Today, I’m happy to announce an improvement that will make uploading a lot nicer. In fact, if you’ve uploaded anything new in the past few days you should have noticed a difference. No, we’re not automatically replacing the people in your videos with the cast of Gray’s Anatomy. That’s too expensive.

Instead we’ve given our transcoders a major kick: we’re now transcoding user uploads to 700kpbs! That’s up from 300 kpbs in the past. Transcoders are those robots that diligently turn your video file into flash format. We also boosted the capacity of our uploader. This means better and faster uploads from start to finish. Of course, this doesn’t re-encode anything you’ve already uploaded; this is for new uploads only. As always, the final quality depends on the original video file. So keep your bitrate high, we’re ready for it.

So, here’s Yahoo! Video by the numbers: a 16:9 aspect ratio, 150 mb uploads, and 700 kpbs transcoding. We’re closing in on 100% awesome.

-Kent, Yahoo! Video Team