youtube YouTube Ramps Up "1080p Premium Enhanced Bitrate" scheme. Retroactively Reducing Bitrate On Many Videos.

[GOnker]

Summary

A couple of months ago, YouTube started testing the waters with their "Premium enhanced bitrate" option on select videos, such as ones from late night tv shows like Stephen Colbert's; which actually just meant they lowered the bitrate for everybody but premium users on those videos. As far as I can tell, "1080p" videos with this "feature" enabled looks like they are 800p or lower.

 

Thoughts

It seems that premium only 4K was only the start, now even 1080p will be premium only, as its pointless to have a 1080p resolution with so low of a bitrate. Hopefully someone more knowledgable than me can analyse the situation further. It may be only for select regions for now(I'm from Turkey), I have no way to test currently.

Update:

The "feature" is being enabled retroactively, making the claims of this post more credible as it is less likely that youtube keeps masters of uploads instead of just their re-encoded versions. So they must be lowering the quality for free users instead of increasing it for premium users.

 

Some videos with the "Feature" enabled:

I've now found videos with this "feature" being enabled retroactively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn8Ed7luPDA

 

[TempestCatto]

1080p has been looking fuzzy lately on any video I watch. Guess this is why. Wouldn't be necessary if they didn't shove ads down your throat like giving a cat its medicine. Then more people wouldn't feel the need for an adblocker.

[da na]

Oh god, I sure hope 1080p videos downloaded with 3rd-party tools (YT-DLP, ClipGrab, Jdownloader, IDM etc) will not be in a cut bitrate...

 

As a creator on the platform myself, I wouldn't mind too much if literally a single cent of this was passed onto the creator of the video. But no, John Google needs a 4th private jet and more money for AI?

[Kisai]

Please remember that a lot of this is due to Korea at the moment. What we see in the US is just Youtube trying to cut it's costs in Korea and other places with extortion-level bandwidth costs by trying to market it as a premium service. Mobile devices in Canada, and the US often are bandwidth capped, and Netflix had been doing this for years.

 

Kinda sucks that we get "innovations" like this which are just about trying to avoid ISP's in Korea and Europe from double-dipping on their bandwidth costs.

 

 

[Fasterthannothing]

This is absurd we need a YouTube competitor now. Atleast I can use Nvidia AI to upscale on my desktop and through my Nvidia shield TV. wonder if they are doing more compression on YouTube TV as well. Obviously that's a paid service but they used to have some of the highest bitrate streams for cable and lately I've noticed much lower quality streams on some devices.

[leadeater]

28 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Please remember that a lot of this is due to Korea at the moment. What we see in the US is just Youtube trying to cut it's costs in Korea and other places with extortion-level bandwidth costs by trying to market it as a premium service. Mobile devices in Canada, and the US often are bandwidth capped, and Netflix had been doing this for years.

 

Kinda sucks that we get "innovations" like this which are just about trying to avoid ISP's in Korea and Europe from double-dipping on their bandwidth costs.

Not true, that is not to blame. If it were then only South Korea would have lowered 1080p bitrate since geo-location is a thing. Peering and transit bandwidth costs that YouTube pays hasn't gotten more expensive, in fact cheaper almost everywhere. A few regions with higher costs wouldn't change the global cost of YouTube. Australia has forever had extremely expensive bandwidth compared to global, probably always will.

 

Having something simple and current to point to doesn't make it the cause, particularly not globally.

 

YouTube deploys cache servers in to ISPs and IX's so they don't have to pay or get heavily discounted peering/transit fees as well anyway.

[GOnker]

I've now found videos with this "feature" enabled retroactively on 2+ year old videos. Its getting more likely that my claims are correct. Updated the OP.

[SansVarnic]

-= Moved to General Dicussion =-

OP You are missing requirements to post this in the TN section.

 

 

[Sunoo]

1 hour ago, da na said:

Oh god, I sure hope 1080p videos downloaded with 3rd-party tools (YT-DLP, ClipGrab, Jdownloader, IDM etc) will not be in a cut bitrate...

