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Watching 4K YouTube videos on Google Chome is about to get much faster

Published May 13th, 2015 7:30PM EDT
YouTube 4K

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The ability to watch 4K video on YouTube has been around for a few years now. Unfortunately, though, actually getting 4K video to run smoothly is a whole another story. The problem is that 4K video simply has so much data that many folks simply lack the requisite bandwidth and/or patience to make viewing 4K clips all that practical.

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Thankfully, Google is taking steps to make 4K video all the more accessible to the masses. While it’d be nice if Google up and decided to roll out Google Fiber across the country, we’ll still settle for a new video rendering algorithm.

As highlighted on Francois Beaufort’s blog, users interested in checking out “smoother video frame rendering for HTML 5 videos” can do so by setting up a flag by going to chrome://flags/#enable-new-video-renderer and then restarting Chrome.

“In practice,” Beaufort writes, “that means that if your computer was on the edge of playing 4K60, 4K, 1080p60 videos on YouTube for instance (hiccup every few seconds), it should now play smoothly.”

Yoni Heisler Contributing Writer

Yoni Heisler has been writing about Apple and the tech industry at large with over 15 years of experience. A life long expert Mac user and Apple expert, his writing has appeared in Edible Apple, Network World, MacLife, Macworld UK, and TUAW.

When not analyzing the latest happenings with Apple, Yoni enjoys catching Improv shows in Chicago, playing soccer, and cultivating new TV show addictions.