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Don’t assume Google et al. will ever consider enough people buy their subscription. There’s never enough money for these people.
I don’t care that enhanced Bitrate is premium only. I do care that you still need to click “advanced resolution settings” to access this even for premium users on mobile.
ReVanced :)
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.
Yeah I sometimes switch to Firefox instead of the youtube app, but its a little bit annoying switching in and out of fullscreen and I’ve found the tap to fast forward doesn’t work consistently. I wasn’t able to find an addon for Firefox Android to force the quality selection last time I looked but maybe I need to check again.
They’re especially greedy when you consider they are not only the most profitable of all their competitors (Netflix/Disney Plus/Hulu/etc), but that they’re unique in that they’re the only one who doesn’t fund creating any content at all.
At least the other companies put tons of money producing content alongside their other stuff. YouTube just lets others do that for them and then takes all the profit.
So how does YouTube really justify their costs for premium with zero production costs and the largest profit margin?
Most other companies can be selective in what they host / stream. YouTube will host/stream anything users upload and that’s actually quite insane. Current statistics say that YouTubers upload 30.000 hours of video… per hour.
Aside from the streaming/processing, only the disk space that would need is already frightening. Most of those videos will never be seen, and no ads will be played on them. The setup needed for this is massively more impressive to me than services like Netflix.
Do you perhaps have a source for those profit margins? I really wonder if they’re already running break even.
Don’t worry about YouTube - according to alphabets filings they account for ~10% of Googles ad revenue. Google is posting record profits every quarter, so they should manage.
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 up 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).
there will be scaling with all of its negative consequences on perceived quality
In theory this is true. If you had a nice high-bitrate 1080p video it may look better on a 1080 display than any quality of 1440p video would due to loss while scaling. But in almost all cases selecting higher resolutions will provide better perceived quality due to the higher bitrate, even if they aren’t integer multiples of the displayed size.
It will also be more bandwidth efficient to target the output size directly. But streaming services want to keep the number of different versions small. Often this will already be >4 resolutions and 2-3 codecs. If they wanted to also have low/medium/high for each resolution that would be a significant cost (encoding itself, storage and reduction in cache hits). So they sort of squish the resolution and quality together into one scale, so 1080p isn’t just 1080p it also serves as a general “medium” quality. If you want “high” you need to go to 1440p or 2160p even if your output is only 1080.
13 per month. That’s over 100 per year. Did not expect it to be that expensive.
It is because it includes YouTube Music. A really crappy Spotify clone that nobody asked for.
Which replaced Google Play Music, which was actually good.
Yeah that I think is the most upsetting part to me. Replace a perfectly fine product with a half baked one.
That’s been Google’s thing for decades now
The package for couples is 25. I save a dollar.
That’s almost one cent per video. Outrageous!
If you watch 43 videos per day on every day, yes…
Some of us go to work or school or whatever and can’t therefore do that every single day, especially not when the videos are longer…
yt-dlp and VLC still work. I’m good.
Do you use VLC to play the downloaded YT videos from yt-dl or is there some method to stream directly from a given YT url with VLC?
i beleive you can open a yt vid straight into vlc, not sure on the specifics of how its done tho sorry
YouTube already randomly drops me to 360p on my big-ass broadband sometimes because it just feels like it. What are the guarantees YouTube Premium won’t do that? ANSWER ME YOUTUBE, THIS IS CRUCIAL PRE-PURCHASE INFORMATION.
On mobile, many videos will start at 720 and I have to specifically select a higher resolution but it will stay there. It will have me wait for buffering if my internet isn’t capable but it won’t drop the resolution.
On pc it remembers the resolution you set last.
Yow answer after this message from our sponsor!
Premium user since Red launched.
Mobile defaults to 320p no matter what I do. I have to manually select 1080p each and every video
If your internet is flaky, there’s nothing YouTube can do about it. The alternative would be waiting for the video to buffer at 1080p.
i have 8gbps… youtube buffers nonstop for me. my connection isnt flaky, as I can maintain multi gigabit connections to upload and download sources without issue. youtube sucks
Check your browser
If it doesn’t work on Firefox, then it’s using non-standard web calls. Which Google is notorious for. That doesn’t make youtube suck any less.
Yup, i have the same issue on ff. It just stops and buffers. Goes through fine on the same pc when i test on chrome (used for work). Plays fine on embed, it’s just their website.
I just close the window. Don’t need youtube.
That’s what I do more and more. I’ve had my own invidious setup, I’ve done grayjay. If I continue to have problems, I’ll simply not use Youtube at all…
I paid for youtube red until it wasn’t reasonable anymore. I tolerated the ads until it wasn’t reasonable anymore. I can only do so many mitigations to youtube’s bullshit before I just stop…
Right now I have YT-dlp setup to import some channels into my plex setup. That may be all my house has here soon.
I on 300 mbps internet and barely had YouTube buffering on me. I can even run YouTube videos while watching multiple streams on both YouTube and Twitch and it doesn’t buffer.
Clearly the problem is either your connection is flaky or your device cannot handle a YouTube video. Maybe it’s a video driver issue or you accidentally turned on the feature that automatically upscale YouTube videos using Nvidia cards, assuming you have one. I had some buffering issue when I used this feature when it was first released.
No. On all accounts.
