blu-ray standards have been slow in coming and slower in adaptation. Up for some more of those serial firmware updates, anyone?

Watching a Blu-ray on a computer monitor seems a bit of a waste, but why not go for the best images and audio available in any format?

iTunes 9 won’t be touching down anytime soon — for the record we’re on 8.2.1 at this moment.

One of the immediate questions would be compatibility with Apple TV, the chronically dismissed box that gets video content from your computer to the TV monitor. That combo — iTunes to iMac to Apple TV to HD televisions — has bottom-line shifting implications, if it’s possible.

Duly disclaimed: I own Apple stock and I want it to go up.

The iTunes Store is open to all for high-definition business, starting with the highly anticipated videos “Quantum of Solace” and “Twilight.”

iTunes actually started selling high-def titles more than a year ago, but the proposition was too squirrelly for most of us to worry about — HD movies and TV shows were only available for rental, and then only if you used the Apple TV box to get them to a monitor.

You now can rent or download an HD movie and play it on your Mac or PC. That’s high-def* with an asterisk because the resolution is 720p, unlike Blu-rays at the full 1020p.

The latest hit HD movies will sell on iTunes for $19.99 (a bit of a price break over Blu-rays). The HD downloads also come with a standard def version for playing on iPods and iPhones. You’ll need the latest iTunes update, 8.1, Apple said in a press release on the high-definition movies.

HD rentals are $4.99. They’ll go live within a month after the Blu-rays street, Apple said.

“Customers have made HD content on iTunes a hit, with over 50 percent of TV programming being purchased in HD when available,” flacked Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services.

The new Bond movie and the teen vampire romance are now on iTunes as pre-orders, with the actual files downloading next week. Step right up, quantities are unlimited.

The iTunes store has some HD movies up there now, but they’re mostly marginal entries such as “Bangkok Dangerous” and “Disaster Movie.” Anyone up for paying $20 for “Religuious”?

So far, the TV.com page only has a couple of clips — from “CSI,” “Survivor,” “The Pink Panther” and Letterman. But the text promises, “This is Blu-Ray DVD quality, right here on TV.com — and there’s about to be a whole lot more of it.”

Of course, most people still don’t have the capability of displaying true 1080p video on their computer monitors. If you have a good CRT monitor, you’re good. Owners of Sony “Full HD” laptops (such as the VAIO) seem to be getting the true 1080p experience. Some widescreen LCDs will deliver the full monty as well. (Check the manual.) I don’t know if computer-to-HD TV schemes work, but an HDMi chord would have to be in the loop. (Anyone?)

At any rate, the 1080p offerings on TV.com seemed a clear step up from the site’s regular HD offerings. (At least the clips didn’t have the ads.) The images were clean, with the sharpness way high, flirting with jagged. There was a satisfying 3D pop to everything.

I experienced some odd and annoying stuttering as the clips played, especially when the live-action survivors were running around. In the Letterman clip, with U2 butts-down for an interview, there was almost no stuttering.

Silicon Valley Insider had worse luck with the halting images: “Their HD videos looked more like HD slideshows.”

The vintage “Pink Panther” toon looked OK, but you wonder why they didn’t include a contemporary bit of animation for show-and-tell.

Check it out for yourself: This seems about as good as it gets in online video.

TV.com recently lost content from NBC and Fox as Hulu halted feeds to the CBS site, which seeks to display shows from all networks.

YouTube, you probably recall, played around with low-grade high-definition video before surprising users last month with a widescreen player used for all videos. That 16×9 screen measures about 640 pixels wide. Now, a wider version of the HD player automatically appears when selecting HD video, rolling out at 850 pixels wide over the 965 page.

Videos that appear to have HD-quality images tend to stutter a bit, even for those with decent bandwidth.

Here’s the latest super-popular “Where the Hell Is Matt” video that YouTube has been pushing as a demo for the new HD player. You’ll start out in standard, before clicking on “Watch in HD” at bottom right of the screen. Pretty impressive, especially if you’ve never caught Matt’s act.

The site was basically a YouTube for people shooting in high-def. Which could be just about anyone, given the low cost of HD gear these days. It also included other typical YouTube-type fare, which as trailers, anime and music videos.

The latest traffic figures show something like 17 million users a month.

So why kill the site?

Tom (aka Spinner) of DivX wrote on the online video site: “The short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it’s really as simple as that.”

The well-connected blog Tech Crunch talks about those details, saying the shutdown came after “a ridiculous battle of egos at the DivX board level” that caused the show-runners to quit. It’s a complicated story concerning a deal to sell the video service; you can read about the boardroom battles on that blog. DivX had no comment on the report.

Stage6 was launched after DivX went public in late October 2006, and went into beta the next summer. Since then, wanna-be filmmakers and real ones have packed the site with content.

Meanwhile, DivX stock took a pounding after Monday’s announcement.

The video content reportedly is being sent to other unspecified content sites.

I’d recomend taking a quick look at the site before tomorrow — this is what we’ll all expect to see from video-sharing services in the future. Right now, the shutdown is a real loss to the cause.

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The media and tech bloggers wasted no time in bringing on the next threat to Blu-ray: downloading and streaming of movies and TV shows via the Internet. Perhaps the Blu-ray victory was hollow, some speculated.

Good story line, but way premature. Anyone with experience in watching movies and shows over the Net knows this remains early adopter territory.

A lot of progress in terms of consumer convenience has been made in the year since this blog launched, but we’re still (mostly) a forgiving core audience of teens, college students and tech hounds.

