4K displays on phones, tablets and TVs are all the rage nowadays but sadly, there is not enough content to enjoy in ultra high definition. YouTube has been quick to support 4K videos though since some time. Now, through TestTube, it has rolled out experimental support for 60 frames per second 4K videos along with a redesigned nifty video player.
Any YouTube user can head over to the TestTube page and try out the features. 4K 60fps video does not need any enabling but you would need a powerful device to handle the additional processing requirement for such videos. YouTube has shared two playlists to try out the new video format. One is for 4K videos, which were already supported by YouTube. More 4K videos can be found via YouTube’s search filters.
For 60fps 4K videos at 3840×2160, YouTube recommends this playlist.
The redesigned YouTube player is my favourite experiment out of the two. I am always interested to see what the world’s most popular videos website decides to do when updating its widely used video player. The new video player, on HTML5, works very well and has a few cool new animations along with transparency in the seek bar. Once you enable the experiment, try out the following parts of the player to notice the animations: in settings menu, the video resolution and toggles for annotations, autoplay and playback speed. The related videos shown at the end of the player also have slight animations which make it much more pleasant to use.
The player stays true to YouTube’s branding while looking very modern at the same time.
These test features seem to be working well in Safari and Chrome on Mac, whereas Firefox does not support the new video player. I have been unable to give this a try on Internet Explorer or Edge so far but will update this post when I give it a test drive.
Head over to YouTube TestTube to enable both features.
2 comments