I tried to bypass Google+ for commenting on a video, but it was to no avail. My Youtube account isn't even linked to a proper Gmail address, so it looks like I won't be doing any more commenting on Youtube.

That's pretty shit. Youtube's a useful resource because its the video site with the most resources and the greatest ability to host so many videos.... but with that said, it, especially its UI, has been getting worse and worse for ages.

How about the change that made it so that I have to click the gear, then the drop down menu, then a resolution, just to select an "HD" resolution... and then click the gear again, then the bigger window button, then click the gear to close it because for some reason that doesn't auto-close the menu. That's 6 button clicks for what used to be 3, and for no aesthetic improvement... I just don't get it. I feel the same way about FaceBook and loads of other sites, makes me think I'm in the minority and that maybe what I think is good UI is what everone else thinks is bad UI... but I doubt it.

I did indeed abandon Google as my search engine; I've had enough with Google's ridiculousness. I'm only going to continue using YouTube since so many people want me to, but beyond that, YouTube will now be the only Google service I use.

In its place, I'm presently trying out Blekko. So far, as strictly a search engine for web pages and images, it works very similarly to Google, with a few extra features while missing a few really minor (but REALLY need to be added at some point) features. Also, no ads! (Though I'm left to wonder how they make any money... maybe through affiliate links if their privacy policy is any indication.)

Oh yeah, that's one thing that's interesting about Blekko too... they have an INCREDIBLY explicit privacy policy that outlines exactly which pieces of information they collect, how long they store it for, how it's associated, who gets access to it, etc. That's about a million times better than can be said for most companies' privacy policies in general nowadays! :o

Still, I find it odd that my Avast rating system is giving it only an average rating... Maybe because people are so used to Google that they think anything with fewer features is inferior (ie: everything not Google), but then, the only things I used Google itself for were regular page searches, image searches, and math conversions, which Blekko can do just fine. :B

So, that'll be my search engine of choice for the next little while, and if it does the job, it'll become my permanent replacement in place of Google. ;)

My exisiting comment also looks weird now, it seem the new commenting system hates new-lines.
The comments made me looks that I forgot to press "Enter".

One word for this one: UGH

Right now I'm with the others and can't comment since I don't have Google+ (nor do I want it). From what I've been reading, the new system isn't working right to begin with. Does anybody test things before flipping the switch? Google says its "new and improved" (they have an unnaturally cheery video about it) and will clean up the comments. To the legitimate users its a big headache.

What they don't realize is self moderated comment systems have a big loophole that can be exploited. Once your reputation/karma is in the trash, you can just create a new account and keep on flaming the comments section. (see slashdot)

Gemini000 wrote:

Google needs to stop breaking things and needs to stop forcing people to use their stuff. I'm getting close to the point where I may even stop using their search engine entirely if they can't get their act together.

I feel the same. They've become every bit as bad as fecesbook with this new crusade against net anonymity and freedom of choice for the user. Just last week they launched a new sign-in process that's tedious, overcomplicated and invasive (keeps tracks of your accounts through cookies when you're signed out), and now this.

I despise the changes that google has made, besides making youtube worse and worse to use over the years they encrypted/removed a lot of links to different resolutions to the videos so that make downloading quality videos difficult. Second they removed the old UI that I had been using for years with my edu account (gmail but for college/university uses only) and made it more difficult to log into my other accounts. Last but not least they removed some of my spare accounts from youtube >.<

I hardly watch videos on youtube directly but instead I download and watch later with download helper.

Gemini000 wrote:

Still, I find it odd that my Avast rating system is giving it only an average rating...

In my experience, website rating services from the likes of antivirus publishers are still decidedly unused by their users. Well-known websites with zero ratings are not unheard of. In other words, the "crowds" are not "sourcing"...

I use also youtube but there are some some basic functionality things that annoy me.

The auto quality detection always chooses 144p for me, while often 480p work well. It requires always manual interaction to set it back to 480p.

