YouTube, Now In Text Mode!

techmuse writes "YouTube has introduced a new, higher-resolution text mode for video. The new text mode is far more efficient than their previous high-end, high-definition offering, and should bring entirely new levels of realism to streaming web video!"

Really?

[mcfatboy93]

this is actually cool. i hope its not one of /.s April fools jokes

Re:Really?

[kimvette]

They really should run everything through an aa filter today. :D

Re:Really?

[Hurricane78]

Especially your mom.

The stench of cheap booze is only drowned, by the vomit in her beard! :D

Re:

[NinePenny]

I just clicked "Parent" hoping to see a picture. Didn't work.

Re:

[tomhudson]

They should run slashdot through an aa filter - get rid of the buggy "Web 2.0" interface ... oh wait - they're going to announce that in the "mysterious future" [slushdot.com]!

Re:

[jrmcferren]

Nope, this one isn't a Slashdot April Fool's joke, this one is Youtube's joke. For more info on Jokes I've found so far please visit: http://www.kb3pxr.net/2010/04/april-fools-jokes-abound.html [kb3pxr.net] and please don't flame me for the ads.

Re:

[L4t3r4lu5]

Ugh, I just wish /. didn't have to run a story on other people's April 1st jokes. Can't it get some of it's own?

Re:

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Have you seen the jokes /. types come up with (e.g. last year's pink ponies theme, this year the lame chat roulette thing)? We're better off with other people's jokes.

Re:

[jrmcferren]

Oh Please don't remind me of that, not the OMG Ponies! thing, but the fact that I was stupid on that day. For a while first posts were getting modded up, I decided to start the first post stuff as myself. Later the mods started modding the trolls as trolls and my Karma hit rock bottom. In fact I think I'm still paying for it as I have to wait 10 minutes or more between posts, then again there may have been trolls on using an open WiFi I once had.

Re:

[tepples]

Your recent posts have been starting at 1 for me, so your karma must have worked back up to positive by now. Perhaps you can't post more often than every 10 minutes unless you have Good or Excellent karma. If you can get six positive moderations a week for a month, you'll be up to Excellent where you can post reasonably fast and at Score:2.

Re:

[clone53421]

I have to wait 10 minutes or more between posts

I’ve found that this seems to be a side effect of using the separate posting page [slashdot.org] rather than the fancy-dancy Web 2.0 comment editor.

Internet Explorer apparently doesn’t support the Web 2.0 fanciness, so you’re stuck with the other page... and the posting limit...

Re:

[jrmcferren]

I have to wait 10 minutes or more between posts

I’ve found that this seems to be a side effect of using the separate posting page [slashdot.org] rather than the fancy-dancy Web 2.0 comment editor.

Internet Explorer apparently doesn’t support the Web 2.0 fanciness, so you’re stuck with the other page... and the posting limit...

Thanks for the tip, I'll see if that helps.

Re:

[clone53421]

You mean like SlashRoulette?

Re:

[IBBoard]

Adverts? What adverts? ;)

Besides, if you didn't want flaming for them then you presumably know that they're hideous or something, so why put them up?

Re:Really?

[ottothecow]

Unfortunately, it also looks like they are pushing through the new page design which I am not a huge fan of.

The *glaring* problems have been fixed, but the way things are placed does not seem as smart to me...particularily the video description. It should be to the side of the video...especially on wide screen displays. Often it will have lyrics or something you want to read while the video is playing and you can not do this with a longer block of text (or with any text on a netbook screen).

Re:

[auld_wyrm]

But the big question is whether this new high def text still uses flash or if it takes advantage of HTML5 2.0, unless of course you're in France.

___
A year of achievements already?

Re:

[A Friendly Troll]

Unfortunately, it also looks like they are pushing through the new page design which I am not a huge fan of.

I've talked to a dozen people today about the new layout, and not a single person liked it - not the laymen, not the designers, not the programmers, nobody. The words "clusterfuck", "illegible", "wanky piece of shit" and "it's an April Fools' joke, right?" had been uttered.

Judging by how this thing looks and behaves, they probably haven't done any real usability testing, and they've partly left Opera out in the cold (videos now require "click to activate" and vertical centering is off on all "buttons", whic

Re:

[ottothecow]

Unfortunately, it is not a new thing.

I had a computer that was stuck in their beta test (until I figured out what combination of logging out/clearing cache and cookies would get rid of it). The layout was similar although they had some even worse features. The search tried to dynamically shrink the currently playing video (to the a small box in the top left) to display the search results next to the recommended videos...this simply did not work for me (firefox on ubuntu). The first search might sort of

Re:

[A Friendly Troll]

I know, they selected me as a beta user some time ago, and I happily deleted the cookies responsible for that monstrosity. There have been some improvements since then (most notably, URLs now look like URLs, instead of 524987-character garbage, and not everything is a playlist), but it's still garbage. If you picked a random person from the street, they would probably be able to design the page better and in a more usable way.

I honestly have no idea what they tried to accomplish with this, and why they have

Re:

[commodore64_love]

Didn't you watch the Matrix Text video that youtube put-up as an example? This is no joke. And yes the vid looked just fine. At last I watch youtube on my C=64.