Two voices of reason popped up:

David Pogue, the talented home tech writer for the New York Times, tackled the subject of digital downloads on Thursday: “The Internet movie download era is more distant than pundits think, for four colossal reasons.” — limited broadband penetration; lack of extra features such as director’s commentaries, deleted scenes; audio and video quality; and the cluelessness of Hollywood.

Here’s Pogue:

“Today’s movie-download services bear the greasy policy fingerprints of the movie studio executives — and when it comes to the new age of digital movies, these people are not, ahem, known for their vision.

“For example, no matter which movie-download service you choose, you’ll find yourself facing the same confusing, ridiculous time limits for viewing. You have to start watching the movie you’ve rented within 30 days, and once you start, you have to finish it within 24 hours.

“Where’s the logic? They’ve got your money, so why should they care if you start watching on the 30th day or the 31st?”

He goes on to review the leading download/streaming services, such as Apple TV and Vudu.

The conclusion: “When competing with the humble DVD, Internet movie boxes do poorly on price, selection and viewing flexibility (that is, how much time you have to watch). Their sole DVD-smashing feature is the convenience; you get the movie right now.”

Duncan Riley of TechCrunch listed his reasons online video downloads are not about to kill Blu-ray:

• “Substantial generations have grown up with physical media, and this isn’t about to change tomorrow. … Like music, that is going to take at least 5-10 years.”
• “There are still people who prefer consuming video on their TV sets. … Until such time that Net or network-enabled devices become mainstream, TV and physical media will retain the upper hand.”
• “The days of cheap unlimited internet access in the United States may well be coming to an end as more and more download video and use P2P services. The low cost of bandwidth itself was a historical quirk that came about due to the first dot com bubble.”

I think Blu-rays should have a good decade of life left in them, with increasing consumer acceptance — unless the various compatibility issues between player makers and disc makers don’t get sorted out. (HD DVD had its issues, but it was clearly more “market ready” than Blu-ray.)

Watching movies on computers will always be a secondary pastime, so the providers of online video content had best use that decade to figure out how to get the Internet directly plugged into those TVs — with minimal hassle and maximum A/V quality.

Yeah, that’s one reason I own Apple stock.

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Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida cited Warner Bros.’ decision to go Blu-ray exclusive: “That had tremendous impact,” he said. “If we had continued, that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win.”

Toshiba vowed to support current HD DVD players.

Nishida indicated the situation with U.S. film studios backing the format was unresolved, the AP reported early today.

Format creator Toshiba says no decision has been made to surrender, but spokeswoman Jodi Sally told the Hollywood Reporter that, “Given the market developments in the past month, Toshiba will continue to study the market impact and the value proposition for consumers, particularly in light of our recent price reductions on all HD DVD players.”

Toshiba subsidizes the price of HD DVD players, which have undercut Blu-ray machines at retail.

Wal-mart dumped HD DVD on Friday, days after Best Buy and Netflix left the format to die. The HD DVD collapse began in January, when Warner Bros. decided to go Blu-ray only — just days before CES.

In the end, the inboard Blu-ray player in Sony’s PlayStation 3 units proved the deciding factor. Outboard HD DVD players were available for the Xbox 360 machines, but they were cheap and nasty.

Quality was a more or less a tie between the warring formats, with HD DVD getting the nod in price and reliability.

The showcase features trailers from five new and upcoming films: “Alien vs. Predator: Requiem,” “Horton Hears a Who,” “Wanted,” “Charlie Wilson’s War” and “Hitman.” Unfortunately, with the possible exception of “Charlie Wilson,” these movies appear to suck. But we’re here to look at the pretty pictures …

The animated “Horton” had the best images, as is typical with CGI material displayed in high definition. On Hulu, the animation looked sharp and clear, but the visual experience clearly lagged behind a decent TV monitor running similar content in any format: HD DVD/Blu-ray, upconverted DVD and even DVD.

Still, for streaming video on a midpriced computer monitor (16×9), this was a visual treat, far better than I’ve seen to date. That’s in line with what Hulu has to say in its HD preview:

We’ve limited the bitrates on these HD streams to allow as many users as possible to sample high definition streaming. Even so, we think you’ll agree that the results are a huge step up from what we’re used to seeing on the web.

Given expectations, a few of the live action trailers seemed a bit flat and dingy — probably more a question of source material, or even the choice of shots in the trailer. “Alien” and “Hitman” looked drab at times, while “Charlie Wilson” and “Wanted” had some sparkle. There were no signs of artifacting or other video noise. The video stream never broke and the pause feature worked like a charm. (The photos on this post come from the HD and give a pretty good idea of the quality. I did brighten up the images a tad.)

The lossless audio is a major perk of high definition on DVD systems. On Hulu, even played through a decent PC system, the sound was nothing special. Except for that one moment of real clarity and presence, in which an announcer thanked the sponsor. I have no idea how the audio was streamed.

The Hulu HD comes out at 1280 x 720 resolution, using the H.264 video codec for compression. Viewers need broadband, the latest Adobe Flash Player 9 and a reasonably fast computer. The requirements can be found on the HD Gallery’s intro page. You’ll need to be in on the Hulu beta.
Meanwhile, NBC Uni has been busy on other fronts:

TechCrunch reports that NBC’s own site, NBC Direct, is turning to P2P distribution of its downloads. Apparently this is another move toward high definition.

NBC Universal also did the spin on an output deal with SanDisk for videos on the Fanfare service, which uses a portable hard drive to haul online video from PCs to TVs. Fanfare has an iTunes-style store for downloads that gave NBC the pricing control it failed to wrest from Steve Jobs. The deal includes content from NBC’s primetime sked as well as Sci-Fi Channel, Bravo and the like. Here’s the closing snark: Anyone have a Fanfare player? Hands? OK, how about an iPod …