On some of my uploaded videos some qualities like 480p to 1080p can be chosen but don't work. So if it is chosen, it drops back to 360p and greys out the e.g. 720p option.

Sometimes after upload it takes youtube ages to process a video, like 16h or more until its finally available.

I get for 50% of the videos, that are mostly captures from demos or old games a copyright notice, where I have to write a dispute. The risk is that my whole account can be deleted if the dispute is rated wrong or inappropriate.
Just to give one example how ridiculous it is often, I just had this for one of the last videos:

"some song title", musical composition administered by: 5:12
One or more music publishing rights collecting societies

I really didn't found arguments to dispute such a general copyright notice.

The framerate downconversion of the youtube reprocessing sometimes results in 25 fps videos, sometimes in 30 fps videos...

After 24h hours of video upload the credentials time out and youtube drops all descriptions for the uploads.

Sometimes the player just freezes, UI keeps responsive but it doesn't play, seek or downloads any material.

Great work Google! You won't be getting any comments from me anymore. I don't want to use your antisocial networking service, and you have no reason to plaster my full name all over your websites.

elianda wrote:

On some of my uploaded videos some qualities like 480p to 1080p can be chosen but don't work. So if it is chosen, it drops back to 360p and greys out the e.g. 720p option.

That's supposed to mean your connection can't keep up, and it automatically drops the quality down a notch. Even if it's not set to Auto! The greying out "feature" is very annoying and stupid. Also higher quality settings are not greyed out which doesn't make sense at all. (for example, if 720p is greyed out, 1080p and Original are still available)

And often, changing the quality setting doesn't actually do anything. I found that you need to pause the video first, THEN change the quality, and wait for the gear icon to stop spinning before resuming playback.

elianda wrote:

The framerate downconversion of the youtube reprocessing sometimes results in 25 fps videos, sometimes in 30 fps videos...

They seem to like randomness at Youtube. Sometimes you'll find videos that use an older version of the flv player. Sometimes the Original quality setting is available, sometimes not. Sometimes speed settings are available, sometimes not. You might think, it depends on the video right? Well try watching a video with Original setting on someone else's PC... Most times it won't be available!

Also, note how they call heavily compressed 25/30fps video "HD"... And everyone seems to think it actually means HD. I would prefer uncompressed 640x480 at 120Hz+ over Youtube's 1080p any day.

elianda wrote:

Sometimes the player just freezes, UI keeps responsive but it doesn't play, seek or downloads any material.

On Chrome I had this extension which fixed that: https://spoi.com/software/yto/
Doesn't work on Opera 12 though 🙁

To Elianda: There's a few solutions and explanations for some of those issues you're having.

In terms of getting your videos to process correctly, chances are you're simply using codecs that YouTube can't process very well. When I first started using YouTube I found the MP4 files I was uploading were getting REALLY badly garbled visually in the conversion process. After doing some testing uploading private videos with special pixel patterns on them I found the best format for my videos specifically were Xvid-compressed AVIs with an MP3-format audio stream. There's no loss of framerate, video, or audio quality going with this method. (Well, apart from typical lossiness due to recompression.)

As for your copyright notices, if you're pretty much just uploading music that's not your own, yeah, you're gonna see a lot of those. Keep in mind though that Content-ID matches are NOT the same as Copyright Notices. Content-ID matches are meant to keep one person from profiting off of another person's work as a Content-ID match will disable ad revenue for the video for yourself, or possibly divert the ad revenue to the person who's claimed the matched content, but unless said person has chosen to block videos with matched content, your channel's status will not be in question. To that effect, if you're uploading music made by other people to help spread it around, you probably want to check with those people first to see if they're OK with that.

Copyright notices on the other hand are not automatic at all. Someone has to actually submit a copyright claim to YouTube claiming your video infringes their copyrights. Those are a lot more serious and while you can dispute the claim, if the person making the claim is really serious about it they may go so far as to take you to court under those circumstances, so if you want to dispute a claim you need to be prepared to fight it under the worst-case scenario, and trust me, unless you're 100% certain you can win such a case, disputing the claim is not a good idea.

