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

[Pajas84]

Just wanted to share my own findings when looking into this matter, because I only learned about the enhanced 1080p a week or two ago after noticing that the quality of videos seemed worse than before.

 

Below are extracts from the MediaInfo of two files of the same video, downloaded through the exact same method, only the first was downloaded november 3rd 2023 and the second today december 23rd. I'm also including the MPC-HC MediaInfo text files.

 

As you can see the video bit rate was reduced from 1882 kb/s down to 1235 kb/s, that's more than 30% lower. Audio bit rate was unchanged.

 

So Youtube's promise that they were not going to lower the standard bit rate was at least in this case not true.

 

Video
ID                             : 1
Format                         : AVC
Format/Info                    : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                 : High@L4
Format settings, CABAC         : Yes
Format settings, RefFrames     : 3 frames
Codec ID                       : avc1
Codec ID/Info                  : Advanced Video Coding
Duration                       : 1 h 33 min
Bit rate                       : 1 882 kb/s
Width                          : 1 920 pixels
Height                         : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio           : 16:9
Frame rate mode                : Constant
Frame rate                     : 23.976 (24000/1001) FPS
Color space                    : YUV
Chroma subsampling             : 4:2:0
Bit depth                      : 8 bits
Scan type                      : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)             : 0.038
Stream size                    : 1.23 GiB (93%)
Title                          : ISO Media file produced by Google Inc.
Color range                    : Limited
Color primaries                : BT.709
Transfer characteristics       : BT.709
Matrix coefficients            : BT.709

 

Video
ID                             : 1
Format                         : AVC
Format/Info                    : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                 : High@L4
Format settings, CABAC         : Yes
Format settings, RefFrames     : 3 frames
Codec ID                       : avc1
Codec ID/Info                  : Advanced Video Coding
Duration                       : 1 h 33 min
Bit rate                       : 1 235 kb/s
Width                          : 1 920 pixels
Height                         : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio           : 16:9
Frame rate mode                : Constant
Frame rate                     : 23.976 (24000/1001) FPS
Color space                    : YUV
Chroma subsampling             : 4:2:0
Bit depth                      : 8 bits
Scan type                      : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)             : 0.025
Stream size                    : 829 MiB (90%)
Title                          : ISO Media file produced by Google Inc.
Writing library                : x264 core 155 r2901 7d0ff22
Color range                    : Limited
Color primaries                : BT.709
Transfer characteristics       : BT.709
Matrix coefficients            : BT.709

 

Best of the Worst： Junka 4.mp4.MediaInfo.txt Best of the Worst： Junka 42.mp4.MediaInfo.txt

[LAwLz]

33 minutes ago, Pajas84 said:

after noticing that the quality of videos seemed worse than before.

It's all in your head. I seriously doubt you noticed a lower quality by yourself, if it even exists. 

 

 

35 minutes ago, Pajas84 said:

only the first was downloaded november 3rd 2023 and the second today december 23rd. I'm also including the MPC-HC MediaInfo text files.

In that case both were downloaded long after YouTube introduced the enhanced mode. The enhanced quality mode has been out since April this year. 

The lowering of bit rate you see in this example is completely unrelated to the enhanced bitrate mode. You're making connections between two unrelated events. 

 

Also, I am pretty sure you got the two files mixed up, because the file you claim was downloaded today matches Youtubes old encode info. You can see this by looking at the build number of the x264 version. 

In other word, the file you claim you downloaded today, the one who has the higher bit rate, is the newer version. Not the older version. 

 

 

42 minutes ago, Pajas84 said:

As you can see the video bit rate was reduced from 1882 kb/s down to 1235 kb/s, that's more than 30% lower. Audio bit rate was unchanged.

Something to keep in mind is that bit rate is an unreliable measurement for determining quality. A file with lower bit rate can look better than a video with higher bit rate. 

 

 

44 minutes ago, Pajas84 said:

So Youtube's promise that they were not going to lower the standard bit rate was at least in this case not true.

Where did they promise that?

 

 

Also, I'd like to know how you downloaded that file because I'd like to look into it myself.

[Pajas84]

8 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

It's all in your head. I seriously doubt you noticed a lower quality by yourself, if it even exists. 

That's what you said to the last guy too, as I said I wasn't even aware that the enhanced quality had been implemented, I didn't notice until I checked what the quality was, AFTER noticing a downgrade.

8 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

 

In that case both were downloaded long after YouTube introduced the enhanced mode. The enhanced quality mode has been out since April this year. 

The lowering of bit rate you see in this example is completely unrelated to the enhanced bitrate mode. You're making connections between two unrelated events. 

You are aware that Youtube doesn't implement changes platform wide to all regions and/or all users at the same time, sometimes to purposefully obfuscate changes like this, as I said; I hadn't noticed a difference until a couple of weeks ago.

