RU-vid's compression on 1080p videos has definitely gotten increasingly noticeable over the years. I swear it feels like 10 years ago I didn't really notice it unless I was looking for it, and then slowly over the years, videos across the board got increasingly muddy and blocky looking.
This! It has absolutely gotten worse. I think I have been part of their trial as well because I’ve even seen straight up blurs and its been infuriating.
And have you thought about the fact that when you buy a newer smartphone or TV you have a higher screen resolution? Because on my ip6s I haven't noticed a difference in the quality of yt videos, only the bitrate which has always been low and I'm glad they fixed that
I have some ancient downloads of stuff laying around that I occasionally re-download on similar codecs/resolutions to compare the bitrates. An average video could have up to 8000kbits at 1080p AVC in 2012, whereas that rate seems (more than?) halved now. For some bitrate indulgence these days, I feel like I have to pull up the screen recording of Alcatraz' "Kill the Encoder" tho. At 4K60 it's around ~80Mb/s and burns away over 1GB of your data/bandwidth in just under 2mins - if it can buffer in time.
I don't see how this will dissuade people from simply uploading their 1080p videos in 4K to work around the issue of low bitrate like they've always done.
I used to live in Africa with very restricted data usage on my wifi (30gb/month /household). I watched at 144p and 240p, and could really notice how well RU-vid has optimised the data usage required for videos.
@NadVic17 wow that is quite sad.. I lived in Uganda, and in terms of speed we had 2MB/s, but if you only have 30GB for a whole month then that expires quickly.
@@LYoda the 30 gb option was also introduced to us at around 2013/14. Before that, we had 384 kbit/s in our village. Later, we had those 30 gb with around 2 mb/s as well over LTE, but after those 30 gb for our whole family (4-5 people at that time), we again dropped down to our usual 384 kbit/s. And that isn't even the biggest joke: We paid 70 € per month for the 30 gb option!!! I'm in IT. I use around 30-50 gb each day.... Back in the 384 kbit times, i needed around 1 day to download 1 gb... Imagine downloading a game with 30 gb XD. Germany is a joke when it comes to infrastructure like that. Everything got privatised, and the greedy companies didn't see that maybe, just maybe, access to internet should be established for everyone, and not only the bigger cities. We had like 70 people in our village. Of course it doesn't really pay off to build a new wire for those little villages. Moral of the story: don't give your precious state infrastructure to private companies that only watch their own gain.
Even 440p over the years have gotten so much better. Even with 1GB up and down I still play at 440p or in rare cases I max it out when needed. Maybe a 1 video a week. I have no idea what people are watching that makes 720p even necessary to be entertained or gather information. I mean sure sometimes I also have to pause a video and turn on max settings to read something or whatever. But 99.9% of the cases 440p is the best RU-vid have ever delivered on over all this years. Even 60fps is useless compared to the improvements at 440p. Even really dark scary horror stuff looks grate at 440p now. Yea pixle peeing is not going to do grate but laying in bed it is more then enough. Going from old 144p to modern 440p RU-vid? It is like going from black and white TV to color TV.
I keep trying to explain to people that German public TV networks transmit in 720p BUT with 50p AND 14000-16000kbit/s bitate, while the pay to view private HD stations transmit in 1080i (50i/25p) with bitrates of 6000kbit/s or lower. Most people still think resolution is more important than bitrate 😬
@@OriginalCatfish42 how? they certainly have heard of byte at least. "something something data" + rate, means speed of data, or amount of data over time
One thing that AV1 will probably improve: VP9 doesn't just hate confetti and snow like any other compressed video codec, it also really hates the strong edges present in leafless foliage.
@@chiyolate you reminded me of my favorite compression artifacts - it's particularly disturbing to watch a creature gently emerge from the surface of wavy water with surface reflections... _The waves embody the creature initially until the codec goes cross-eyed and abruptly aborts compression in confusion. Suddenly, it was a seal all along!_ _Sure, you're safe now, but the codec blacked out and forgot what just happened. If only we could be as fortunate..._
As a note for the end of the video, Premium is tied to the email, not the youtube account. If your other YT channels are all under one email they all get premium. You can also do YT Premium family plan for 50% more and get 5 more emails you can add the plan onto. It's what I do.