YT-DLP can download the Premium 1080p versions, as long as you have YouTube Premium.

[GOnker]

17 minutes ago, SansVarnic said:

-= Moved to General Dicussion =-

OP You are missing requirements to post this in the TN section.

 

 

are you calling me disreputable? rude.

[starsmine]

Im sorry, are you just assuming they are dropping the bitrate of normal 1080p?

The enhanced bitrate doesn't require lowering the bitrate of the traditional 1080p to be a value add.  Is there any legitimate source to satisfy your claim?

  

48 minutes ago, GOnker said:

are you calling me disreputable? rude.

Yes.

Having the feature retroactively enabled on older videos that still have a higher-quality source is a good thing. So making up stuff is FUDing about. Youtube doesn't throw away the file you upload when they reencode to your FHD file to their FHD file/HD file/SD file, the source is just not served to users. 1080p premium enhanced is just a better encode at 1080p that they can now serve. Its not reencoding the old FHD file they were serving already to be worse.

[GOnker]

1 hour ago, starsmine said:

 Youtube doesn't throw away the file you upload when they reencode

Source for this?

[starsmine]

7 minutes ago, GOnker said:

Source for this?

your youtube studio dashboard where you can download your own videos?

[Avocado Diaboli]

3 hours ago, starsmine said:

your youtube studio dashboard where you can download your own videos?

I just tried it with one of my own videos. The file that I got was 720p / 30 fps. I upload in 1440p / 60 fps. So at least that way you can't get your original source files back. There seems to be an option via Google Takeout which states you get the original video or whatever they deem a high-quality transcode, but I haven't tried that.

 

 

Anyway, I don't see any evidence here of YouTube actually dropping the bitrate for Coke Classic here to make New Coke more palatable. Unless OP has solid evidence beyond "I can tell with my eyes", then this is a nothingburger.

[LAwLz]

8 hours ago, GOnker said:

which actually just meant they lowered the bitrate for everybody but premium users on those videos.

Can people please stop just making shit up without any evidence?

 

I have seen so many people claim this, but I have so far not seen a single person able to show any evidence of it being true.

 

 

 

 

6 hours ago, GOnker said:

I've now found videos with this "feature" enabled retroactively on 2+ year old videos. Its getting more likely that my claims are correct. Updated the OP.

1) You should make sure your claims are true before making them, not after.

2) Them doing it to older videos does not mean they are lowering the quality of those videos. It could just be that Google keeps the original copy, or an even higher-quality copy when you upload the video. What is exposed to users might not be everything they got.

 

 

 

4 hours ago, starsmine said:

your youtube studio dashboard where you can download your own videos?

That copy is still reencoded.

 

 

Edit:

I am now looking through my video library to try and find old 1080 Youtube videos that I have downloaded, and I will try and find one that has the new enhanced quality option.

Hopefully, I will find one, and if I do then I'll download and compare the old 1080 version (which I already have since years ago, hopefully), the new 1080 version, and then the enhanced 1080p version.

Since it seems like nobody is interested in verifying the conspiracy theories they spread, I guess it's up to me to verify or debunk them.

[starsmine]

15 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Can people please stop just making shit up without any evidence?

 

I have seen so many people claim this, but I have so far not seen a single person able to show any evidence of it being true.

 

 

 

 

1) You should make sure your claims are true before making them, not after.

2) Them doing it to older videos does not mean they are lowering the quality of those videos. It could just be that Google keeps the original copy, or an even higher-quality copy when you upload the video. What is exposed to users might not be everything they got.

 

 

 

That copy is still reencoded.

 

 

Edit:

I am now looking through my video library to try and find old 1080 Youtube videos that I have downloaded, and I will try and find one that has the new enhanced quality option.

Hopefully, I will find one, and if I do then I'll download and compare the old 1080 version (which I already have since years ago, hopefully), the new 1080 version, and then the enhanced 1080p version.