The quality auto-detection thing is annoying. I wish YouTube would actually have an option to prefer content at a specific quality setting and to choose whatever's next in the list if it's not available on a particular video.

As for player freeze-ups, I was suffering from them too for quite awhile. The mostly likely problem is that hardware acceleration of Flash Player is screwing everything up, so you need to go disable that, restart the entire computer, and try again. You may also be having problems with your network/wireless adapter, router, or modem, as YouTube pulls far more bandwidth than most other web applications.

Also...

jwt27 wrote:

And often, changing the quality setting doesn't actually do anything. I found that you need to pause the video first, THEN change the quality, and wait for the gear icon to stop spinning before resuming playback.

The YouTube player is now designed to be able to process multiple streams at once. When a switch in the stream quality is requested, it immediately starts buffering it (which is what the spinning gear icon means) and at the same time it ALSO starts buffering in a super-low-quality stream. The idea is, if the current stream exhausts before the new quality can be properly buffered, it switches to the super-low-quality stream for the interim, and then once the newly requested stream is properly buffered, it switches to it. Pausing and unpausing the video simply overrides this and forces it to start playing the newly buffered stream, ready or not, which isn't a BAD thing to do really, just unnecessary.

Gemini000 wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

And often, changing the quality setting doesn't actually do anything. I found that you need to pause the video first, THEN change the quality, and wait for the gear icon to stop spinning before resuming playback.

The YouTube player is now designed to be able to process multiple streams at once. When a switch in the stream quality is requested, it immediately starts buffering it (which is what the spinning gear icon means) and at the same time it ALSO starts buffering in a super-low-quality stream. The idea is, if the current stream exhausts before the new quality can be properly buffered, it switches to the super-low-quality stream for the interim, and then once the newly requested stream is properly buffered, it switches to it. Pausing and unpausing the video simply overrides this and forces it to start playing the newly buffered stream, ready or not, which isn't a BAD thing to do really, just unnecessary.

Well that's a great idea... If it actually worked!! On my (slow) connection it either keeps spinning, playing the low-quality stream until the end of the video, or it just stops playing halfway through.

About the Original quality, can anyone find any videos that have this setting? I know one that used to have it but is now replaced by "1440p".

Gemini000 wrote:

To Elianda: There's a few solutions and explanations for some of those issues you're having.

In terms of getting your videos to process correctly, chances are you're simply using codecs that YouTube can't process very well. ...

Well, I use for all of my videos the same workflow that results in x264 encoded H.264 material with AAC audio in an mkv container. Still the result on youtube varies.

As for your copyright notices, if you're pretty much just uploading music that's not your own, yeah, you're gonna see a lot of those. Keep in mind though that Content-ID matches are NOT the same as Copyright Notices. Content-ID matches are meant to keep one person from profiting off of another person's work as a Content-ID match will disable ad revenue for the video for yourself, or possibly divert the ad revenue to the person who's claimed the matched content, but unless said person has chosen to block videos with matched content, your channel's status will not be in question. To that effect, if you're uploading music made by other people to help spread it around, you probably want to check with those people first to see if they're OK with that.

I do not use any ad revenue function of google and/or youtube. As I wrote most of the videos are captures of demoscene productions that are freely available on the net and most of them feature tracks that were composed by a member of the specific group. I respect this work and don't use it to generate profit for my own. The content-id matches youtube detects seem to me in the most cases not related to the video at all. However sometimes I can not judge if the claim is eligible or not since the match description is very general.

Copyright notices on the other hand are not automatic at all. Someone has to actually submit a copyright claim to YouTube claiming your video infringes their copyrights. Those are a lot more serious and while you can dispute the claim, if the person making the claim is really serious about it they may go so far as to take you to court under those circumstances, so if you want to dispute a claim you need to be prepared to fight it under the worst-case scenario, and trust me, unless you're 100% certain you can win such a case, disputing the claim is not a good idea.