Glad most of my favorite content creators have started uploading in 1440p or higher because man 1080p is looking rough on a decent desktop monitor nowadays…
I couldn't believe my eyes when I once saw a 720P video, with stupidly high bitrate, it actually looked as good as a blu-ray to my eyes. Bitrate is king.
It still amazes me that RU-vid is as profitable as it is. 99% of the content on this platform is just pure expense on the side of RU-vid (personal videos like weddings/birthdays/etc), we're talking beyond Petabytes of storage/bandwidth, especially when you factor in how things gets copied around to different data centers for redundancy/performance reasons. Honestly, I expect RU-vid to be a very different and much a worse service 50 years from now, I just can't imagine how they'll keep up as South America, Africa, India continue to grow. We'll be telling our grand kids about what RU-vid was like 50 years ago and they won't believe us.
On the other hand, if they normalize paying for the platform it would encourage higher quality competition. One of the big issues is that youtube is free and nobody but a Google can compete with that business model. I could see a future where already paid streaming services like Netflix, Amazon etc. also offer video hosting if Google removes the option to watch youtube for free. Perhaps we'd even see the emergence of a new tech giant in that space.
@@omarcomming722 Third worlder here, yes, we pay for premium, and most people i know do. It is part of the "No Cable" combo, HBO+ YTPremium (with YT music) and Netflix
I think computing resource is also a big factor. AVC is inefficient in terms of bandwidth, but it takes much less compute power to encode in than VP9 or AV1.
@@2kliksphilip 2 things. 1. In the testing I have made, the chosen bitrate changed the encoding time a lot, especially for AV1 and VP9. On top of that if you encode at a fixed bitrate, you can change the "effort" the algorithm uses , thus giving you to videos with the same bitrate but different video quality. 2. Also I do not think you can separate the resolution, bitrate and code from each other. They all have a grate impact on the video quality. I do not care what resolution and bitrate I am watching I care about the video quality. If you pay at 1080p settings you can still get a bad quality AVC1 video, or a good quality VP9 or AV1 video. I don't know the bitrate yt have chosen for there VP9 and AV1 encodings, but it might be that AV1 has a lower bitrate than VP9, but I have not noticed any difference. On the other hand AVC1 hurts my eyes every time I see it. If 1080p normal was AVC1 and 1080p premium was VP9 or AV1 (with the current settings) this would matter a lot.
@@2kliksphilip You can technically make a point that they can use more time-efficient calculations at higher bitrates, but at the end - they need to spend them bits, and it's harder to do so sensibly at higher bitrates - so it's still a part of discussion - Whether to use h264 as that "premium" tier as well. I wonder if all devices can playback 1080p60-highish bitrate now. Otherwise it may not work best for RU-vid afterall? RU-vid recommends uploading using h264 codec - I wonder if transcoding it to high vp9/AV1 won't cause more of the generation loss than h264>h264. May they also simply use h264 uploads that they keep stored? Probably not, but is there anything that prohibits them from doing so?
a) hardware encoders whose sole purpose is to encode videos exist. they are literally only capable of encoding videos of a specific codec because they've been engineered to do so b) bandwidth has to be paid for every time a video is watched unlike a video where its rendered once and half a million people can enjoy the same thing. by reducing bandwidth costs go down which is why every video over 100 views is more or less encoded in vp9 and those below are still avc
I used to COMFORTABLY be able to watch 720p videos. Around the start of the pandemic they dropped the bitrate if I recall. Since then 720p is nearly unwatchable, at least on videos that include things such as onboards from cars or anything with a lot of motion.
