What’s Up With YouTube?

What’s Up With YouTube

I recently uploaded a recording of one of my home-made tunes, and was frustrated to see that Google did not properly sync the audio and video. I’ve had this happen with a few other videos, and it is really getting aggravating.

I re-uploaded the video twice, to see if Google could do the sync correctly during its “conversion” process, but each upload had the same problem.

The phase-difference between audio and video is not as bad in this video as it is in some of my others, but it is enough to annoy guitar students who might be learning from watching.

Is this problem occurring because the service is overloaded? I read recently that about 35 hours of music are uploaded to Google every minute, so clearly a lot of videos are getting converted at the same time. But, if Google is going to provide the service, shouldn’t they do it right?

I have even wondered if Google is deliberately phase-shifting the audio for videos recorded on a Mac. I suspect that this is not the case, but there is a war being waged between Google and Apple.

So, I wonder, out of curiosity, do any of you who own Mac also have this problem? What about Windows users?

Again, I doubt that anything deliberate is involved on Google’s part, as it looks like, if there were, it would backfire on them by alienating Mac users. But regardless of the cause(s), I find this to be really frustrating.

3/28/2011 Update: If you search for “mov youtube audio sync,” you’ll find that this issue has been widely reported. One way of dealing with it is described in this article. So, it looks like I need to get away from saving the recorded videos in QuickTime format (mov), and go with a format that has a higher resolution.

We’ll see if that fixes it (may be some time before I try this, but at least a solution looks possible).

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