YouTube Goes Beyond HD, Introduces 4K Video

Just when you were getting used to the amazing quality of Full HD 1080p, Google has decided to take you even further by introducing 4K videos on YouTube. To simplify how different it is, videos played at the resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels (also known as 2K) are called Full HD, and the 4K videos will be playing at the resolution of 4096 x 2304 pixels. Ideally, the movies played at IMAX use two 2K resolution projectors.

Google’ YouTube Engineer, Ramesh Sarukkai explains on YouTube blog that these videos are ideal to watch from 25 feet away and are not meant to be watched on computer screen, irrespective of how big your monitor is. The reason he mentions this is because the hardware required to view these videos are very costly. You would require a high quality projector, which will be giant in size. To shoot such videos, the camera required is very costly as well.

So you must be wondering if the current hardware is not sufficient to shoot or watch these 4K videos, then why Google bothers about it at all. Well, last year when Google announced the launch of 1080p there were many analysts who predicted that it would hardly be used. But now, we have the hardware supporting these videos even at home theatre and PC. We truly believe that this is a great step ahead by Google. As usual, Google has done its job of innovation, now it is up to rest of the world to catch up with it.

Here is the link of five videos put in the 4K playlist by Google. We would like to advise you not to check these videos out unless you have very fast internet speed and at least a Full HD monitor. Chances are that you might not see much difference as the video will be scaled down to meet your current monitor, and might stutter (a lot) if you play at Original.