I think most "Lyric" videos, where the screen is a single image, or nearly the same image, can be compressed to be almost the size of just the audio.
If not, I would second the "zero pixel" option!
If not, I would second the "zero pixel" option!
A 0 pixel video would defeat this by being in effect an audio stream separated from the video. I always wondered why manufacturers don't just resize the video stream to 1 pixel and use any of the device LEDs to "display" the video thus bypassing this part of the ToS.
Hilarious hack, love this idea
Isn't this backwards? It seems more likely that the TOS follows the business decision here. I believe old versions of the official mobile apps continued to play the video with the phone screen off.
it's not like we don't have ads on radio
youtube-dl -k gave me two files, one webm/opus audio file and one mp4/av1 video file.
The files had roughly same sizes, the audio being 9728k large, the video 9476k.
The video had 127 keyframes, out of 17030 frames total, distributed over 567 seconds of video (one keyframe every 4.5 seconds). I don't have a method at hand to measure the encoded size of the keyframes but if I extract the first 90k of the file using dd (bs=90k count=1), I get 21 frames, so that's a lower bound for the size that's actually needed to encode one single keyframe, more shouldn't actually be neccessary.
So of the 9.4M video file, > 99% is waste. Quite literally as 1% of 9476k is 95k. With the addition of audio, the amount of waste has to be adjusted to roughly half of the total audio+video data. Still a large amount of data that can be saved, especially at youtube scale where reductions of traffic in the sub-percent range are material for promotions.
The 480p video-only file sizes for this video as reported by youtube-dl have VP9 at 9.70MiB, AV1 at 9.25MiB, and H.264 at 3.55MiB.
If your content is audio only then use an audio encoding site like SoundCloud. Or, if you really want to use YouTube, then you need to get them to develop an audio specific option.
And then additionally, there should be better recognition of the "picture not changing" conditions, to allow better use of such a feature.
I was trying to distribute a 3 hour lecture with a single slide. I suppose seeing the speaker for a few seconds would be nice too. haha, I'm asking a lot? The slide had a lot of detail so the video uhhh I mean the jpg got enormous and few keyframes so no seeking? No thanks, ill do the "compression" in javascript. (eeewww!)
It is not impossible to go over all music videos, automatically fetch lyrics and replace video with static album cover or something, but who would do it? If YouTube does this then they are responsible for any copyright infringement, and they become huge competition to user-created content on their own platform.