Since it seems like nobody is interested in verifying the conspiracy theories they spread, I guess it's up to me to verify or debunk them.

I feel like things like this need to be force-appended to the OP. People search results get hits on things like OP's posts and some people wont read past the first post. 

Like hey this is misinformation, dont trust it.

[LAwLz]

Okay I am back.

I found this video in my library and I have some interesting observations. It's a video from "All Gas No Brakes" that I downloaded for archival purposes back when rumors had it that the channel was going away.

 

I have a 1080p copy from 2020-04-04.

Today I downloaded the 1080p and 1080p enhanced versions. Here are the bit rates:

 

Old 1080p - 2347 kbps

New 1080p - 2347 kbps

Enhanced 1080p - 3503 kbps

 

 

It's the exact same file.

 

Even the metadata is the same. In fact, the "encoded date" is the same.

You can test this yourself if you want.

Get youtube-dl and run this command:

yt-dlp.exe -f 137

 

This will download the 1080p avc version of the video and you can read the metadata if you want. The timestamp is 2020-04-04 20:23:59.

Spoiler

 

What I did observe however when downloading various versions of this video is that Youtube very recently (not sure if it's 10th December 2023 or 12th October 2023, stupid American date formatting) created a VP9 1080p version of the file. That file has a bit rate of 2015 kbps. But since VP9 is a more efficient format, it should look better than the avc version of 1080p. 

 

So the idea that Youtube is just relabeling old 1080p videos as "1080p enhanced" is complete bullshit. It's not true. It's just some conspiracy theory that some people came up with based on zero evidence.

 

 

Here is the enhanced version:

Spoiler

 

Here is the VP9 1080p version:

Spoiler

 

 

For those who want to replicate the verification, here are the different format IDs:
1080p (AVC aka H.264) - 137

1080p (VP9) - 614

1080p Enhanced - 616

[LAwLz]

Here is another video which showed some interesting results.

3Blue1Brown - Gradient descent, how neural networks learn | Chapter 2, Deep learning

 

 

I downloaded this video 2018-05-11.

My 1080p version (VP9) (WebM)- 723 kbps

1080p version downloaded today (VP9) (ID 248, WebM) - 616 kbps

1080p version downloaded today (VP9) (ID 614, MP4) - 647 kbps

1080 Enhanced (VP9) - 1559 kbps

 

 

So this is one video where it seems like something has happened to the VP9 file.

The new 1080p version seems to have a lower bit rate than the old 1080p version.

Just to be clear, the "enhanced" version still looks way better than the old 1080 version and it is 100% for certain that there is no "YouTube is putting the old quality behind a paywall" going about. The "enhanced" version is a brand new file that didn't exist before and it is higher quality that what we could view before. The conspiracy theory should die. It's still bullshit.

 

But it seems like YouTube has changed their VP9 encoder and reencoded videos.

In the case of the 3blue1brown video it seems like this change happened 2023-12-11. The timestamp says the exact time and date I downloaded it on though, so that's weird. Not sure if that's a bug, or an indication that there is something weird at play here. I doubt it just so happened that they reencoded the video exactly when I downloaded it.

 

I'll try and look into this more but it is however important to note that the reduced bit rate might not mean the quality is lower. Google's VP9 encoder was not exactly great before, and it might just be that it was very inefficient on a "bit to quality" ratio. So there is a possibility that they are fixing this with their new encoder.

This seems to only apply to VP9 files though. AVC files are untouched, and the "Enhanced 1080p" are brand new files, not relabeled.

[Mark Kaine]

11 hours ago, da na said:

Oh god, I sure hope 1080p videos downloaded with 3rd-party tools (YT-DLP, ClipGrab, Jdownloader, IDM etc) will not be in a cut bitrate...

 

As a creator on the platform myself, I wouldn't mind too much if literally a single cent of this was passed onto the creator of the video. But no, John Google needs a 4th private jet and more money for AI?

thats a good point,  most uploaders don't see any $ because they're "too small" ... probably,  like most of what gooe does, illegal...