BTW I've decided to quit engineering and join a convent.
Maybe then I'll finally get some sisters.

More details here ...

[tomhudson]

YoutTube's TEXTp Saves You Bandwidth and Money"> [slushdot.com]

apparently it will save Youtube lots of money AND allow them to do streaming 1080p videotext.

Re:

[clone53421]

It appears to me that it downloads exactly the same .flv as it normally would. So the claim of saving bandwidth is entirely fictional...

Not on all videos

[dfm3]

I pulled up a few random videos and text mode only seems to be enabled for a select few.

Re:

[MoellerPlesset2]

I pulled up a few random videos and text mode only seems to be enabled for a select few.

True. But since the Trololo guy [youtube.com] is one them, I can't help being very glad.

Also not in all countries...

[denzacar]

It seems that it is USA-only, judging from the comments on the videos and the fact that I also can't see the TEXTp version.
I hope that THAT part is the actual joke. Though I doubt that.

Re:

[Dayze!Confused]

I'm currently in Taiwan and enjoying the TEXTp videos.

Re:

[fastest fascist]

Not true, I was able to view them just fine from Germany. Some videos didn't have the option to enable TEXTp though.

Re:

[elashish14]

You can already do it in VLC! http://www.instantfundas.com/2009/09/watch-movies-in-ascii-in-vlc-media.html [instantfundas.com]

Re:

[Dan East]

No, this is legitimate. If you pause the video you'll see perfectly crisp ANSI chars, and not just an encoded video of ANSI rendering. Same thing with full screen. On my HD monitor it is perfectly crisp while playing. Also, both CPU cores are literally idle playing this video.

Of course Youtube would have to pre-process and "encode" the video into ANSI first - this isn't some video rendering mode of the player, but the actual stream is ANSI. It is very doubtful Youtube will actually go to to the trouble

Re:

[AmigaHeretic]

I'm sure it's april fools joke, but it makes you kinda wonder why they don't take a few hours and add Theora support.

HTML5

[OOSCARR]

No more flash needed!

HTML 3

[tomhudson]

Apparently Youtube isn't the only one - Slashdot is finally killing off their buggy Web 2.0 interface [slushdot.com] and supporting real web standards. They'e waiting until tomorrow to announce it by first letting everyone overdose on the stupid flash "roulette chat".

FIRST

[grimdawg]

april fool i'm way too late

aalib

[zmooc]

Oh come on why not do it properly and port aalib to flash.

Re:

[plasmodio]

maybe flash to aalib ?

Re:

[Antony-Kyre]

Is this the ASCII art thing that VideoLan has as an option?

Re:

[VisiX]

How do you know how they did it? It works on every video so they obviously are running it through some sort of output filter.

Re:

[gknoy]

It does? I tried it on several videos and they had no textp option. Perhaps I am doing it wrong.

Re:

[Spansh]

There's an even easier way of noticing it's an output filter.

The switch when clicking between your current stream and the text stream, is instant. If you switch from low to high def streams it actually reloads the stream. You can click the TEXTp to normal links as many times as you like and it's instant. They probably did effectively convert aalib to flash in some form (at the very least use the conversion tables).

Re:

[zmooc]

They didn't. The april fools joke is not the first video; it's that after clicking on some of the fake related videos you're actually going to believe it:P APRIL FOOLS! :D

Could have done it for real...

[alephnull42]

This technology exists e.g. http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Text_Mode_Doom [wikia.com] - would have been way cooler to actually implement the option permanently than just upload this Video

Re:Could have done it for real...

[Deag]

it is on all their videos just add &textp=fool

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzCZ1W_CUoI&textp=fool [youtube.com]

Re:Could have done it for real...

[quadelirus]

You can also select it from the resolution selection box.

Re:

[byornski]

Except that it doesn't work for any videos that they haven't uploaded an ascii version of...... try it on an actual random video and it does nothing.

Re:

[macshit]

Except that it doesn't work for any videos that they haven't uploaded an ascii version of...... try it on an actual random video and it does nothing.

I saw it on some very random videos earlier today (which seem extremely unlikely to be classified as "popular"...), and it was available (through the resolution-selector widget) on every video I looked at subsequently.

It seems more likely that not all servers got it at the same time or something.

Re:

[Sancho]

I found several where there isn't a text option. Try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVRHOhLP-aA [youtube.com]

Re:

[tepples]

Perhaps it doesn't show up if there are ads on the video.

Re:

[byornski]

or this one [youtube.com] and still nothing. (ignoring how annoying the people in the video are)

Re:

[clone53421]

They only say it only works on “most” videos:

Or you can select “TEXTp” from the pulldown menu on most videos ... You can also append &textp=fool to most video URLs to test it out

Re:

[quadelirus]

Yeah, it seems pretty limited which ones are available. Oh well.

Re:

[Xzzy]

Is there any pattern for why some videos have the textp option, and others don't?

Maybe they only did it for popular videos? Because none of my uploads have the textp option.

