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Comment by nrki | Hacker News Reader

An example of Silicon Valley technology assumption.

Many apps assume There's [youtube] [info] Available format code 249 webm 250 webm 140 m4a 251 webm 394 mp4 278 webm 160 mp4 395 mp4 242 webm 330 webm 133 mp4 396 mp4 243 webm 331 webm 134 mp4 397 mp4 244 webm 332 webm 135 mp4 398 mp4 247 webm 333 webm 399 mp4 302 webm 136 mp4 248 webm 298 mp4 137 mp4 334 webm 303 webm 299 mp4 335 webm 400 mp4 271 webm 308 webm 336 webm 401 mp4 313 webm 315 webm 337 webm 18 mp4 22 mp4 100% internet connectivity at all times. i.e. not even minimally functional when offline.

They assume a certain speed, latency and packet loss (zero).

The adage should be: plan for the worst, then adjust for reality.

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YouTube does plan for the worst, you can even watch on a <100kbps connection if you're okay with 144p (and YouTube will downgrade to that automatically).

It seems that OP defines downgrading to 720p60 (?) as "broken".

I do support bringing back the 1080p30 stream though.

Edit: Tested in Chrome with the "Slow 3G" throttling profile. YouTube automatically falls back to 240p with some buffering.

OP is defining a downgrade that 40% of the UK users now have to fall back to 480p since 720p60 won't work and 1080 won't work. OP wants 720p30 back since it s the highest resolution that 40% users were able to use before the change. 480p, seriously?

People who can play 720p30 well enough but not 720p60 would have a connection speed around 3Mbps, which is at most 10% per the graph in TFA.

TFA is claiming ~40% got a downgrade in resolution.

It's rather that they have 4Mbps for 720p30 to play well. They don't reach 5Mbps hence 720p60 buffers. We could argue about whether that's 10% or 40% of the UK that is affected. I see your point.

It's affecting 40% of the population, everybody with a connection less than 8 Mbps, give or take. 1080p60 is around 6 Mbps, need a 7-8 Mbps connection to work well.

The 20% who had a connection 4-8 Mbps and could do 1080p got downgraded to 720p60. The 20% who had a 2-5 Mbps connection and could do 720p got downgraded to 480p.

Obviously it's not clear cut, there's a continuous spectrum where things will load much slower and start having breaks in playback until you really have to drop the resolution.

Well, we should also consider households having more than one person. Two people watching YouTube requires double the bandwidth, going into 12 Mbps+ territory. Truth be told, this is affecting more than 40% of the population.

Why is it broken?

It's clever to push lower quality, but here they push to a lower quality than what was achievable so far before the "upgrade". So from a user standpoint, YouTube have downgraded the service overnight for all low speed connections.

The more frustrating being for users that could sustain 1080p yesterday and are "upgraded"(?) to 720p60 today. Roughly same bandwidth but much lower resolution for what? better frame-rate? Not sure why anyone would prioritize frame-rate over resolution with all our fancy HiDPI screen.

It's much worse than that.

When you watch a video with text or small content, like a gaming video for example, these have menus and texts, it stops being readable when downgraded from 1080p to 720p (or worse). It's broken.

When you live with flatmates or family, you're getting crazy load time and erratic pauses now because of the contention. not enough headroom to buffer ahead with the bandwidth use increasing 50% overnight. The video is dropping as soon as somebody else opens something, it's effectively broken.

The algorithm will see contention and downgrade the quality, only to upgrade it again a minute later when it sees a bit of headroom, only to fail again. There's a lesson here on network contention. Worse case is with 2 people browsing youtube, the 2 players are fighting each other for bandwidth.

> I do support bringing back the 1080p30 stream though.

Wait, what? Why would 1080p30 be gone?! I don't like 60fps, it looks weird, so now it's either 480p OR I'm forced to watch 60fps?! WTF?!

> I don't like 60fps, it looks weird

It only looks 'weird' because you're not used to it.

"You don't see in 4K"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxNBiAV4UnM

Isn't that video talking about resolution? '4K' is a resolution, not a frame rate.

We're talking about frame rate.

You didn't watch it, did you?

Dude, I don't have time to watch 20-minute videos in response to every comment, especially when they don't appear relevant. You need to try to give more concise points if you want responses.

What does that have to do with framerate?

I don't know, I just watched some newly uploaded videos available exclusively in 30fps. TFA shows a screenshot where there's no 720p(30) or 1080p(30) option though, so it must be happening to some videos.

(Does it even make sense to "upgrade" a 30/29.97 fps origin video to 60fps? I don't think so.)

