YouTube Introduces 1080p Premium
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--extractor-args "youtube:player_client=default,ios"
to the command. The ID for the enhanced bitrate 1080p is 616.
137 mp4 1920x1080 30 │ 1.59GiB 2686k dash │ avc1.640028 2686k video only 1080p, mp4_dash
270 mp4 1920x1080 30 │ ~ 2.86GiB 4707k m3u8 │ avc1.640028 4707k video only
248 webm 1920x1080 30 │ 801.49MiB 1320k dash │ vp9 1320k video only 1080p, webm_dash
614 mp4 1920x1080 30 │ ~ 2.13GiB 3514k m3u8 │ vp09.00.40.08 3514k video only
616 mp4 1920x1080 30 │ ~ 3.52GiB 5789k m3u8 │ vp09.00.40.08 5789k video only
Checked 4K one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUm5B-5uQik "FIRST WIN IN THE SW20!!! MR2 Championship Brands Hatch 2023" DannyDC2
299 mp4 1920x1080 60 │ 2.34GiB 5047k dash │ avc1.64002a 5047k video only 1080p60, mp4_dash
312 mp4 1920x1080 60 │ ~ 3.68GiB 7756k m3u8 │ avc1.64002A 7756k video only
303 webm 1920x1080 60 │ 1.62GiB 3508k dash │ vp9 3508k video only 1080p60, webm_dash
617 mp4 1920x1080 60 │ ~ 2.86GiB 6027k m3u8 │ vp09.00.41.08 6027k video only
308 webm 2560x1440 60 │ 5.17GiB 11168k dash │ vp9 11168k video only 1440p60, webm_dash
623 mp4 2560x1440 60 │ ~ 6.72GiB 14169k m3u8 │ vp09.00.50.08 14169k video only
315 webm 3840x2160 60 │ 11.55GiB 24964k dash │ vp9 24964k video only 2160p60, webm_dash
628 mp4 3840x2160 60 │ ~ 13.42GiB 28319k m3u8 │ vp09.00.51.08 28319k video only
Completely agree and its been super annoying to me that 1080p was compressed so dang aggressively in the past few years.
I have some yt-dlp copies of videos that I grabbed a couple years ago.
If I go and download them again today from the same video URL, the quality is worse when I compare frames from them directly to each other.
It's been nearly impossible to see invisible units in Starcraft2 replays on 1080p for a long time now, but that didn't used to be the case. YouTube has spent a lot on improving the compression algorithms to save money, and they've maintained 90% of the quality for most content, but the edge cases have seen 50%+ drop in visible quality. 4k completely fixes these problems and has very conservative (expensive) compression, but too many content creators still don't take advantage of that and produce only in 1080p.
When 1080p came out on YouTube, it was much, much less compressed than it is now. So they did take it away for non-premium users. They just did it slowly over a long timescale.
"and Google seems aware of the responsibility it shoulders running one of the best entertainment apps out there. "
What? Get to the point. Google seems aware that it runs YouTube. Yes I'm sure they are.
I mean, yeah. It’s how most content writers are paid. And it’s also how the OpenAI API they use is paid (by the token).
I feel like streaming services compress their streams so hard that the resolution indicators become meaningless.
That shouldn’t be noticeable if the 4K stream was encoded properly.
There could of course be other factors involved as well but this is definitely a pretty big contributor.
I've never really noticed effects from chroma subsampling so my guess would be the bitrate just being better with the higher resolution. Also "full res->compress->downsample" might be more efficient than "full res->downsample->compress" since downsampling is a (really bad) form of lossy compression as well.
I don't think this is true. At some point there are diminishing returns. At some point if the 4k video has twice the bitrate it is going to have more information available. Some will be lost in the down sampling but it isn't "improper" to end up with more data on the screen.
It is true that YouTube bitrates are pretty "conservative" for the resolution but I don't think that is "improper" it is just a tradeoff based on common device an internet speeds. They could be more bandwidth efficient if they did a custom transcode for each user's screen size and bandwidth but that is infeasible. So it is fine that some users will not be able to stream the 4k transcode on their 4k screen and will need to use the 2k stream and some users will have extra bandwidth on their 1080p screen so will stream the 2k version for better quality. The goal isn't to be perfect for each device but to be good on average.
200MB - 300MB for full-length movies, ~150MB for series episodes. This is on "Standard quality", but still.
After some quick Googling (grain of salt) I see that a standard DVD of 4.7GB tends go have (usual encoding) up to 135 min of 480p video. That's a big difference! Even when considering that modern encoding might be more efficient. It is lossy compression, and the lossyness seems to be cranked way up.
The movie producers would try to hide it by placing the layer change in a scene change, but I often still noticed it.
In PAL regions, the PAL signal uses 625 signal lines, of which 576 (known as 576i signal) appear as visible lines on the television set, whereas NTSC formatted signal uses 525 lines, of which 480 appear visibly (480i).
In PAL video, every second line has the phase of the color signal reversed, which leads to the signals flattening out the frequency between the lines.
Effectively what this means is that damage to the signal appears as errors in saturation (level of color) rather than hue (shade of color) as it would appear in NTSC video, leading to a higher-fidelity picture of the original studio version.They will then transcode it to h265, or webm which uses even less bandwidth, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here and assuming they target their transcoding setup to preserve as much quality as they recommend providing them.
And of course this is VBR not CBR, so some scenes will use less.
4mbps is the linked article description of where h264 matches DVD quality. Yes, 4mbps is more than most streaming sites will give for 480p. This does mean that most streaming sites are inferior to DVDs at 480p. The fact that most streaming sites use less bitrate than a DVD-equivalent quality is therefore not surprising, giving that people have noticed that exact fact.
Streaming sites do not pick their bitrate to maximise quality given a fixed maximum filesize, so it's not surprising that they choose a lower bitrate (and therefore lower quality) than DVDs. They're instead optimizing for things like their server costs, time to playback start, or the ability to perform uninterrupted playback over the internet connection of users resorting to these lower resolution settings.
That is for uploading. They will transcode your H.264 file when you upload it regardless of bitrate.
And your original claims of YouTube using 2.5Mbps and 4Mbps. Go and find me clip with those bitrate?
Here is Disney+ stream vs a Disc 1:1 copy:
https://nicko88.com/misc/compare/Ant%20Man%20Quantumania/
https://nicko88.com/misc/compare/Avatar%20The%20Way%20of%20W...
Streaming looks only slightly marginally worse IMO.
It also doesn't mention about Codec. I assume it is still H.264? Or could it be HEVC given Google already pays the maximum cap on royalty for their Pixel Phone, tablet or other Appliance.
Most creators upload at 1080p, and YouTube has always given bitrate recommendations to match their service. Even with updated documentation, I'm expecting lots of people using their existing encoding presets for future 1080p uploads that can't benefit from this paywalled upgrade.
It's not better than the 1440p or 4K downscaled. The main use I see for it is for videos that were only uploaded in 1080p in the first place, and so they don't have a 1440p or 4K option.
But even then, I am not seeing a very big difference at all between the regular 1080p and enhanced 1080p.
1. If you are bandwidth limited the high bitrate version should be a bit more efficient than the higher resolution (as it isn't wasting space on details that will be lost in the downscaling).
2. For videos that are uploaded in 1080p it will be the best quality available.
So it does seem like a pretty niche benefit. Maybe if you have a 1080p phone it can be worth it for the reduced resource usage and better battery life? But with many channels starting to upload in 4k it does seem like a very minor improvement in most cases.