True. I have been watching every video in the highest possible quality for like 10 years now, but i remember this thing that happened around 2020. 720p still had the "HD" label next to it, now it doesn't
1440p theoretically should be enough, at least that forces RU-vid to use VP9 instead of AVC (it does use VP9 for lower resolutions too if the video got enough attention apparently)
For the bit that you don't understand, here's my take. I'm still fairly confused on it, but I have the very prestigious label of "has used FFmpeg" so I gave it some thinking: Take a look at figure 4's probabilities superimposed against the quality/bitrate graph. Reasonably, they play the highest video resolution that can be supported for that connection. But notice how flat the curve is within that region. They have a lot of wiggle room before the operating point before the quality begins to drop off drastically. So, they don't start showing you that resolution once you hit the operating point for it; rather, the operating point is the place where they upgrade you to the next highest resolution. For example, when you hit the operating point for 360p, they switch your stream to 480p at the lower bitrate. There's still the point that you brought up in the beginning about 1000Kbps 1080p being worse than 1000Kbps 720p. But, notice that the article treats 1080p as the absolute highest, not the "normal" resolution. They seem to care more for this in the lower resolution/bitrate space, where the data pipeline is smaller. I did some encoding testing with 360p and 480p at low bitrates for Beat Saber videos (a surprisingly bitrate-sensitive game) and found that ~600Kbps was where 480p started to look better than 360p at the same bitrate. At 800Kbps, the 480p stream was significantly better, so we could maybe call that the operating point. 480p still has a while to go before it gets to diminished returns (the operating point that would send you to 720p), but why stay on 360p when 480p is marginally better for the same cost? The idea is that they upgrade the stream to a higher resolution before they even approach the point of diminished returns, since the higher resolution has already started to look better. --- As an aside, I hope AV1 takes off. Haven't been able to play with it myself because I lack the hardware (and AV1 CPU encode is mega slow, if it even works right), but it looks really promising. Great for details in black areas, which is a massive problem for x264 and even NVENC.
I think it may be changing approach from fixed bitrate ladder to "per-category" - "per region" and all those metrics (or playback reliability, when using harder to decode functions?) that where mentioned in the article. I don't know, it's probably a bit complicated, as simply fixing their bitrate goals, doesn't sound post worthy. but it's quite vague at the end.
youtube premium has a family plan that lets you add up to five accounts to the plan. It's cheaper than paying for each account individually and I give the extra seats to my family.
I have not seen this... And I have premium.... Maybe this is different from country to country. Update: I just checked, and I can now choose a family plane, I have not seen this before. Thanks.
I don't know what data it was based off of, but the dev notes you referenced said there was no drop in "perceived" image quality. So, I'm guessing they used some data that suggests people didn't notice the quality difference (most likely measured in an indirect and dubious fashion). The image quality was almost certainly objectively worse, but they had information to suggest that it wasn't consequential (at least that's my read of it)
A long time ago I saw an article (couldn't find it now) which explored how the same JPEG image looked when downscaled vs. the quality slider on JPEG moved to make the file size lower than the downscaled version. Almost universally, the lower bitrate higher pixel count versions looked better. So I think this is what the RU-vid document means. Seems like something you can explore in a video as well :)
This is generally how it works, but only to a point. An example is streaming, since the bitrate has a definite maximum. A 720p30 will look noticeably better than any 1080p60 if the bitrate is low enough. But if a game for example moves slowly then a 1080p30 stream at the same bitrate as 720p30 will look better. Motion is what causes blocking and smearing. If videos are fast paced they're going to look bad without a huge bitrate. If they're slow, you always want higher res even at low bitrates. Hence why a jpg--being a still image has less to worry about.
@@flameshana9 well, even for anime that is mostly static images with flat colours and not many details I still prefer 720p with higher bitrate than bit starved 1080p
Regarding the multiple RU-vid Premiums issue, you can get a family subscription for a small additional premium (hah) over the normal price, which allows you to share it with up to 6 accounts in your household. That's what I've ended up doing since I want to make different accounts for different purposes (like work and language learning) but I've become too accustomed to the lack of ads, mobile background play, and the general sense of superiority I get from knowing that I'm providing support to my favourite RU-vidrs regardless of whether their content gets demonetised or not to go back to the free experience.