8 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Also, I am pretty sure you got the two files mixed up, because the file you claim was downloaded today matches Youtubes old encode info. You can see this by looking at the build number of the x264 version. 

In other word, the file you claim you downloaded today, the one who has the higher bit rate, is the newer version. Not the older version. 

Nope, didn't mix up anything, check the dates yourself :

8 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

 

Something to keep in mind is that bit rate is an unreliable measurement for determining quality. A file with lower bit rate can look better than a video with higher bit rate. 

A file with higher bit rate contains more information per second. A file with higher bit rate will only look worse if you're using a less efficient codec or if the source was of lower quality.

 

I don't quite understand why someone is so willing to trust and defend the giant faceless mega-corporation, but assume that other users are either lying or delusional? 

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Pajas84 said:

A file with higher bit rate contains more information per second. A file with higher bit rate will only look worse if you're using a less efficient codec or if the source was of lower quality.

No. A video with lower bit rate can look better than a video with high bit rate even if the format is the same. 

For example with x264 you can increase the motion estimation search range and change method from let's say hexagon to transformed exhaustive. The result is that the quality will be higher per bit. There are a bunch of ways to increase quality per bit within the same video format. 

 

 

1 hour ago, Pajas84 said:

I don't quite understand why someone is so willing to trust and defend the giant faceless mega-corporation, but assume that other users are either lying or delusional? 

Because a bunch of people are making shit up and I dislike misinformation. Like the OP who said they were relabeling the old quality and putting it behind a paywall. It's complete and utter bullshit that was proven false. It's just a conspiracy theory that someone came up with and didn't bother verifying if it was true or false. 

 

Also, I dont "trust a faceless mega corporation". The first thing I did when I read this was to look into it and did my research. That's also why I asked you for more information about how you came to your conclusion. Because I don't trust you either. 

You don't seem to know much about video encoding, and the thing you posted seem to indicate the opposite of what your conclusion was. x264 core 155 is a build that's over 3 years old and one that YouTube seem to be phasing out. Newer encodes seems to not use that build anymore. In other words, it seems like the newer encode is the one with the higher bitrate in your case. 

 

What I am interesting in right now is trying to figure out which version you were served, when and why. In order to do that I'd need to know how you went about downloading the videos, hence why I asked. 

It might be a simple thing like the program you used decided to download the enhanced version before, but didn't do that today for some reason. So you might be looking at enhanced 1080p vs regular 1080p,but thinking that it's "old 1080p vs new 1080p". It's something I'd like to examine. 

 

I do appreciate that you provided the media info and did some more digging into this, but I am not convinced that you reached the correct conclusion. That's why I want to look into this particular case too. 

[Pajas84]

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

No. A video with lower bit rate can look better than a video with high bit rate even if the format is the same. 

Maybe if someone purposefully used a lower quality source, but if the source, the codec, the resolution and all other settings except bit rate are the same, higher bit rate should look better.

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Because a bunch of people are making shit up and I dislike misinformation. Like the OP who said they were relabeling the old quality and putting it behind a paywall. It's complete and utter bullshit that was proven false. It's just a conspiracy theory that someone came up with and didn't bother verifying if it was true or false. 

Or maybe a bunch of people independently noticed a difference that you haven't, but you seem adamant to distrust everyone. Do you seriously think that you're the only one capable of critical thinking?

 

I noticed something was off, I looked into it, found a video I downloaded recently and downloaded it again, because I wanted to make sure. I can't verify whether other people's claims are true or not, but I'm not lying, I have no reason to.

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Also, I dont "trust a faceless mega corporation". The first thing I did when I read this was to look into it and did my research. That's also why I asked you for more information about how you came to your conclusion. Because I don't trust you either. 

You don't seem to know much about video encoding, and the thing you posted seem to indicate the opposite of what your conclusion was. x264 core 155 is a build that's over 3 years old and one that YouTube seem to be phasing out. Newer encodes seems to not use that build anymore. In other words, it seems like the newer encode is the one with the higher bitrate in your case. 

True, I don't know anything about Youtube's codec builds, but you can see in that screenshot that the older file is both larger and has higher bit rate.

 

I used loader.to to download both files and neither it or I have access to the premium stream, the only possible explanation then is that the higher bit rate version was available for non-premium users on november 3rd, but that that is no longer the case.

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

What I am interesting in right now is trying to figure out which version you were served, when and why. In order to do that I'd need to know how you went about downloading the videos, hence why I asked. 

It might be a simple thing like the program you used decided to download the enhanced version before, but didn't do that today for some reason. So you might be looking at enhanced 1080p vs regular 1080p,but thinking that it's "old 1080p vs new 1080p". It's something I'd like to examine. 

I have never had any access to the "enhanced" stream, I'm not a premium user and loader.to accessed the only 1080 AV1 stream available to it, in both cases. If you're a premium user it would be interesting to see what the bit rate of the premium stream served today is, if the video is higher than 1880 kb/s and the total higher than 2017 kb/s.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Pajas84 said:

Maybe if someone purposefully used a lower quality source, but if the source, the codec, the resolution and all other settings except bit rate are the same, higher bit rate should look better.

