YouTube ups upload limit

But keeps video lengths the same

2 July 2009 14:18 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

YouTube has increased the size limit of uploads to the video sharing site for its millions of users. The authorised size of standard uploads has been doubled from 1GB to 2GB.

This move is a response to user demand, considering the amount of new devices on the market offering better, and in many cases, high def video quality recording.

Although no doubt popular with some, more experienced YouTube users are bemoaning the fact that it's just file size that's been increased, rather than length of video - currently curtailed for standard users at 11 minutes.

YouTube user nineko says: "I don't care about those 2 gigabytes, I never had problems even with the old 100 megabytes limit, people who need all that filesize for their videos are people who fail at encoding, seriously, H264 doesn't need all that bitrate to look good".

While cmyanmar13 chimes in with "Only the most dreadfully badly encoded 11-minute file could possibly take up 2GB".

But YouTube says the move is so that some users won't have to worry about encoding files with the 2GB limit, meaning users can upload "large HD files directly from your camera".

In addition, YouTube has now made it possible for users to share links directly to the HD version of a video - by adding "&hd=1" to the end of the URL as well as embed the HD versions directly in sites.