I don't think that is correct. I already had at least three videos where I got copyright notices directly after it was processed by youtube. This was
Second Reality - Future Crew where a song at 0:06 seconds were claimed, which I disputed because the video had no audio at this time mark at all. This was in the sound card setup menu. I think the dispute was successful as the claim vanished, but i never got a notification on the result.
To be on Top on C64s SID chip for the title song, which was a very general claim that I had to acknowledge because I was unable to verify this.
and Loom on Roland MT-32 where Swan lake was claimed, which I acknowledged since it is the games overture song. I was surprised that the MT-32 score is obviously so authentic.
All of those I got directly after processing, so I strongly doubt there is any human involved.
For the intro of the DOS game XWing e.g. there was a content-id match to the Star Wars score, which is rather obvious. I did acknowledge this and now after two years the audio of those videos (captures from different DOS wavetables) was muted also without any notification.

Still it takes so infinite time to verify all this matches and claims (if even possible).
Just one more example how difficult it can be to verify a claim:

"Act II No. 14: Scene", musical composition administered by: 0:51
AdShare MG for a Third Party

And this is worth to read about content ID trolls:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130227/205 … ree-money.shtml

elianda wrote:

and Loom on Roland MT-32 where Swan lake was claimed, which I acknowledged since it is the games overture song. I was surprised that the MT-32 score is obviously so authentic.

Swan Lake isn't copyrighted at all, it's a 100% public domain song... Google can go eff themselves with all their BS shenanigans around as of late.

I decided to post a thread about this on the DeviantArt forums if anyone wants to see. Warning, LOTS of profanity: http://forum.deviantart.com/community/complaints/1915553/

So can someone explain something to me?

Youtube says I can use my real name, or I can create something else. Some sort of page. But it doesn't explain what it is or what the difference is. Anyone know? 😐

relevant image:

First reply in that Deviant Art thread sums up my opinion quite well.

So you don't even contribute in any way to the website and yet think you're entitled to bitch about how it changed while still freeloading off it.

Websites change and adapt. Go to Home Depot, get some wood, some concrete, some bricks, and some illegal Mexicans to help with the work, build a bridge, and get over it.

im' pretty pissed that they fucked up google home page too. they replaced the youtube/videos tab with "videos" AND to get to youtube was just 1 click form my home page now it's two or three, plus i have to drag the mouse across the screen to get their. first windows 8 and then all this shit.

"So you don't even contribute in any way to the website and yet think you're entitled to bitch about how it changed while still freeloading off it."

only by force, we aren't allowed to developed the YT website, nor is there any option to pay for premium services. that argument is a crock of crap.

jwt27 wrote:

Great work Google! You won't be getting any comments from me anymore. I don't want to use your antisocial networking service, and you have no reason to plaster my full name all over your websites.

My thoughts exactly. I don't want Google+, I don't want my real name displayed to the whole Internet. If they're making it such a hassle to reply/leave comments I'll simply stop doing it.

luckybob wrote:

First reply in that Deviant Art thread sums up my opinion quite well.

So you don't even contribute in any way to the website and yet think you're entitled to bitch about how it changed while still freeloading off it.

Websites change and adapt. Go to Home Depot, get some wood, some concrete, some bricks, and some illegal Mexicans to help with the work, build a bridge, and get over it.

I can sorta relate to that. It annoys me when YouTube does a minor UI change and all these whining videos like "That's it! YT is shit now. Goodbye!" get plastered all over my subscription box. However not being able to comment on videos seems pretty significant to me.

I don't feel entitled to anything from Google so if I don't agree with their new commenting policy I'll shut up and decline to participate, on the other hand even though the 1090 subscribers and ~1.4 million views on my YT channel might be peanuts to them, I don't feel like a freeloader either.