But we don't know if the settings are the same...

That's my point. The settings are what determines how much "quality" you get per bit. That's why a video with let's say 1000 kbps bit rate can look worse than a video with let's say 900 kbps bit rate even if the file format is the same, from the same source, and the same resolution.

 

 

1 hour ago, Pajas84 said:

Or maybe a bunch of people independently noticed a difference that you haven't, but you seem adamant to distrust everyone. Do you seriously think that you're the only one capable of critical thinking?

Except in this case the conspiracy theory put forth by for example OP has been debunked. It is bullshit.

There is no proof that it is true, but there is a mountain of evidence that it is false. There is so much misinformation being spread around that it is crazy. People don't bother doing any research and just says whatever they think is true. 

 

 

1 hour ago, Pajas84 said:

I used loader.to to download both files

That's a shame. Guess I'll have to look into this blind then. I was hoping for a video ID so that I could compare it.

The problem with using a site like loader instead of downloading directly from Youtube is that we don't know how loader fetch the Youtube video. The difference you are observing might have been done on loaders side, not Youtube's side. I am not saying that's what happened, but it is possible.

 

 

1 hour ago, Pajas84 said:

neither it or I have access to the premium stream

Yes you do.

Again, this is what I mean by a bunch of wrong assumptions being made, and misinformation being spread. You do have access to the premium stream even if you aren't a youtube premium user. The logics Youtube uses to block it is done entirely client-side and as a result can easily be bypassed if you know how. That's how I obtained the files I used for comparison earlier in the thread.

 

 

1 hour ago, Pajas84 said:

the only possible explanation then is that the higher bit rate version was available for non-premium users on november 3rd, but that that is no longer the case.

That's not the only possible explanation, but it is one explanation (that loader used to fetch the premium version but stopped).

 

But I'll do my own investigation into this particular video soon so we will see.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Pajas84 said:

I have never had any access to the "enhanced" stream

Yes you have.

 

 

1 hour ago, Pajas84 said:

and loader.to accessed the only 1080 AV1 stream available to it

You didn't download an AV1 video. All the files you have posted so far have been H.264 files, not AV1.

Not sure why you are bringing up AV1 right now.

 

 

1 hour ago, Pajas84 said:

If you're a premium user it would be interesting to see what the bit rate of the premium stream served today is, if the video is higher than 1880 kb/s and the total higher than 2017 kb/s.

I am not a premium user but I'll look into it anyway.

 

 

By the way, you seem to have good taste in Youtube videos.  

 

 

 

Edit:

I've downloaded a bunch of different variants of that video now and I am kind of left scratching my head. I can't find the version you claim to have. So maybe Youtube did replace it with a different version?

 

I found one 1080p AVC file with a bitrate of 1236 kb/s. I can't see when this one was created.

I did however find another 1080p AVC file that was created on November 9 that has a bitrate of 1235 kb/s. So slightly different than the one above.

The Youtube Premium enhanced version is VP9 at a bitrate of 1762 kbps.

 

In any case, this video was uploaded months upon months after the whole 1080p enhanced feature was rolled out. If Youtube has replaced videos with lower-quality versions, then it is most likely not because of the 1080p-enhanced version. They seem to be two completely separate events. 

 

 

Edit 2:

I looked into loader a bit and it seems like it offers services like downloading Youtube audio as WAV files.

As some of you might know, Youtube do not provide audio in WAV format. This means that loader at the very least has functions for transcoding file formats. It might just be that loader transcoded the video and that's why it ended up being so big. I'll try and look into if this is true or not. The fields like title and writing library are arbitrary and could be something loader just copies into the transcoded file. I'll try and look into whether or not loader might be transcoding the files, if it makes your computer download the file directly from youtube, or how it works. 

 

Edit 3:

It seems like loader do mess with the file when you download from there. For example it inserts the description into the file itself, which is not how the file looks like when fetched directly from Youtube. It does seem like in this case, they are only touching the metadata though, not the audio and video files themselves. In my case the video seem to be copy of what I got when I downloaded the file with the ID 137. Except they stripped out the encoding date tag for some reason (it was encoded on 2023-11-09).

But there is no telling if this is how loader worked when you used it before. They are advertising their site as a converter website, so it is a possibility that the video you have saved from before is something loader encoded, not Youtube. That might explain why it is larger. Not sure why they would do that, but I am not sure why they put the description into the video file either, or strip out the encoding date so who knows their reasoning.

[Pajas84]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

But we don't know if the settings are the same...

That's my point. The settings are what determines how much "quality" you get per bit. That's why a video with let's say 1000 kbps bit rate can look worse than a video with let's say 900 kbps bit rate even if the file format is the same, from the same source, and the same resolution.

