YouTube announced on their blog today that they have started the process of re-encoding their catalog of videos into higher quality. News to me was also the updated size allowed for uploaded videos. YouTube now allows uploaded videos to be up to 1Gb in size. Thats 10x the previous limit. You can see that Google is serious about YouTube and making it the video platform of the internets. I guess thats why they spent 1.6 billion dollars to buy it. UPDATE: Apparently YouTube announced the larger upload limit in November of last year, sorry, I must have been in a cave then.

Excerpt from YouTube’s blog

“You may have noticed that we’re now giving you the option of watching some YouTube videos in higher quality. We’re making these streams available on certain videos, based upon the source file uploaded to us, and over time you’ll find a greater percentage of the library is available to view in higher quality.”

You may also wonder how video quality is chosen. Our general philosophy is to make sure that as many people as possible can access YouTube and that videos start quickly and play smoothly. That’s one reason why you don’t see us racing to call this “Super Duper YouTube HD,” because most people don’t want to wait a long time for videos to play.

Annoying video talking about “High Def” video