The ad free experience knowing that the random RU-vidr that I will not be able to support on patreon will still get paid is cool, better than just adblocking
not my case where i mainly use youtube for scrolling memes where most of the times ad revenue goes straight to yt but when i use it to stream music it just automute and autoskip ads, which i think is split ad revenue
For the bit you don't understand, looks like what they do is adjust the parameters of the video encoder to tweak specific areas of video quality that are least affected on the most devices. Assuming most people watch on their phones, I would bet this would look something like maintaining colour accuracy for everything but blacks, or focusing on maintaining the quality of small text at the cost of other small details - essentially "improving" the quality on these devices at a lower cost.
maybe this can explain the visual quality reduction on some really old videos(5+ years). like, blobby mess kind of quality reduction thanks to that repeated compression over time
am i the only person to remember the "original" quality option we had a few years ago for free? i remember using it to check the battlefield 3 gameplay before i had a good gpu to run the game, it was mind blowing how amazing the quality was
I will never give RU-vid or Google a single cent if they continue to behave in the manner that they have been. What a joke to treat their viewers and creators so poorly and then expect people to want to pay for "premium" features.
@@Smoginchibim It could've been countless more, with less algorithmic suppression, less focus on their on-contract stars for RU-vid Red and more respect for the ordinary channels. Don't needlessly succumb to media hate campaign's and governments' wishes. Be a neutral platform like a regular city street is. Like any other major platform/social media they actively work to make it more addictive, the so-called Facebook Papers was just the first drop in the ocean that will become the awakening towards the modern technology. At the moment we are too zombified to realize. Essentially RU-vid has to solve the same problem like Mozilla: How do you get people to donate? This is exactly what it looks like to me, I am not interested in their paywalled services and given Google's past and reputation I am in the same boat as @@UCVvQKWrhaVtphyWPvTD6zkg (BakedAndSteaked, idk if that link will work)
Jesus, dude. You sound super entitled. It's free and you're bitching? Lol. Bandwidth costs a HUGE amount of money. So does all the reencoding they do. Yikes.
0:20 to be clear, encoders don't "drop the resolution". They simply encode in blocks and average out colors. Flatter colors are going to be averaged more, saving more space. It's why a flat color PNG is significantly smaller than a really complicated PNG.
Yeah, it's rather ironic to talk about misconceptions and then make the same one that uneducated people make. The res does not drop (easily tested with something like text) but the compression becomes a lot heavier.
They dont really average out, a block is quantized in the encoding process depending on Quality Factor (not practical to explain here how that exactly works, look up quantization in JPEGs for a basic understanding, but its important that its an entirely different thing than "averaging out"), thats how JPEGs work, PNG is a very bad example since its lossless and its basically just normal file compression. But besides quantization depending on the encoding standard lots of complex transformation are performed, both in time domain and spatial domain and in more advanced encoding standards even on the block layout itself, these are what mostly sets apart the different encoding standards.
The blog post is basically saying that the bitrates in which a video is encoded are based partly on the expected audience. So if a video's expected audience is in a region where bandwidth is more limited, then all of the resolution options will have lower bitrates, allowing more people to watch at higher resolutions than they otherwise would. This also reduces loading time and buffering events. I imagine they also use different encoding algorithms based on the types of devices in a regional video's audience, because some are more CPU intensive to decode than others (so if they know most people in a region are using slow phones, they can compensate for that, which improves the overall experience).
As someone who was an Edit Assistant for one of the biggest post production services I can't tell you how many clients say their videos look worse on social media. We us interlaced footage too which I know social platforms do not like. To avoid this we export as ProRes 422 HQ with various tweaks as upscaling is just too time consuming. H.264 is the main RU-vid export setting we use too but varies as it depends what is in the video to warrant either Quicktime or H.264, but highly down AV1 will be used anytime soon in this industry until its had a lot of testing. At the end of the day, most people are watching our stuff on various different devices and wifi speeds that it just isn't worth the energy to find the "perfect" export settings. AV1 though looks great, especially as it seems to do grades more justice and get true blacks!
@@flameshana9 it can be both, it tends to be the most lossless and LNE friendly method when sending over to designers to work on it, but also used to upload. H.264 is great because of its files size that’s why most people use it to upload You are correct in that ProRes is used for video editing proxies but it doesn’t mean you can’t export and upload it. At the end of the day I do what the clients want and not input my advice as that cause more confusion ahaha
Stop wasting data and start upscaling 😅 Do you understand 4k content huge amounts of data? A one hour film could be 10GB😅 Replace your browser with Opera and start using Lucid Mode to stay on 720p to waste MB instead of GB😅
@@100Bucks I mostly watch content on a landline connection so I get good speeds and don’t have to worry about how much data I use why not just use 4k looks better 😅
@@dean1100110 If you have unlimited Internet then my advice does not matter. If you don't then it does matter. Your bill will rise. Watching a one hour 4k video eats a lot of data vs a 720p hour video which is like 700mb. If you have unlimited Internet then ignore everything I said.
