Monday, August 25, 2008

Things Youtube Should Invent (or, rather, reintroduce): shrink poor quality videos down to their original size

I don't have the technical vocabulary to describe this phenomenon, so please bear with me and feel free to politely put it in more grownup words.

When youtubes are poor quality (low resolution?), they don't have enough pixels to fill up the standard youtube screen size, so everything gets enlarged and the pixels take up more than one pixel's worth of space, making the whole thing look kind of fuzzy and pixely and poor quality. (If you don't understand what I'm talking about, take a normal-quality youtube and expand it to full screen.)

YouTube used to have an option where you could shrink the video back down to its original size. So you could have tiny and crisp, or regular and fuzzy, or full-screen and even fuzzier. I think they should bring that option back. I'm not a technical quality geek at all (the technical quality geeks in my life are apalled at my hardware), but even I'm noticing the poor quality and wishing for the option of a smaller but crisper image!

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