 

*if* they make any $ on a video they should have to share a % with the uploader/rights holder, and also additionally give them the appropriate information. 

 

[Doobeedoo]

Meh basic bitrate was already bad and people expected they would up it as a new default and maybe paywall 4K higher bitrate. 

Also when will they support 120fps already, it's been a long time.

[Ripred]

So were all moving to Rumble now? sweet, YouTube had a long enough run

[RejZoR]

11 hours ago, GOnker said:

Source for this?

As far as I know Google encodes videos to their own "more efficient" format and then do the further re-encoding on the fly depending on file popularity and what quality user picks to watch.

 

Popular stuff is already encoded in all quality levels and just streamed to users, very rare stuff watched by few is only stored in their own efficient format and re-encoded on the fly for that play specifically. At least that's how I understand they run the whole thing. Encoding it all on the fly would stuff their CPU clusters and having it all prepared ahead of time would stuff their storage. So they balance both depending on popularity of content.

[LAwLz]

20 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

As far as I know Google encodes videos to their own "more efficient" format and then do the further re-encoding on the fly depending on file popularity and what quality user picks to watch.

 

Popular stuff is already encoded in all quality levels and just streamed to users, very rare stuff watched by few is only stored in their own efficient format and re-encoded on the fly for that play specifically. At least that's how I understand they run the whole thing. Encoding it all on the fly would stuff their CPU clusters and having it all prepared ahead of time would stuff their storage. So they balance both depending on popularity of content.

Source on the video being stored in their "own efficient format"?

 

If you're referring to VP9 av AV1 then those are the formats being pushed to users, not necessarily what's being used in the backend. My guess is that they just store the original video and then reencode everything from there.

Or in some cases my guess is that they reencode to a very high quality format that doesn't get exposed to users.

 

 

I have asked for a YouTube checkout so I guess I'll see which videos I get sent back. The page says "your originally uploaded videos, or a high-quality transcode".

[Kisai]

On 12/11/2023 at 6:03 AM, RejZoR said:

As far as I know Google encodes videos to their own "more efficient" format and then do the further re-encoding on the fly depending on file popularity and what quality user picks to watch.

 

Popular stuff is already encoded in all quality levels and just streamed to users, very rare stuff watched by few is only stored in their own efficient format and re-encoded on the fly for that play specifically. At least that's how I understand they run the whole thing. Encoding it all on the fly would stuff their CPU clusters and having it all prepared ahead of time would stuff their storage. So they balance both depending on popularity of content.

I'm absolutely sure youtube encodes on the fly, maybe it depends how long it's been since it's been accessed. Maybe it depends what you sent to youtube in the first place, but for a specific kind of video, I know it does, because I recorded a lot of these tests in the descriptions of the video.

 

So I'm going to grab one of those and see what YT-dlp gets:

Source upload : 

h264 720p version from youtube (2010): 158,469,521, original upload: 106,627,952 (zmbv)

 

Version downloaded right now (56,993,539 bytes):

Video: VP90 960x720 60fps [V: English [eng] (vp9 profile 0, yuv420p, 960x720) [default]]
Audio: 0x704f 48000Hz stereo 3072kbps [A: English [eng] (opus, 48000 Hz, stereo) [default]]

 

Version downloaded from Youtube Studio (46,847,919 bytes):

Video: MPEG4 Video (H264) 960x720 30fps 493kbps [V: ISO Media file produced by Google Inc. Created on: 08/02/2021. (h264 main L3.1, yuv420p, 960x720, 493 kb/s)]
Audio: AAC 44100Hz stereo 128kbps [A: ISO Media file produced by Google Inc. Created on: 08/02/2021. (aac lc, 44100 Hz, stereo, 128 kb/s)]

 

Both of these are definitely different. While you certainly could watch it in either and not miss that much visually. If google did in fact re-encode it in 2021, then it's incorrectly identified the frame rate of the uploaded video which would have been 60.

