While it’s true that other video-sharing sites (like Vimeo’s HD channel) have had large HD-quality video for a while now, YouTube has finally jumped into the fray with its own HD.
And to be honest it looks really good.
The only drawback is that it’s absolutely required that you have a reasonably fast PC with a decent video card, else you get dropped frames here and there.
An example of YouTube HD is here. Click the "watch in HD" link under the video.
One thing’s for certain – you absolutely cannot use a webcam to get this kind of quality; it more or less has to come from a camcorder or handheld USB video device that can do 16:9 aspect (which most do). The drawback with that is that while cool, the video takes much longer to upload and brings us back to a point where video is difficult to use once again. A webcam is easy, a camcorder is difficult. You have to transfer the video off the camcorder first, edit it, render it (which takes at least twice as long), upload a huge file, etc.
HD is cool but definitely not for everyone.
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Out of curiosity, I tested out my Intel Quad Q6700 with 6Gb’s RAM the other day:
I had Firefox running for 10 hrs straight, Outlook 2007 opened the same amount of time, along with FeedDemon, uTorrent, Tweetdeck and Winamp all running simultaneously. I had VirtualDub doing it’s thing appending 2x 700Mb AVI’s into one file, AutoGK converting a VOB file to AVI and TMPGENc Authoring Works 4 authoring a DVD. Maximum CPU used was about 50% with about the same for RAM usage.
If I need a fast computer to use HD video I think I’ll be OK
Only thing I need now? An HD camera 
Yeah, it is almost a shame that everyone has to go HD now…it is nice to have the quality sometimes, but now I can’t just open a video and watch it. I’ve got to pause the video, let it load about a third and THEN play it. Small hassle, but a hassle nonetheless.
Sweet, now I might have to jump the youtube bandwagon like the rest of the population. The main reason I didn’t use it before was because I really didn’t like the quality of the videos, and I’m kind of picky about resolution. Maybe now I can save myself the trouble I spend downloading videos and just watch them on youtube.