But you said yourself that the smaller file used an older codec than the larger one, isn't it then unreasonable to assume that a video using an older codec and having a lower bit rate will look better than one user a newer codec and having a higher bit rate?

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

Except in this case the conspiracy theory put forth by for example OP has been debunked. It is bullshit.

There is no proof that it is true, but there is a mountain of evidence that it is false. There is so much misinformation being spread around that it is crazy. People don't bother doing any research and just says whatever they think is true. 

 

I don't know anything about any conspiracy theory, I just started to look into this recently because I was noticing a difference and I was at the time completely unaware that Youtube had implemented this change. They do however have a history of rolling out changes at different times depending on your region, platform, browser etc. 

If you look into when they started to implement the Adblock warnings, there were plenty of early reports from a few users, while the wast majority had yet to experience them. Maybe they made the change here more recently, I had never seen the enhanced 1080p option until a week or two ago and the only reason I checked was because I thought the image quality looked worse than usual. I can still access some 4k videos that doesn't have any option for enhanced 1080p either, but maybe anyone can?

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

That's a shame. Guess I'll have to look into this blind then. I was hoping for a video ID so that I could compare it.

The problem with using a site like loader instead of downloading directly from Youtube is that we don't know how loader fetch the Youtube video. The difference you are observing might have been done on loaders side, not Youtube's side. I am not saying that's what happened, but it is possible.

 

 

Yes you do.

Again, this is what I mean by a bunch of wrong assumptions being made, and misinformation being spread. You do have access to the premium stream even if you aren't a youtube premium user. The logics Youtube uses to block it is done entirely client-side and as a result can easily be bypassed if you know how. That's how I obtained the files I used for comparison earlier in the thread.

 

 

That's not the only possible explanation, but it is one explanation (that loader used to fetch the premium version but stopped).

 

But I'll do my own investigation into this particular video soon so we will see.

 

 

 

Yes you have.

Ok, if you say so, then maybe I have in theory, but I was completely unaware of it until now and I haven't looked into how to access it, so in practice I haven't had access and I haven't accessed it.

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

You didn't download an AV1 video. All the files you have posted so far have been H.264 files, not AV1.

Not sure why you are bringing up AV1 right now.

 

Sorry, my bad, misread avc1.

 

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I am not a premium user but I'll look into it anyway.

 

 

By the way, you seem to have good taste in Youtube videos.  

A fellow connoisseur, huh?
 

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

 

Edit:

I've downloaded a bunch of different variants of that video now and I am kind of left scratching my head. I can't find the version you claim to have. So maybe Youtube did replace it with a different version?

 

I found one 1080p AVC file with a bitrate of 1236 kb/s. I can't see when this one was created.

I did however find another 1080p AVC file that was created on November 9 that has a bitrate of 1235 kb/s. So slightly different than the one above.

The Youtube Premium enhanced version is VP9 at a bitrate of 1762 kbps.

 

In any case, this video was uploaded months upon months after the whole 1080p enhanced feature was rolled out. If Youtube has replaced videos with lower-quality versions, then it is most likely not because of the 1080p-enhanced version. They seem to be two completely separate events. 

Unless the changes was implemented at different times in different regions, I'm located in Sweden and I don't know if they can implement these kind of changes on all servers, all over the world, all at once. I didn't start to see the Adblock warnings until very late either. loader.to seems to be based in Switzerland so the change may have been implemented there at the same time as it was for me. If it helps you can see the creation date here, the video was released on november 3rd, so there couldn't be an older version.

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

Edit 2:

I looked into loader a bit and it seems like it offers services like downloading Youtube audio as WAV files.

As some of you might know, Youtube do not provide audio in WAV format. This means that loader at the very least has functions for transcoding file formats. It might just be that loader transcoded the video and that's why it ended up being so big. I'll try and look into if this is true or not. The fields like title and writing library are arbitrary and could be something loader just copies into the transcoded file. I'll try and look into whether or not loader might be transcoding the files, if it makes your computer download the file directly from youtube, or how it works. 

 

Edit 3:

It seems like loader do mess with the file when you download from there. For example it inserts the description into the file itself, which is not how the file looks like when fetched directly from Youtube. It does seem like in this case, they are only touching the metadata though, not the audio and video files themselves. In my case the video seem to be copy of what I got when I downloaded the file with the ID 137. Except they stripped out the encoding date tag for some reason (it was encoded on 2023-11-09).

But there is no telling if this is how loader worked when you used it before. They are advertising their site as a converter website, so it is a possibility that the video you have saved from before is something loader encoded, not Youtube. That might explain why it is larger. Not sure why they would do that, but I am not sure why they put the description into the video file either, or strip out the encoding date so who knows their reasoning.

In my experience loader does have the ability to convert files, but when it comes to Youtube; depending on your choice of quality it only fetches the video and audio separately and simply combine them into one file. The process is very fast so if it actually did re encode the video it would probably either be significantly slower or require more resources than seem reasonable for them to offer to every single user.

