That actually makes more sense to me compared to most premium features. Higher quality directly costs more money to stream.
Even with premium they will send lower quality if they think they can get away with it, I have to change the quality on every video that plays on my tablet now: it completely ignores the preferred quality in the settings.
I haven’t noticed any issues on Firefox, can also use an add-on to force specific quality.
This has been a thing for a while now, hasn’t it? I remember trying to watch the Noseferatu trailer a few months ago and seeing how shit it looked. Tried to up the quality only to see that it was paywalled
At least according to YouTube, the enhanced bitrate option is higher than 1080p normal has ever been
But what about the new normal 1080p? Has it been reduced?
No, at least according to YouTube
It’s obviously noticeable from the ones they don’t pull this shit on.
Personal experience, but I feel like it has. Especially on videos with a lot of still frames like 3blue1brown, you can see the still images become slightly better quality after all the animations stopped. I noticed a few months ago and saw 1080p premium as an option.
I’ve just seen it for the first time now. Might be because I’m situated in Europe? Or because I mostly don’t give a damn about the pixel count.
Possibly, I don’t think its on every video
Thought it was always that way.
It’s a year or two old at the most
Yes. And I thought that’s how it always had been.
trailer
I mean, that’s an advertisement. I feel like if you’re going to watch an ad, that the company trying to sell the product should find a way to have the ad in full quality themselves.
It looks like the official website does use YouTube, though.
I never noticed a quality difference on my phone due to the small screen, even 1080p to 720p wasn’t bad on my 4k TV. Also, when did they change the free trial from three months to one?
I don’t notice it on a 75" TV.
But when 99% of the content on YouTube is struggling to just get focusing right, pursuing higher quality bitrates is a useless priority. It’s all trash amateur TV. Resolution is not a factor here.
Isint higher bitrate better for busy scenes with lots of movement? Like games that have a lot going on or tall grass in the wind.
Yes
when did they change the free trial from three months to one?
When they decided FUCK YOU!!! PAY US MONEY FASTER!!!
The worst part is that this doesn’t seem to be some sort of better quality. All of the other qualities seem to have tanked in the past year, so at best this just restores the previous 1080p bitrate.
Is this a vibes-based position, or did you actually check the bitrate of the segments?
100% vibes based. I’ve been noticing very atrocious artifacts. It could also be things like different encoding settings that are producing a worse result. Or I could be making the whole thing up and confirmed it in my mind for 1080p when the launched the higher bitrate and then was primed to see the higher resolutions drop in quality after.
Notice how they don’t post the bitrate, because even the higher one will be extremely low. Every streaming service has been dropping their bitrates over the years, Netflix and HBO are the worst offenders as I’ve noticed. It probably saves them a ton of money, and 90% of their customers won’t notice because they’re on their phone while watching in the background.
To make it weirder, I’m confident they boost the bitrates on their new releases to get the approval of the enthusiastic viewers, then drop it after the reviews are in.
So the reason no one posts the bitrates is because it’s not exactly interesting information for the the general population.
I’m highly skeptical of the claim that streaming services would have intentionally dropped their bitrates at the expense of perceived quality. There’s definitely research going on to deliver the same amount of perceived quality at lower average bitrates through variable bitrate encodings and so on, but this is sophisticated research where perceived quality is carefully controlled for.
It probably saves them a ton of money, and 90% of their customers won’t notice because they’re on their phone while watching in the background.
So this is fundamentally not how video streaming works, and I think this is important for the average person to learn - if you stream a video in the background or with your screen turned off, video data will stop loading. There’s literally no point in continuing to fetch the video track if it’s not being rendered. It would be like downloading the audio track for French when the user is watching with the English track turned on, i.e. nonsensical.
This subsequently removes this as a possible reason for any video streamer intentionally reducing their bitrate, as the savings would not be materialized for background playback.
To make it weirder, I’m confident they boost the bitrates on their new releases to get the approval of the enthusiastic viewers, then drop it after the reviews are in.
Depending on the usage patterns for the platform in question, this probably doesn’t make sense either.
the reason no one posts the bitrates is because it’s not exactly interesting information for the the general population.
But they post resolutions, which are arguably less interesting. The “general public” has been taught to use resolution as a proxy of quality. For TVs and other screens this is mostly true, but for video it isn’t the best metric (lossless video aside).
Bitrate is probably a better metric but even then it isn’t great. Different codes and encoding settings can result in much better quality at the same bitrate. But I think in most cases it correlates better with quality than resolution does.
The ideal metric would probably be some sort of actual quality metric, but none of these are perfect either. Maybe we should just go back to Low/Med/High for quality descriptions.
