YouTube Live Streams Get HTML5 Player And Now Support 60FPS Playback

Last year, YouTube introduced 60 frames per second (fps) video streams and today, it’s bringing the same smooth playback experience to live streaming videos, as well.

As Google rightly notes in today’s announcement, this will be especially exciting for game streaming (as well as for live sports events), so it has also worked with various video game capture vendors like Elgato and XSplit to bring 60fps support to their services.

Any app that uses YouTube’s live streaming API can also now enable this feature.

When YouTube sees that a stream is coming in at 60fps, it will automatically transcode it to 720p60 and 1080p60 streams, which users should be able to play back on most modern browsers and devices. For anybody else, YouTube will also still offer the usual 30fps streams, but the company says it is also working to expand support for this new feature “in the coming weeks.”

With this update, YouTube is also now using HTML5 playback for live video streams. It has already switched to using this web standard for regular videos, but live video streams hadn’t yet made the switch. With this change, YouTube now also supports variable speed playback in streams, so you can skip back a few minutes and then speedwatch through the stream at 2x to catch up.