 

To summarize: I don't know for sure what is going on, but I'm not some naive kid starving for attention and eager to subscribe to the latest conspiracy theory. I just shared what I found after looking into it and I only started looking into it after I had noticed a difference in quality and I was unaware of the enhanced 1080p option at the time, but this coincided with the enhanced 1080p option starting to show up for me. It just seems like too perfect timing to be a coincidence and I wouldn't put it past Youtube to do this considering how heavy they have been pushing premium lately and cracking down on Adblockers.

 

Also just noticed that you're a fellow Swede. Får önska god jul då.

[LAwLz]

20 hours ago, Pajas84 said:

But you said yourself that the smaller file used an older codec than the larger one, isn't it then unreasonable to assume that a video using an older codec and having a lower bit rate will look better than one user a newer codec and having a higher bit rate?

By "codec", you mean the encoder, right? Sometimes people refer to formats as codecs so I want to make sure we aren't talking past each other.

The encoder seems to be different between the two files, yes. But since we don't know the settings that's fairly irrelevant for determining which one should look the best.

The settings are what matters the most in this case. 

 

I have included two clips in this post. I swear that I have not done any trickery with the file. I took the same source file, and the only thing I did was change the encoding settings. The file with a bit rate of 2500 kbps looks way better than the file with a bit rate of 3256 kbps. You can check out my encoding settings using MediaInfo if you want.

2500.mkv 3000.mkv

 

A file that was encoded using an older version of x264, with a lower bit rate, can still look better than a file with a newer version of x264 and higher bit rate, if the settings changed in a particular way (which we don't know).

 

 

 

20 hours ago, Pajas84 said:

don't know anything about any conspiracy theory

I am referring to the one presented in the OP.

OP claims that Youtube took the old 1080p videos, relabeled them "1080p enhanced" and then created new, lower-quality 1080p videos and started serving those new lower-quality ones to users. In other words, OP says that Youtube "took something from us" and now demands we pay to get it back. That is demonstrably false and a made-up conspiracy theory. It is not at all true and there is 0 evidence that supports that theory. In fact, the only evidence that has ever been presented says the opposite. That the 1080p enhanced version is a file that offers higher quality than anything served before on Youtube.

 

 

20 hours ago, Pajas84 said:

If you look into when they started to implement the Adblock warnings, there were plenty of early reports from a few users, while the wast majority had yet to experience them. Maybe they made the change here more recently, I had never seen the enhanced 1080p option until a week or two ago and the only reason I checked was because I thought the image quality looked worse than usual. I can still access some 4k videos that doesn't have any option for enhanced 1080p either, but maybe anyone can?

But how could you even determine that the image quality looked worse?

In regards to the 4K videos you looked at, please note that the 1080 enhanced feature is only available on videos that were uploaded in 1080p. If the video was uploaded in anything higher than 1080p then you won't see 1080p enhanced available. It's a feature that only exists for 1080p videos.

 

20 hours ago, Pajas84 said:

Sorry, my bad, misread avc1.

Easy mistake. Sorry that I was harsh. 

 

 

20 hours ago, Pajas84 said:

Unless the changes was implemented at different times in different regions, I'm located in Sweden and I don't know if they can implement these kind of changes on all servers, all over the world, all at once. I didn't start to see the Adblock warnings until very late either. loader.to seems to be based in Switzerland so the change may have been implemented there at the same time as it was for me. If it helps you can see the creation date here, the video was released on november 3rd, so there couldn't be an older version.

-snip-

To summarize: I don't know for sure what is going on, but I'm not some naive kid starving for attention and eager to subscribe to the latest conspiracy theory. I just shared what I found after looking into it and I only started looking into it after I had noticed a difference in quality and I was unaware of the enhanced 1080p option at the time, but this coincided with the enhanced 1080p option starting to show up for me. It just seems like too perfect timing to be a coincidence and I wouldn't put it past Youtube to do this considering how heavy they have been pushing premium lately and cracking down on Adblockers.

I'm was more thinking that maybe loader transcoded the video, and their transcode increased the file size and bit rate. I am not sure why they would do that, but they do mess with the video in some way, and they do advertise transcoding as a service they do.

It is possible that the only change that was made was on loaders website, and that you are now getting the original file instead of a transcoded one.  I wouldn't bet on it being true, but it seems to be a possibility.

I find it hard to believe that Youtube would encode the video at a pretty high bit rate and then just a few days later transcode it again into a lower bit rate version. The timing seems off (especially if we are thinking that this is related to the 1080p enhanced feature) and I don't think it make much sense to serve the more bandwidth-intense version when the video is new and gets a lot of views.

 

 

And as I said before, the 1080p enhanced feature is like half a year old. It did have a rollout period, but I was using the feature in may as you can see in this thread.