I think resolution comes with an advantage over posting bitrates - in any scenario where you’re rendering a lower resolution video on a higher resolution surface, there will be scaling with all of its negative consequences on perceived quality. I imagine there’s also an intuitive sense of larger resolution = higher bitrate (necessarily, to capture the additional information).
Don’t assume Google et al. will ever consider enough people buy their subscription. There’s never enough money for these people.
A company isn’t successful in hyper capitalism unless they are accelerating the growth of their profits every year. They have to sell more products to existing users, acquire new paid users, charge more for their existing products, or they’re considered unsuccessful. The model literally assumes a constant infinite exponential growth of the human race where success can only be achieved if every human alive is paying for every product offering possible, buying every upsell and microtransaction, freely giving their data to be sold so that more useless products can be created at minimum cost and sold at maximum price. But also hyper capitalism lobbies for less benefits, lower pay, etc. It inevitably collapses into neo-feudalism or just slavery
The model literally assumes a constant infinite exponential growth
Cancer. Capitalism models cancer.
I was happy to pay for youtube as a service until they broke the shit out of their algorithms and started shoving ads to my face in premium. Did a chargeback and got my money back. Fuck these monkeys.
I got the 2 month free trial recently and have yet to see an ad with it. Don’t plan on continuing the service if I do see one.
Watch out for the “video suggestions” in your home feed with the title “introducing ….” These are product placements they make even with the premium subscription. I HATE ads so I pulled the plug.
That’s a nice way to lose access to all Google products, including your email account.
Assuming they use Gmail in the first place
So far so good. The fuckers at youtube support acknowledged serving ads to me even with my premium membership, so they can suck a big fat dick.
Search is also completely broken on YouTube. It’s become useless.
Search for a video using the exact title? Sorry, no match. Here is 5 videos that are loosley related to a word in your search, before the completely unrelated algorithm feed begins.
Use the exact video title in quotation marks? Best i can do is two videos of the five i already showed you…
I’m frankly offended by he shittiness of youtube search.
wow, premium in the usa is expensive. it’s a little under $3 per month here in india for the family plan and even that’s after a recent 16% hike. the individual plan is even cheaper.
i guess these rates are in store for us as well in the future?
Depends on economies, they can’t really charge like double minimum wage, so countries like India have “cheaper” subscriptions. So for a minimum wage worker, it’s about the same in terms of expense (ignoring other bill differences).
So it’s probably going to stay about the same for you.
Is this something that could be gamed with a vpn possibly?
Yes. I’m in Europe paying Pakistan prices. You just need to find a location that doesn’t require a local payment method.
Does that require you to watch via vpn all the time or just when you make the account?
Would that be Pakistan? Asking for a friends dogs friends owner…
That’s the Euro symbol. Just FYI.
I just lost my premium subscription after about 2 years of paying $3/month in Argentina. Here it’s $24/month (family plan). YouTube is unbearable with all the ads. Sometimes a 10-minute video has 3 as breaks. I’m only using it for precise purposes now, not scrolling and exploring, and finding alternatives as much as possible.
OK, am I the only person that has a working ad blocker and doesn’t get YT ads? Literally never seen one.
If you’ve used YouTube on anything besides a computer, then you would know that the experience is suboptimal.
There are ad blockers on mobile browsers, too. Besides, there are other ways to block ads, like DNS blocklists. Or if it’s just for Youtube use an alternative front-end like Piped or Invidious or Grayjay for built in ad- and Sponsorblock
Exactly. Why bother paying? Firefox + uBlock Origin on the computer, SmartTube Next on Android TV, ReVanced on Android phone. I haven’t been seeing ads on YouTube for years.
I can’t believe people still even use YouTube when shit like this is happening. Paywalling resolution? Get fukt.
Paywalling a better resolution than the ones ALREADY present on the platform, may be the best way to approach the issue of it being fucking expensive to serve it.
Youtube has gone to shit and the enhanced 1080p bitrate is not one of the reasons
Resolution is the same it has always been, they are just offering a higher bitrate stream with premium (except I think they offer 8K streams on premium? But like come on… who the fuck needs that).
Doesnt matter if the video is uploaded in 4K, you can watch that stream at 1080p with the same/better effect.
YouTube compresses the shit out of anything uploaded to it. More so than other sites.
Yes, which is why extra bitrate is valuable (depending on the video content) and the higher the resolution the video is, the higher the bitrate is. Which is why it is beneficial to watch a video at 4K even if you only have a 1080p screen.