Linux, 7950x3d, rx7900xtx, 64 GB of ram. I’m a veteran in the IT world. It’s not my system. Those same multigig transfers happen over https traffic on domains I have control over. As far as “drivers” go… I’m on kernel 6.11.10, which is stable. If I can push 200 fps on beatsaber in VR… and that’s somehow a problem for Youtube… guess what! That’s Youtube’s fault.
What it is, Google pushes chrome and nerfs Firefox. Plain and simple. They push everything they can into their ecosystem and that makes youtube suck.
It’s well known. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/youtube-responds-to-delayed-loading-in-rival-browser-complaints
Edit:
My system pushing 7.1Gbps out it’s interface… (note the ~2gbps steady transfer happening prior to the test)
No issues with speedtest… (my 8gbps minus the 2-3gbps I’m pushing on the backend here…)
My connection is fiber. Little jitter, no fuss anywhere else. Youtube runs like ass because it IS ass.
But I’m watching YouTube on Firefox without spoofing my browser and never had this problem. It’s funny how some people are downvoting me for suggesting some solution to your problem, but idk.
Another potential issue is that it’s your ISP that is causing the problem. I have a less powerful system than you and a slower Internet while using Firefox, yet I’m not having any buffering issue, so our different ISPs might be the reason.
It could also be that you have a stricter standard for what you deem buffering than I do, considering your experience with that good of an Internet connection and PC. Mine only buffers less than a second at the start of the video while it loads, but I’ve never considered that an issue.
It’s a 70/30 split. 30% of the video I watch will have issues. And those videos will often spend more time buffering than playing the video.
And nearly 100% of the content I watch should be in youtube’s caching system. As I almost universally watch new releases from my subscription page and don’t tend to let the algorithm recommend anything to me. This has been my normal for years.
Except lately it’s gone up to nearly 100%. I can’t load a damn thing anymore (as of the past month or so). It just sits and spins, multiple devices including phone on cell network. I can only get phone to work using something like Grayjay.
You can claim that my ISP interchange might be at fault… But that wouldn’t explain why I have no issues with virtually any other platform on the entirety of the internet that I exchange packets with. This would still be squarely youtube’s fault. My ISP is one of the big ones, Lumen (Centurylink/Quantum). Lumen owns backhaul. A lot of backhaul. While it’s possible my local interchange is completely crammed full in other situations, I happen to know it’s not. We’re not even 1/4 of the way through their build out in my area. And the fiber goes straight to the head end for my area. There’s capacity galore.
What’s likely, and has already been cited is the fact that youtube has been waging war again firefox for a long time. It’s well documented. Further Google also has a history of targeting specific users where an account simply being logged in will achieve the same effect of constant buffering.
Youtube is bad. Here’s the kicker… Other platforms? Never have an issue. Twitch, Odysee, Rumble (Cringe platform, but a couple people I watch went there even though I wish they went elsewhere), hell even most peertube instances work with better results than Youtube does for me.
At this point I’m not interested in help fixing it. It’s clear there’s no helping Youtube. The platform is broken, both in the business sense and technologically.
It’s pretty easy to check if this is caused by YouTube throttling Firefox. Just install a chromium browser for testing or check if the YouTube app is still buffering. Well, only if you’re actually interested in finding out the cause of the issue.
If you just disagree with YouTube’s actions, it’s best to just boycott them altogether. My personal anecdote is that I’ve only had issues with YouTube on Firefox but not any other browser for a short period, which does prove that they had history of throttling Firefox, whether intentional or not. It’s just hadn’t been a problem in my area of the world currently.
Is that why I am getting about one ad for every 90 seconds of video ?
Creators have a say in how many ads they want to roll. Maybe try another channel.
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 pay for premium but would love to use peertube instead since it’s decentralized. It would be great to have all the people I sub to upload there as well then I’d bail.
I was paying for it until it got to like $16.99 on iOS. As much of an annoyance to use a work around like AD Guard. I can now afford it but refuse to give those greedy mofos a dime.
That is because you are paying for the premium of signing up through ios; apple takes a cut so to make money they raise the rates. It’s extremely common signing up to any service through ios, that you will be charged higher than if you went to the website on your browser and sign up for it there. First link has link to Hank Green who does a great break down and investigation but provided many more examples.
https://www.devicemag.com/youtube-premium-cost-iphone/
https://lifehacker.com/dont-sign-up-for-subscriptions-in-the-app-1850298355
https://umatechnology.org/psa-subscriptions-cost-more-when-bought-on-an-iphone/
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I paid for premium recently which helps a bit except now the problem is a lot of the content I watch ppl are doing sponsored segments which I get but at the same time fuck off.
You need to install the sponsor block extension
Majority of what I watch is on my TV. Phone is fine as is computer because of extensions and/or revanced
Sponsor block is great for that.
Majority of what I watch is on my TV. Phone is fine as is computer because of extensions and/or revanced
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.
I can do all of them already without premium.
Pray tell how you have enhanced bitrate without premium.
Can’t yt-dlp download high bitrate videos? I think I saw this option in the list of formats.
I don’t think so - but I’d love to be proven wrong on this. I’m not sure what the other guy is on about.
Enhanced bitrate? Do you get smoother bits there? If it means “more cache”, that’s a setting in mpv.conf.
Better even, i have AI-upscaling.
