Skip to main content

NASA is bringing 4K content to YouTube, and here’s a 20-second teaser

Ultra High Definition Video from the International Space Station
What better way to show off videos running at a whopping 3840 x 2160-pixel 4K resolution than with the vast emptiness of space? That’s obviously NASA’s thinking, as they’ve launched a new series of 4K videos on the ReelNASA channel with the 20-second clip you can see above. The forthcoming series of clips are going to be shot in smooth 60 frames-per-second quality as well.

You’re not just going to need a speedy Internet connection to watch 4K without buffering — you’re also going to need a fairly powerful computer too. The effort of displaying some 8 million pixels on screen 60 times every second can put a lot of strain on your machine’s CPU and RAM, so don’t be too surprised if you see glitches. Right now 4K is aimed more at the next generation of computers and cameras than current hardware.

Recommended Videos

“The view of life in space is getting a major boost with the introduction of 4K Ultra High-Definition (UHD) video, providing an unprecedented look at what it’s like to live and work aboard the International Space Station,” writes NASA in the video blurb, which also includes a download link.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

“This important new capability will allow researchers to acquire high resolution, high frame rate video to provide new insight into the vast array of experiments taking place every day. It will also bestow the most breathtaking views of planet Earth and space station activities ever acquired for consumption by those still dreaming of making the trip to outer space.”

NASA promises that more 4K content is coming down the pipe in the near future, but YouTube has already moved on to the next level — the first 8K clip on the portal was posted earlier this week by Neumann films. That gives you a quality that’s twice as sharp as 4K, but you’re going to need an even more powerful computer setup to be able to get through it.

Via TechRadar

David Nield
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…
BenQ’s new 4K HDR projector is designed with gamers in mind
benq announces one of kind 4khdr projector x3000i x1300i

BenQ is looking to grab the attention of gamers attending the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show (CES.) The company that is most known for its monitors has just announced a new lineup of gamer-first products, including a 4K HDR gaming projector.

Being called the "only gaming projector on the market offering settings for 4K HDR game audio-visual enhancement," the new addition to BenQ's lineup is the X3000i 4K LED gaming projector. This projector is unlike any other as it covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, with preset audio-visual gamer modes. Those modes are tuned to 8.3ms response times, at the 120Hz frequency. These response times and frequencies are quite important when playing fast-paced games like Fortnite or even Call of Duty. 

Read more
Why you may still be missing ESPN and other Disney-owned channels on YouTube TV
YouTube TV on Roku.

ESPN, ABC, FX, and other channels owned by Disney have returned to YouTube TV. But if you reorder your live listings so that the channels you actually watch are higher up than the ones you don't, you likely don't see those channels at all.

The problem is a bit of a glitch in that not only have the channels in question been pushed to the bottom of the listings in the custom view -- they're actually not even enabled in the first place. And that's not a new phenomenon. It's the way it has always worked when new channels are added to YouTube TV and you're using the custom sort, and so it makes sense (in a perverse, broken sort of way) that it's the case with the Disney-owned channels as they've been added back to YouTube TV.

Read more
YouTube TV couldn’t have picked a worse time to lose ESPN
best youtube tv alternatives alternative 5

There's never a good time for a streaming service to lose channels. Not for you, not for the service. But YouTube TV's potential loss of the Disney-owned channels -- which, among other things, comprises ABC, FX, ESPN, and of course, Disney -- could be devastating for what is believed to be the second-largest live TV streaming service in the United States, with more than 3 million subscribers at one point.

The linchpin in this sort of thing tends to be sports -- live events whose distribution rights command top dollar. The NFL may be what you think of first when it comes to the sort of thing, with any one of the usual suspects supposedly in the running to carry NFL Sunday Ticket, which lets anyone watch out-of-market games.

Read more