A while ago i found a youtube test channel with 100 subs by chance, over the past few months they kept uploading videos with titles talking about "premium exempt bits" or something like that, now i finally understand what that was referencing to
I upload my videos at 1440p to get around the awful bitrate of 1080p on youtube (extremely noticeable a 60fps in videos with a lot of foliage or many small moving objects.. be they particle effects or leaves). While 1440p is less than 50% better resolution, youtube allocates double the bitrate for 1440p videos vs 1080p. It's even worth just upscaling a 1080p video to 1440p before uploading just to ensure you get a better bitrate on youtube and most modern editing tools can do this in a mere few minutes now.
@@tteqhu More people will upload to 4k when youtube doesn't routinely take anywhere from 24 hours to 2 WEEKS to process your 4k video. If you upload a 4k video longer than a couple minutes long, there's a good chance it will be in processing hell for days, possibly weeks. I've had over half my 4k video uploads takes a minimum of 3 days to process (20 to 30 minutes long each). Quickest on a "good day" is 24 hours processing. In contrast, a 1080p video gets processed in minutes. A 1440p video usually a couple hours. But 4k taking days to process, nobody really wants to spend the time dealing with that (it's not a technlogy issue. If I can render and process the video myself in an hour or 2, there's no reason RU-vid should need several days to do it in their server farms).
@@Hathur Yeah that is slow for your channel because it's efficient. I think it would be great to have option to encode video on your own, but making encoder that widely works is probably not worth it for youtube (when few people would do that). Anyway: 4k is 4x pixels (relatively to 1080p). There are also likely seperate setups for 60fps. Try to think what is least important category for youtube: gaming: -high % base blocking ads, which doesn't even pay well. To that most of them will use 4k (so delaying processing might save them some bandwidth for impatient people) -relatively small channel: fewer people to notice, and again not hugely profittable to make their experience better. It'd be wasteful for them to have 2x as much hardware lying around, just because people post x3 as many videos around fri-sun. Instead load is spread throughout the week neatly, which delays purchases of new hardware for as long as possible = more $ It may also manage itself to work more extensively during times when energy is cheapest (example, their grid has significant wind/solar prod - check the forecasts)
I’ve been paying for RU-vid premium for about 2 years now and I can’t imagine going back to free. Any time I’m on a TV and for whatever reason I’m not signed in, the ads are so incredibly jarring it’s actually painful.
@@maxtheawesome4255 yeah, I know that's a problem now. I thankfully got it when it was still official. I can't recommend anything safe. I guess, try to download it on PC on an emulator from some torrent, and run it on a virtual android phone, ensure it's safe and then download it on your phone
Thats a very interesting idea. Perhaps, using Jdownloader, you could investigate in further detail, what RU-vid is now supplying us. I'd like to see some actual measured bitrates on video and audio. Currently upscaling my entire collection of Tintin from 576i to 1152p- I'm glad I can play Half Life 1 and RTCW in VR on my Quest 2 without needing my desktop, cause it looks like it'll be buggered for a few days haha
5:09 HOLY CRAP THAT'S A GREAT POINT! We always complained that we had to upscale with nearest neighbor or Lanczos to force RU-vid to give us VP9/AV1 or 1440p for higher bitrates. The 1080p Premium finally gives us what we've always asked for. Good quality without having to upscale/re-render a video, and the bitrate isn't an absurd 20mbps version of the original 8mbps video. However, RU-vid knows this and is trying to profit over a feature we value so highly... It's a perfect system-pay up for if you're willing to see 1080p only videos in original quality.
