YouTube To Begin Supporting 60fps Videos

YouTube is adding support support for 48fps and 60fps videos, the company announced today via their YouTube Creators Twitter feed.

This is great news for anyone that cares about the difference between 30 and 60 frames-per-second. Up until now, finding a widespread solution to stream in-game footage at 60fps has been rather difficult, but with YouTube stepping up to the plate, things will get a lot easier.

At the moment, one can technically trick YouTube into running a video at what looks like 60fps, but it requires a roundabout method on the part of both the uploader and the viewer for the video in question to work correctly. We’ve provided an example of this below.

To view the video above at “60fps,” you need to opt in to use YouTube’s HTML5 player (click here). Then, open the video above up on its YouTube page. You need to click on the little gear button below the video, and change the playback speed to 2.0. Then hit play. (You’ll have to forgive my rusty Virtual On skills.)

Getting the video above to upload correctly required a fair bit of trickery. I recorded the footage at 60fps, and then slowed it down to half speed (30fps) using a video editor. The trick, though, is that you aren’t actually removing any frames of animation to achieve 30fps. All 60 frames of animation are still in there—they’re just running in slow-motion. So, after you upload the video to YouTube, enabling the 2.0 speed option makes it run at its regular speed, which is what provides the 60fps effect.