Chances are the 1080p enhanced videos have been available to you for along time, just that you didn't notice it until now because it's only available on a few videos, and I am not sure about you but I rarely manually change the quality.

I think a likely explanation for why you discovered this could be:

1) You were unaware of the feature for months even though it was available to you.

2) You happen to watch a video that is for some reason slightly lower quality than usual for the uploader. Maybe the uploader accidentally used lower-quality export settings by accident for that particular video, or the video contained more hard-to-compress scenes.

3) You went into the quality control settings and noticed this new button.

4) You assume that this new button is related to the lower quality because you became aware of them both at the same time.

 

I am not saying that's what happened, but it's not impossible that it happened, right? Throw in some "it's too perfect of a timing" and some general distrust for Youtube because of their adblocking crackdown and it's very easy to connect the dots between unrelated events. 

 

 

I do think it's weird that your old download had such a high bit rate though compared to the files presented now. It's possible that Youtube has started lowering the quality of videos, but if they have then I think it is unrelated to the 1080p enhanced feature. The timeline of the events just doesn't line up.

 

 

God jul du med

 

[Mark Kaine]

i don't understand what seems to be the main point of discussion  - of course they will make bitrate worse for none premium users, that's the whole point!

[TetraSky]

I guess this explains why many videos look like dogshit at 1080p now. Even for streamers, there's a clear visual difference between Twitch and Youtube. It's not even comparable.

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

i don't understand what seems to be the main point of discussion  - of course they will make bitrate worse for none premium users, that's the whole point!

That's the thing... There is no solid evidence that they have made the bitrate worse for non-premium users.

 

2 hours ago, TetraSky said:

I guess this explains why many videos look like dogshit at 1080p now. Even for streamers, there's a clear visual difference between Twitch and Youtube. It's not even comparable.

That could very well just be that you have been "primed" into thinking the quality is worse because you heard other people say it was worse.

Also, this has been going on for over half a year. If you only recently started noticing a difference then chances are it is a change unrelated to 1080 enhanced. Or it could just be the nocebo effect.

Might also be that Twitch always had the better quality. It's hard to find valid comparisons for this because most people have no idea how video encoding works or how to do visual comparisons, but a quick Google search shows a ton of threads about people saying Twitch looks better than Youtube (and vice versa to be fair), and plenty of those threads are dated long before 1080p enhanced was a thing. Also, is 1080p enhanced even a thing for live streaming? It seems silly to blame 1080p enhanced for "lowering the regular 1080p quality" if that isn't even available on the videos you are complaining about lacking quality.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

 

Also, this has been going on for over half a year. If you only recently started noticing a difference then chances are it is a change unrelated to 1080 enhanced. Or it could just be the nocebo effect.

Might also be that Twitch always had the better quality.

 

Twitch doesn't re-encode the video for the ingress stream unless you select so, or leave it on auto. So if the streamer is always using 6-mbit at 1080p60, and not playing a FPS/Racing game usually the twitch stream looks better than the same stream on youtube. A lot of high-motion games look terrible because too much of the screen changes, and the only way to counteract that is to switch to 720p60 and keep 6mbit. Most people watching a twitch stream are likely watching it between 480p and 720p and not 1080p simply because chrome/firefox on a HiDPI screen aren't actually showing the video at the native resolution. 

This is a youtube video:

Note the Viewport size.

 

Now here's a Twitch stream:

 

And if you look at a live stream, it's more like this:

The latter is very blurry because it swapped to 720p right when I took a screenshot.

That's the stream in forced 60fps mode. Pretty much if you want the chat to be visible, on a 1080p screen, you're likely only seeing 720p worth of video unless you full screen it. Even on a 4K screen, it's still typically sub 720p unless you've full-screened it, and twitch tops out at 1080p.

 

So if the streamer has it set to 6mbit, you are seeing a 6mbit stream. If you are having it set to any re-encode, no you're seeing probably 2.5mbit at 720p, or 1.2Mbit at 480p

 

 

[Sauron]

On 12/11/2023 at 12:51 AM, 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...

well if the lowered bitrate video is what's served on the site then they probably will be.

 

It's just another case of a platform lighting money on fire to create a monopoly and then remove or paywall the features that made it successful in the first place...

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

well if the lowered bitrate video is what's served on the site then they probably will be.

 

It's just another case of a platform lighting money on fire to create a monopoly and then remove or paywall the features that made it successful in the first place...

See:

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

There is no solid evidence that they have made the bitrate worse for non-premium users.

 

I really dislike how a lot of people in this thread seem to jump to conclusions without any evidence. Since it seems like this is one of those things that makes sense in peoples' heads they don't question it whatsoever. That's bad. We shouldn't assume something is true and accurate without any evidence.

[BrandonLatzig]

i do think maybe one reason people are thinking this is that more and more people are getting better tvs or monitors and newer and newer videos are getting higher and higher bitrates, so older videos with lower bitrates will naturally look worser 

[starsmine]

9 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

i don't understand what seems to be the main point of discussion  - of course they will make bitrate worse for none premium users, that's the whole point!