Re:

[ender-]

That's odd. The videos people link to work, but any other video I try doesn't work. The mode isn't selectable in the selection box, and appending &textp=fool doesn't work. [shrug]

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Nothing beats...

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG! Ponies!

Curses!

[Vectormatic]

Curse the corporate firewall/proxy!

what kind of company policy blocks youtube but lets facebook pass anyway?

i'll have to check this out at home tonight

Re:

[Island Admin]

Companies generally ban YouTube as it is a bandwidth hog. It is strange that facebook is allowed, as it is a productivity hog :P

Re:

[Vectormatic]

i just checked the youtube thing, quite cool!

also, fuck /. for putting sounds-producing flash in every page, i will be off till tomorrow

Re:

[Island Admin]

Click Mute button ;)

Re:

[archangel9]

Tinfoiled again.

nice

[lennier1]

Gotta hand it to them.
They usually manage to make their joke something entertaining rather than the boring stuff most other sites tend to come up with.

This makes life easier

[elashish14]

Great! Before I had to download it and open it in VLC to do this. This cuts one step out of my day - productivity increase!

Woot!

[Drethon]

Now I can watch YouTube at work! Sigh...

This is awesome

[Murdoch5]

Wow what a great useless setting, can't wait to get drunk and watch text based video.

Awww

[Daetrin]

I'm actually kind of disappointed that you can't actually watch all (or even most of) the YouTube videos that way, it's a pretty cool effect!

Re:

[jayme0227]

Indeed, I was surprised at how good it looked when shown that way.

Re:

[VisiX]

I am disappointed that so many people on slashdot are posting this comment. You either jumped to this conclusion with no evidence or have horrible observation/problem solving skills. It is in the resolution options for every video. You can also add "&textp=fool" to the url.

Re:

[Daetrin]

"I am disappointed that so many people on slashdot are posting this comment. You either jumped to this conclusion with no evidence or have horrible observation/problem solving skills. It is in the resolution options for every video. You can also add "&textp=fool" to the url."

I'd thank you for the correction, except you had to jump in with the personal insults as well. Personally i checked YouTube right before leaving for work. I loaded several of my favorite videos and none of them were getting the fi

Re:

[clone53421]

Actually, you’re wrong; the YouTube blog [blogspot.com] only says that it works on “most” videos.

Don't try this at home

[zr-rifle]

Actually, you can to this easily with VLC, since it supports ASCII streaming of video files. Take a look at the available video outputs [videolan.org]. Quite an amusing april fools prank, but a better one would have been switching back to '90s realvideo (H.263) with the soul-crushing, endless pre-buffering.

YT being slow

[British]

If YouTube wasn't so slow(in the past 8 months), I would chuckle. But when I'm at home(Comcast) the loading of videos is dialup-level slow. I can no longer realtime-stream videos, and Youtube's code doesn't handle stalled loading well, where you can't pause it.

It seemed a bit faster last night with the new GUI though, for how ugly it is.

Re:

[mcgrew]

It's a comcast thing, not a youtube thing. I've been taking my netbook to the bar because their wifi is faster than comcast.

Yeah, I realize this is a joke, but...

[Antony-Kyre]

I believe VLC (VideoLan) had a textmode. No kidding. I have the old version, but choose Settings/Video/Output Modules/Color ASCII art video output. And no, I'm not kidding.

Re:

[Laser_iCE]

Are you KIDDING ?!

Re:

[Antony-Kyre]

I swear I'm not kidding. But someone mentioned this too I believe.
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1603426&cid=31700058 [slashdot.org]

I think http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=308695 [ubuntuforums.org] talks about it too, and the dates show that it's not a joke.

Beat me to the punch!!!

[seandiggity]

A few months ago I was working on a PHPmotion [phpmotion.com] site that utilized libcaca [zoy.org] and aalib [sourceforge.net], which both mplayer and vlc use to achieve this effect. I've been stalling on it to work on other, more important [foojbook.com] projects, but maybe I'll revive it now, since this might become popular...

Re:

[seandiggity]

Actually, everyone should check out ASCIImeo [asciimeo.com]...he beat YouTube to the punch :P You can watch anything on Vimeo in ASCII on that site.

I love this

[eagee]

I'd watch youtube in ASCII all day every day! I hope it doesn't go away after the 1st >..

About time!

[Compaqt]

Finally, YouTube for us Lynx [isc.org] users.

Are the ASCII images 7-bit clean?

Not all of us can afford 14.28% additional bits, you insensitive clods!

Not good enough

[EkriirkE]

Still doesn't work in links/lynx :(

Done on CPU, apparently

[SheeEttin]

For those interested in the actual "feature", apparently the ASCIIization is apparently done locally on your CPU within the Flash player.
You can tell because you can turn it on and off without restarting the stream, and also because it loads your CPU.

Re:

[clone53421]

Yes, and the .flv stream that’s downloading is the same regular .flv video that you’d usually be streaming.

Wrong debut video

[Endo13]

They should have debuted their TEXTp with this video instead:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 [youtube.com]

ASCII Star Wars:

[Tablizer]

http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ [asciimation.co.nz]