Eye-poppin' detail
After hitching its wagon to the high-definition star in November 2008 by supporting the 720p HD format, the popular video-sharing site YouTube has announced that it will increase quality to the 'full-HD' standard, 1080p, starting next week.YouTube will still have a maximum video duration of 10 minutes for standard account holders, but, due to the extra capacity required for clips encoded in the higher-resolution format, the file size limit will increase to 2GB.
Users who have previously uploaded 1080p videos that have subsequently been downscaled, will have them re-encoded back to 1080p.
As YouTube uses Flash technology to play back the clips, it's clear that GPU-based acceleration will become a key selling point, especially for low-end systems where the CPU cannot handle the load imposed by 1080p decoding. Indeed, we might even see PC and notebooks with stickers denoting 'certified for YouTube Full HD'.
On a pragmatic note, NVIDIA has already announced and demonstrated Flash (v10.1) acceleration for CUDA-capable GPUs, and AMD reckons it will do so with its bevy of DX11 GPUs.
