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

[Mark Kaine]

10 minutes ago, starsmine said:

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? 

yt is simply speaking just a server, they can allocate bandwidth however they want, lower bandwidth  = worse quality regardless of bitrates. 

[Sauron]

44 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

as a possibility?  yes.

You're thinking of bitrate. Changing the bitrate requires reencoding and either way from @LAwLz's test it seems the bitrate is unchanged. I guess theoretically it's possible this is being done on videos other than the ones tested but... considering OP has linked no sources nor provided any evidence I don't see why we should believe that.

 

Now, theoretically, there are other ways to make the image quality worse without changing the video file, although none of them involve your bandwidth; for example youtube's player could be processing the video to make it look worse, or lying about which resolution is being served. Again, claiming this would require some evidence that was not provided.

Quote

yt is simply speaking just a server, they can allocate bandwidth however they want, lower bandwidth  = worse quality regardless of bitrates. 

It would not. At worst it would cause the video to buffer.

[starsmine]

21 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

yt is simply speaking just a server, they can allocate bandwidth however they want, lower bandwidth  = worse quality regardless of bitrates. 

Sure they can drop the bandwidth, but how does that lower the quality of the video?
It would just force higher-quality videos to buffer, not change the quality of the video. To change the quality of the video, it would require reencoding to a lower bitrate as far as I understand how this works.

[Mark Kaine]

53 minutes ago, Sauron said:

It would not. At worst it would cause the video to buffer.

well theoretically it would be just a lowered resolution  - now that they could just lie about that too,  is an interesting idea!

 

 

ps: basically this is what op is saying,  it may say 1080p, "looks like 800p" tho ... but as said,  we have no evidence of that other than their word lol 

 

i was just saying,  theoretically possible. For the time being we just have to go with @LAwLz's findings i guess.

 

also interesting question, does youtube lower quality of older videos (I've seen people claim that) and if so - how? 

 

[creat0r]

I would be fine with paying for YouTube for better quality. The problem is that every company wants $10 USD or more from you every month and therefore you have to choose. If YTP was ≈ $5 USD per month I would pay, but it's almost three times that were I live.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, starsmine said:

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? 

packet loss.

[saintlouisbagels]

6 hours ago, creat0r said:

I would be fine with paying for YouTube for better quality. The problem is that every company wants $10 USD or more from you every month and therefore you have to choose. If YTP was ≈ $5 USD per month I would pay, but it's almost three times that were I live.

YouTube Premium Family is a good deal $23/5 people. Literally just find 1 more person to share with and it's cheaper than buying the individual plan.

[Sauron]

10 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

well theoretically it would be just a lowered resolution  - now that they could just lie about that too,  is an interesting idea!

No... those are two different things. If they are not lying about it, which again there's no reason to believe they are, when you specifically select 1080p you'll be served 1080p even if your connection is too slow and it will just buffer. If you have it on auto then yeah, you'll be served lower resolution video if your connection is slow, but that's not new or nefarious, it's just the way that feature works.

[Lunar River]

This is maybe the dumbest and least consequential conspiracy theory i have seen in quite some time. Even though it’s been (imo, thouroughly) debunked by @LAwLz, some people still seem to be stuffing their ears with tin foil.

[Tan3l6]

Looking at 4k videos that are available one can only imagine if 1080p "premium enhanced bitrate" is as good at 1080p.

[LAwLz]

On 12/28/2023 at 12:44 AM, Mark Kaine said:

yt is simply speaking just a server, they can allocate bandwidth however they want, lower bandwidth  = worse quality regardless of bitrates. 

Videos don't get magically lower quality just because you have a lower bandwidth. The reason why you get a lower image quality when you have a bad Internet connection is because the video player automatically decides to change to a lower quality setting, and those quality settings are mapped to various encodes of the same video (different bit rates). The quality doesn't get worse because you have lower bandwidth. The quality gets worse because the lower bandwidth causes your video player to fetch a lower bit-rate video.

 

If the bandwidth was lowered but the bit rate wasn't, then at most you would get some more buffering. It would not cause the video to become lower quality.

It's still the same video file you are downloading and playing. It's the file that determines what quality you see.

 

 

 

On 12/28/2023 at 1:36 AM, Mark Kaine said:

well theoretically it would be just a lowered resolution  - now that they could just lie about that too,  is an interesting idea!

 

ps: basically this is what op is saying,  it may say 1080p, "looks like 800p" tho ... but as said,  we have no evidence of that other than their word lol 

1) That's not what OP is saying, at all.

2) We do have evidence other than their word. Did you not see that I downloaded the videos and inspected their properties? They can not lie about this.

 

 

On 12/28/2023 at 1:36 AM, Mark Kaine said:

i was just saying,  theoretically possible. For the time being we just have to go with @LAwLz's findings i guess.

It is not theoretically possible... If that's what they did then we could see it.

 

 

On 12/28/2023 at 1:36 AM, Mark Kaine said:

also interesting question, does youtube lower quality of older videos (I've seen people claim that) and if so - how? 

There are multiple ways they could do that.

They already keep multiple copies of each video, and each copy is labeled with a specific ID that the player uses to fetch the video. What they could do is change which video gets fetched based on what the player says. For example iOS haven't supported VP9 and AV1 before, so the player on iOS would know that and not try and fetch those videos. On for example Windows, your browser would hold information about which formats your computer supports and then the Youtube player would figure out which video to fetch based on that. Here is a list of the formats that is availible on the latest MKBHD video, as an example:

 

 

That one video has been encoded into nine different audio formats and 34 different video formats.

There are four different files for the 1080p version alone (which actually isn't 1080p because it is a wider format). 

 

What Youtube could do if they wanted to lower the quality is introduce another file into this list and then start serving that. That would require encoding a new file though. They could also swap one of the files for another one. That's why I went to my collection of downloaded Youtube videos and looked through that. To see if a video has been swapped.

Also, when the player detects that you don't have enough bandwidth to keep up with the video, let's say the video with ID 614 (1080p .mp4, avc1 format) then it will start loading the file with ID 136 (720p, .mp4, 720p). This is done seamlessly through the DASH protocol.

 

Anyway, if Youtube wanted to lower the quality of old videos (who says this and do they have any proof?) then they would either start serving a different format from the ones they already have, or they would have to replace one or more of the files in this list. 

 

 

On 12/28/2023 at 5:05 AM, Kisai said:

packet loss.

That would not affect quality because this is sent over TCP. It would just cause more buffering.

Also, even if it was sent over UDP it wouldn't just reduce the quality. The video would break in various ways if packets were lost. These formats do not have any built-in mechanism for reducing the quality if data in the stream is missing.

This is what it would look like if the video was being sent over UDP (which it isn't) and there was packet loss:

 

 

 

On 12/28/2023 at 12:48 PM, Tan3l6 said:

Looking at 4k videos that are available one can only imagine if 1080p "premium enhanced framerate" is as good at 1080p.

Just to be clear, this new 1080p enhanced feature is unrelated to framerate. It is just a higher quality 1080p version.

[Tan3l6]

12 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Just to be clear, this new 1080p enhanced feature is unrelated to framerate. It is just a higher quality 1080p version.

Yup I just realised I wrote framerate, instead of bitrate.