They havent. There are no plans to make the bitrate worse, and they just haven't. 

7 hours ago, TetraSky said:

I guess this explains why many videos look like dogshit at 1080p now. Even for streamers, there's a clear visual difference between Twitch and Youtube. It's not even comparable.

What explains it?
Also not sure what difference you are talking about between twitch and youtube specifically here other then a vibe. Most streams on twitch are throttled hard by having to real time encode and upload rates of the streamer. 

3 hours ago, Sauron said:

well if the lowered bitrate video is what's served on the site then they probably will be.

 

It's just another case of a platform lighting money on fire to create a monopoly and then remove or paywall the features that made it successful in the first place...

No one has lowered any bitrate anywhere.
The only thing that has happened is youtube raised the bitrates if you pay. But NO quality drops have occurred on what was already there. There is no retroactive reduction. 

Its frustrating that even though this thread has a solution, 3 people right here ate the misinformation in the OP post and failed to read the solution to the thread. 

[Mark Kaine]

On 12/11/2023 at 1:51 PM, Ripred said:

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

who?

[Sauron]

15 hours ago, LAwLz said:

See:

 

I really dislike how a lot of people in this thread seem to jump to conclusions without any evidence. Since it seems like this is one of those things that makes sense in peoples' heads they don't question it whatsoever. That's bad. We shouldn't assume something is true and accurate without any evidence.

13 hours ago, starsmine said:

No one has lowered any bitrate anywhere.
The only thing that has happened is youtube raised the bitrates if you pay. But NO quality drops have occurred on what was already there. There is no retroactive reduction.

Fair enough, I was answering the technical question and only halfway through did I get the urge to write an opinion on the topic

 

And yes, while obviously we should check the accuracy of claims this would have been so in line with youtube's recent behavior that, on first impact, it passed the smell check. May I suggest adding a "DEBUNKED" headline to your post @LAwLz?

[BrandonLatzig]

6 hours ago, Sauron said:

May I suggest adding a "DEBUNKED" headline to your post @LAwLz?

but wasn't your post the one that was debunked?

[Sauron]

24 minutes ago, BrandonLatzig said:

but wasn't your post the one that was debunked?

I'm saying the post that was pinned as answer could have a headline that says the information within debunks OP, because otherwise it's not immediately obvious that it goes against what's in the title

[Mark Kaine]

On 12/11/2023 at 9:06 AM, LAwLz said:

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

well i never said that,  i said they would make the old videos worse - which would require re-encoding. so maybe they don't do that, wouldn't surprise me at all if they did in the future tho.

 

also keep in mind there are other ways to make videos worse, such as lowering bandwidth. 

 

tldr; yes you found exactly what you wanted to find, good on you, personally im not convinced.

 

 

ps: tbf, there's nothing in op that convinces me either,  "looks like 800p" is a pretty awful and subjective analysis after all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[Pajas84]

On 12/25/2023 at 12:07 AM, LAwLz said:

By "codec", you mean the encoder, right? Sometimes people refer to formats as codecs so I want to make sure we aren't talking past each other.

The encoder seems to be different between the two files, yes. But since we don't know the settings that's fairly irrelevant for determining which one should look the best.

The settings are what matters the most in this case. 

I used codec because that's what youtube itself use when you check stats for nerds.

On 12/25/2023 at 12:07 AM, LAwLz said:

-snip-

 

But how could you even determine that the image quality looked worse?

In regards to the 4K videos you looked at, please note that the 1080 enhanced feature is only available on videos that were uploaded in 1080p. If the video was uploaded in anything higher than 1080p then you won't see 1080p enhanced available. It's a feature that only exists for 1080p videos.

Just by how I perceived the image quality with my own two eyes and I wasn't looking on my phone where any change in quality may be impossible to perceive, but on a 60" TV. While I understand that you have no reason to trust my eyes or anyone else's, but In my case at least I noticed it before any kind of confirmation bias may have affected my perception. It becomes basically impossible to say anything about quality if you suggest that none of us can neither trust our eyesight and different encoders and settings make bit rate an unreliable measurement of quality too.

On 12/25/2023 at 12:07 AM, LAwLz said:

Easy mistake. Sorry that I was harsh. 

 

 

I'm was more thinking that maybe loader transcoded the video, and their transcode increased the file size and bit rate. I am not sure why they would do that, but they do mess with the video in some way, and they do advertise transcoding as a service they do.

It is possible that the only change that was made was on loaders website, and that you are now getting the original file instead of a transcoded one.  I wouldn't bet on it being true, but it seems to be a possibility.

I find it hard to believe that Youtube would encode the video at a pretty high bit rate and then just a few days later transcode it again into a lower bit rate version. The timing seems off (especially if we are thinking that this is related to the 1080p enhanced feature) and I don't think it make much sense to serve the more bandwidth-intense version when the video is new and gets a lot of views.