I’m used to blu-ray and ultra hd blu-ray so now everything else looks like garbage to me. Google are cheap asses. Glad to know I’m not the only one who watches 4k videos on my 720p phone.
Yeah, I get that. Personally, it looks good for most of the content I watch and it’s free content, I really can’t complain. The compression these days is really good.
Maybe it’s more expensive in Europe, my premium is 7.99 usd
Google asking me for €13 a month? Their empire is built upon selling user data. Fuckers should be paying us.
And if you’re a content creator, you can opt in to allow your content to be used by AI… Without compensation. 🤡
At least that’s opt-in, unlike them using your Wi-Fi SSID to fine tune their location settings. Not only was that opt-out but you had to change your router settings (either change your SSID, which isn’t hard but shouldn’t be required, or hide your network, which alienated guests when mobile data wasn’t so ever present). I don’t even know if there’s still a (simple) way out.
But yes. The option you describe is clearly ridiculous.
The funny thing is, I’m nearly certain that it’s opt-in for their benefit (i.e. legal reasons) and not because it benefits the content creator, because it really doesn’t benefit the content creator at all! “Here’s my work. Do what you like with it, and don’t worry about paying.”.
I suspect any time Google gives you a choice about anything, especially anything regarding data, it’s not for your benefit. With that in mind, you’re likely right.
I thought it was based around BSSID which cannot be changed on most devices. Changing SSID helps?
Yes, it’s bssid (the wifi mac address) which is collected by streetview cars as they pass by.
“Enhanced” bitrate? I’ve heard of high bitrates, and I’ve heard of low bit rates, but I ain’t never heard of no enhanced bitrates. Does Google know something we don’t, or do they think we’re suckers? (Rhetorical question, don’t answer.)
You can have high bitrates, but non enhanced bitrates are just worthless no matter what
I think, there is usually 1080p with 30fps and with 60fps. So, they are probably selling you 30 more frames per second… for $13…
That’s not what Bitrate means. They use a lossy compression to send you the video. When targeting lower bandwidth/bitrate you see more artifacting.
Bitrate and resolution do their own thing.
Because of Google going out of their way to cripple YouTube in the name of advertisers, even going as far as to cripple Firefox’s performance just for using it because their videos would sometimes stop resuming, you’d need to refresh .etc
They aren’t seeing shit from me. I will use UBlock Origin as I please.
Friendly reminder: If you know how to use Docker, you can self host Invidious on your PC and have an experience better tgan YouTube for free.
I’ve done this for about 6 months, I’ve had a very mixed experience with Invidious, mostly with YouTube constantly making changes without notice or the video stream not really supporting resuming if the connection breaks briefly.
This isn’t a comment on the Herculean effort the contributors are taking on, but new users should be aware that they need a very reliable connection, update the container regularly, and exercise patience in the current state of Invidious.
YouTube has litterally attacked it by blacklisting all know cloud IPs world wide when tmaccessing YouTube.
Self-hosting is the only reliable way. Sometimes, YouTube breaks something, but after a few hours, Invidious pushes a fix…
But if you target the latest tag of all relevant images, itms just:
docker compose pull; docker compose down; docker compose up
Yeah, anything to make that line go up on YouTube’s end.
The latest tag still doesn’t support multiple audio tracks, which might sound niche, but YouTube just rolled out AI dubbed audio tracks, and so Invidious can just play the wrong track and you can’t do anything about it and it’s been this way for about a month.
That being said, it seems that the team’s plan is to put more dev time into changing the back end to video.js so they don’t have to brunt the video retrieval workload, and video.js supports multiple audio tracks as far as I know. I look forward to when that happens, but in the meantime the latest tag is not 100% usable :(
Invidious alone has been working quite badly this year (stopped working for months until inv-sig-helper was invented, etc), but combined with FreeTube it almost always works; can recommend.
YouTube premium is one of the subscriptions I most often feel thankful for having. I watch enough YouTube videos that avoiding all those ads is really worthwhile, I hope that my view is worth more to the channels I watch, and YouTube music let me cancel Spotify.
I understand being pissed at YouTube and Google, but at the end of the day, of all the things I have to rage at, YouTube isn’t worth it. I like it, there are creators that use it that I like, and I understand that it costs real money to run the platform.
You’ll have ads and be paying soon enough
You used to be able to play videos in the background but they removed that feature specifically to lock it behind a paywall. YouTube will never see a dime from me because of this.
Charging for new features? Sure I guess. Removing features to charge for them later? Get fucked.
You can get around this by running YouTube in the web browser on Android at least
Or use NewPipe