 

For a while, I was trying to upload archive-quality videos to youtube of old DOS-era games because it was certainly difficult to do so (as opposed to streaming a game, talking over it, and not really caring if looks correct), hence these were integer-upscaled before being uploaded so youtube didn't treat them as 240p videos where it rescales them to 360 and it's blurry unwatchable mush.

 

This one, was intentionally uploaded in 4K, to see if the encode size changed (4 years ago):

Source Video: 2GB (2,147,485,910), 3:23:53, 320x200x8bpp 70fps ZMBV, PCM_s16le, 48Khz

Video: ZMBV 320x200 70.086fps [V: zmbv, pal8, 320x200]

Audio: PCM 48000Hz stereo 1536kbps [A: pcm_s16le, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, s16, 1536 kb/s]

 

This was encoded with -level 5.1

 

Transcoded Video (using ffmpeg, what was sent to youtube):

938MB 983,977,213, 2:49:47 2880x2160x32bpp 60fps Video: HVC1 2880x2160 60fps 638kbps [V: hevc main L5.1, yuv420p, 2880x2160, 638 kb/s]

Audio: AAC 48000Hz stereo 124kbps [A: SoundHandler (aac lc, 48000 Hz, stereo, 124 kb/s)]

 

 

Youtube Studio 770,916,595 bytes:

Video: MPEG4 Video (H264) 960x720 30fps 474kbps [V: ISO Media file produced by Google Inc. Created on: 09/23/2019. (h264 main L3.1, yuv420p, 960x720, 474 kb/s)]
Audio: AAC 44100Hz stereo 127kbps [A: ISO Media file produced by Google Inc. Created on: 09/23/2019. (aac lc, 44100 Hz, stereo, 127 kb/s)]

 

That file, matches the upload date.

 

Youtube 4K( 3,006,647,199)

Video: VP90 2880x2160 60fps [V: English [eng] (vp9 profile 0, yuv420p, 2880x2160) [default]]
Audio: 0x704f 48000Hz stereo 3072kbps [A: English [eng] (opus, 48000 Hz, stereo) [default]]
 

I have a few dozen tests like this, ranging from uploading noise to uploading the raw files. Suffice it to say the best outcome for years was uploading 2D game footage with ZMBV if it came out of dosbox, but it would often require being re-encoded by ffmpeg because youtube did not understand DAR (display ratio), so unless it was 640x480, you can't upload dosbox video without youtube wrecking it.

 

I guess what I'm saying here, is that youtube often made the "lossless" videos bigger by compressing, or recompressing it. Very interesting that if you tell youtube studio to download it, you don't even get the 4K one. Really hilarious how the 938MB 4K upload became 3GB.

 

My theory here is the "enhanced bitrate" is only for 1080p60 uploads. If you go directly to a 4K upload, enhanced bitrate isn't even available. What youtube is likely sending as the enhanced bitrate is the same 1080p60 video but with CRF targets rather than straight VBR targets. Who knows. If someone really wants to research it, they'd have to compare frame-by-frame the QP values, and I just don't think that's worth anyone's time except for people uploading archival-quality videos.

 

Another possibility, is that the bitrate is the difference between "main" and "high", since high profile requires more powerful hardware and it shouldn't be presented to devices that can't use it.

[RejZoR]

On 12/11/2023 at 3:40 PM, LAwLz said:

Source on the video being stored in their "own efficient format"?

 

If you're referring to VP9 av AV1 then those are the formats being pushed to users, not necessarily what's being used in the backend. My guess is that they just store the original video and then reencode everything from there.

Or in some cases my guess is that they reencode to a very high quality format that doesn't get exposed to users.

 

 

I have asked for a YouTube checkout so I guess I'll see which videos I get sent back. The page says "your originally uploaded videos, or a high-quality transcode".

No, I meant they are using some custom stuff internally. All the user end codecs are meant for "final output" use and not whatever stuff Youtube is doing on its server clusters. So, I very much doubt it's VP9 or AV1 used internally.