 

I've been messing around a little with loader.to the last few days and downloaded the same video multiple times over the last few days with some interesting findings (more on that below) and as far as I can figure what stream that loader grabs and how it's prepared for the user before download seems to differ depending on which setting you choose. When 1080p is the highest resolution available: the 1080p option seem to fetch a 1080p h264 version, 1440p a 1080p vp9 version and if you choose 4K it also grabs a 1080p vp9 version, but changes the file format to .webm or doesn't change it to .mp4.

On 12/25/2023 at 12:07 AM, LAwLz said:

And as I said before, the 1080p enhanced feature is like half a year old. It did have a rollout period, but I was using the feature in may as you can see in this thread.

Chances are the 1080p enhanced videos have been available to you for along time, just that you didn't notice it until now because it's only available on a few videos, and I am not sure about you but I rarely manually change the quality.

I think a likely explanation for why you discovered this could be:

1) You were unaware of the feature for months even though it was available to you.

2) You happen to watch a video that is for some reason slightly lower quality than usual for the uploader. Maybe the uploader accidentally used lower-quality export settings by accident for that particular video, or the video contained more hard-to-compress scenes.

3) You went into the quality control settings and noticed this new button.

4) You assume that this new button is related to the lower quality because you became aware of them both at the same time.

 

I am not saying that's what happened, but it's not impossible that it happened, right? Throw in some "it's too perfect of a timing" and some general distrust for Youtube because of their adblocking crackdown and it's very easy to connect the dots between unrelated events. 

 

I do think it's weird that your old download had such a high bit rate though compared to the files presented now. It's possible that Youtube has started lowering the quality of videos, but if they have then I think it is unrelated to the 1080p enhanced feature. The timeline of the events just doesn't line up.

 

 

God jul du med

One thing I noticed and is the main reason why I chose the particular video I chose to download repeatedly, was because I noticed it while it was premiering. It turns out that while a video is premiering and for several hours after, despite 1080p being the highest resolution available, the enhanced option doesn't appear until much later. Somewhere between 5 and 24 hours later. I'm not sure whether this is true for other 1080p videos that are released normally too, but this could at least in part explain why myself and others hadn't taken notice of the enhanced option being available despite it being implemented a long time ago, we simply watched videos to early.

 

I've downloaded the same video on multiple occasions over the last few days and also made screen grabs of what I was being served in Firefox at the same time according to "stats for nerd" and neither codec or bit rate has stayed consistent.

 

A few hours after the premiere the codec listed was vp09.00.51.08.01.01.01.01.00 (248) this was also true 24 hours later and the bit rates of the resulting vp9 .mp4 videos from loader.to actually increased from 1087kbps to 1184kbps. Another 24 hours after that as well as a couple of hours ago; the codec listed was av01.0.08M.08 (399) and resulted in files with bit rates of 1184kbps and 1186kbps respectively. The h264 streams at the same times resulted in bit rates of 1179, 2373, 2382 and 2380kbps respectively. I will keep track and see what, if anything happens with this particular video, although I'm well aware that a sample size of one doesn't really prove anything.

 

So, basically it's a mess. what's obvious is that this isn't as open and shut as it first appeared to me and that no claims can really be substantiated, however youtube does seems to change variables and experiment all the time so it's probably not beyond the realm of possibility that some users may have experienced a decreased level of quality at some point, whether that level of quality persisted or not or if it had any connection to the enhanced 1080p feature isn't really possible to say conclusively.

 

Since youtube isn't really big on transparency and we can't know exactly what may or may not have changed on their end, it's pretty much impossible to know if the exact circumstances have been replicated and if the stream being served is the same as someone else my have been served in the past.

 

So, while nothing can be substantiated I do however not agree that these claims have been conclusively debunked either. Just that it's not happening universally and platform wide. After all, not being able to prove someone's guilt is not the same as proving their innocence, but with youtube being youtube, it's unlikely that we will ever truly know for sure.

[LAwLz]

5 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

i said they would make the old videos worse - which would require re-encoding. so maybe they don't do that, wouldn't surprise me at all if they did in the future tho.

 

also keep in mind there are other ways to make videos worse, such as lowering bandwidth. 

Are you saying they might make videos look worse by "lowering bandwidth" instead of reencoding? I just want to make sure I understand you. 

 

5 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

tldr; yes you found exactly what you wanted to find, good on you, personally im not convinced.

What's that suppose to mean? 

I didnt "want to find" anything in particular. I just reported the truth, regardless of what it was. 

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Are you saying they might make videos look worse by "lowering bandwidth" instead of reencoding? I just want to make sure I understand you. 

as a possibility?  yes.

 

[starsmine]

28 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

as a possibility?  yes.

 

I honestly am not sure I understand how this works. How do you lower bandwidth of a video without a reencode to a lower bitrate?