Videos that are submitted in 60 FPS are only available in 60 FPS. It's getting more common as the cameras as getting cheaper.

Check this for example, you should only have the choice between 60 FPS options. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXb3EKWsInQ

Videos that were submitted in 30 FPS remain as they were. It doesn't make sense to create new frames out of nothing indeed.

30fps versions are still there on the server, its the default player hiding them from you. There is even 4K 30fps file available 313.

    D:\_learning>youtube-dl.exe -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXb3EKWsInQ LXb3EKWsInQ: Downloading webpage formats for LXb3EKWsInQ: extension  resolution note audio only tiny   57k , opus @ 50k (48000Hz), 1.89MiB audio only tiny   75k , opus @ 70k (48000Hz), 2.53MiB audio only tiny  130k , m4a_dash container, mp4a.40.2@128k (44100Hz), 4.84MiB audio only tiny  148k , opus @160k (48000Hz), 4.96MiB 256x144    144p HDR   88k , av01.0.00M.10.0.110.09.16.09.0, 30fps, video only, 2.34MiB 256x144    144p   97k , webm container, vp9, 30fps, video only, 3.38MiB 256x144    144p  111k , avc1.4d400c, 30fps, video only, 2.87MiB 426x240    240p HDR  191k , av01.0.00M.10.0.110.09.16.09.0, 30fps, video only, 4.33MiB 426x240    240p  233k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 6.89MiB 256x144    144p60 HDR  243k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 7.96MiB 426x240    240p  245k , avc1.4d4015, 30fps, video only, 5.86MiB 640x360    360p HDR  403k , av01.0.01M.10.0.110.09.16.09.0, 30fps, video only, 8.67MiB 640x360    360p  435k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 12.85MiB 426x240    240p60 HDR  504k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 16.65MiB 640x360    360p  633k , avc1.4d401e, 30fps, video only, 15.49MiB 854x480    480p HDR  735k , av01.0.04M.10.0.110.09.16.09.0, 30fps, video only, 15.80MiB 854x480    480p  857k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 23.18MiB 640x360    360p60 HDR 1059k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 35.72MiB 854x480    480p 1496k , avc1.4d401f, 30fps, video only, 30.03MiB 1280x720   720p60 HDR 1552k , av01.0.08M.10.0.110.09.16.09.0, 60fps, video only, 35.98MiB 1280x720   720p 1697k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 46.97MiB 854x480    480p60 HDR 1988k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 69.11MiB 1920x1080  1080p60 HDR 2683k , av01.0.09M.10.0.110.09.16.09.0, 60fps, video only, 65.43MiB 1280x720   720p60 2742k , vp9, 60fps, video only, 76.27MiB 1280x720   720p 3220k , avc1.4d401f, 30fps, video only, 57.62MiB 1920x1080  1080p 3249k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 84.22MiB 1280x720   720p60 3483k , avc1.4d4020, 60fps, video only, 92.61MiB 1920x1080  1080p 4337k , avc1.640028, 30fps, video only, 103.11MiB 1280x720   720p60 HDR 4524k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 162.28MiB 1920x1080  1080p60 5018k , vp9, 60fps, video only, 134.10MiB 1920x1080  1080p60 5794k , avc1.64002a, 60fps, video only, 163.70MiB 1920x1080  1080p60 HDR 6920k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 252.07MiB 2560x1440  1440p60 HDR 8626k , av01.0.12M.10.0.110.09.16.09.0, 60fps, video only, 223.85MiB 2560x1440  1440p 9621k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 249.96MiB 2560x1440  1440p60 13357k , vp9, 60fps, video only, 388.12MiB 2560x1440  1440p60 HDR 16917k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 607.18MiB 3840x2160  2160p60 HDR 18167k , av01.0.13M.10.0.110.09.16.09.0, 60fps, video only, 460.07MiB 3840x2160  2160p 18852k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 628.46MiB 3840x2160  2160p60 26568k , vp9, 60fps, video only, 956.39MiB 3840x2160  2160p60 HDR 30646k , vp9.2, 60fps, video only, 1.05GiB 640x360    360p  655k , avc1.42001E, 30fps, mp4a.40.2@ 96k (44100Hz), 24.53MiB 1280x720   720p 1669k , avc1.64001F, 30fps, mp4a.40.2@192k (44100Hz) (best)

Yeah, it certainly didn't break only for the UK (though it might be a rolling change)

But yeah if you're assuming every user has the same bandwidth and latency a Google office (in SV) or employee has you're going to have a bad time

Depending on the app it's easy to trigger JS errors with latency problems and some things happening before others

Hahaha. My friends and I call it Silicon Valley Syndrome. Glad to see we were not alone

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