RU-vid premium is tied to the email, not the channel. So if the multiple accounts are brand channels, you can just give access to those channels to any other gmail (or apps account) that subscribes to Premium. Then as long as you're signed in to the subscribed account you're able to pick which RU-vid channel you use RU-vid as. Premium works just fine because you're still signed in to the subscribed email, just using RU-vid as a owner/manager/whatever of the brand account. Been using it like that for years with multiple channels, even as the non-primary subscriber for a RU-vid Premium family plan.
You can add different accounts into a RU-vid family group, as long as they are in the same country. And use one RU-vid premium subscription for this group.
Hopefully replacing 1440p with this option will make the importance of bitrate more obvious to the general public. And since the RU-vid 1440p option is just 1080p with additional bitrate, the company would be more honest about it, too.
Maybe you should try testing the video quality at fixed bitrates for different codecs. There are a lot of settings and you can keep testing forever. But in the testing I made my self, I was very impressed with AV1 at super low bit rates. VP9 is still quite good, and AVC1/H.264/H.265 are lacking behind. I have yet to try to find settings where the encoding takes the same amount of time (I have only tried CPU encoding) for a test video, and see witch are better. Cause AV1 and VP9 takes a lot longer than h.264, when optimizing for quality at a fixed bitrate. The settings are nearly endless. 🙂
They might roll it out to free users as they were talking about getting rid of 4k for free users the other day, but 1080p premium will probably be a noticeable jump over regular 1080 while preventing free users destroying their costly bandwitdh at 4k for premium only? Edit: 3:47 Linus from LTT said they basilcaly held off on that because of backlash but this may be their solution. The small number of 4k users accounted for something insane like 70% of the total websites bandwidth despite being only a few % of actual users.
I think it's just unsustainable that way. If 4K is that horrible in bandwidth. They really should limit it. I totally get that. But tampering with other resolutions is wrong Give us free users one great resolution. You can even keep 1440p behind a premium. Heck you can keep 1080p premium behind a paywall on mobiles But for pc/tv users. Let us get the best 1080p. Take details away from 720p. That's fine. But 1080p should just be great
Honestly, it is RU-vid’s fault for not adapting to the advancement in tech. Locking a resolution behind a paywall way after it was thrown in for free was objectively and factually a step backwards for service wise. I don’t mind “enhanced bitrate”, since it wasn’t something was offered for free. And it is something that they can do with no problem, except the very few people who is more knowledgeable about video codec and bitrate to who would want it for free. But to my knowledge, RU-vid had been using VP9 for ages.
Since you mentioned having multiple RU-vid accounts and therefore needing multiple Premium subscriptions, I just want to point out that a single Premium subscription will cover all of your channels ("brand accounts") as long as they belong to the same Google account.
I wouldn't be surprised if youtube added ads to their "premium" service. youtube has a history of adding features and then removing them only to later add them to a paywall
5:45 I don't think You need to buy several subscriptions. The premium status is linked to your Google account. Unless you have various accounts to manage your different channels, all get premium. At least that's how it works for me. I agree with your opinion, Premium should add benefits and not take them away from free users. I subscribed when I worked in the navy and wanted to save videos and music while in harbour to play offline later. Sure, I could've pirated the music and downloaded the videos, but it was just more convenient at the time. We'll see what RU-vid does, but I'm sure they have the viewers and creator's best interest at heart, as they usually do. Right?
Does this mean RU-vid's past "4K only in Premium" was not a joke. Will they actually lock 1440p and 4K too when they do this? (haha this is discussed at 3:45) Because with some videos 1440p on a 1080p monitor is significantly better thanks to the increased bitrate. (this is also discussed at 5:00)
4k maybe but probably not 1440p. 4k isn't even a necessity, That change would affect something like 11% of users. I'm one of very few people who would be affected by that change, I use a 55 inch 4k tv as my main display and Even I can barely tell a difference between 1440p and 4k RU-vid content, Its compressed to shit anyway. 4k costs RU-vid an insane amount of money store and stream to you, and on phones where like 60% of all RU-vid views are from it makes 0 difference whatsoever since 4k screens on phones aren't a thing except for a couple attempts a few years ago that quickly went away because it was dumb and useless.
@@whitepaws60 YT defaults to 480p on mobile since an app update 1-2 years ago. Often stays at 480p too. Personally I find 720p sufficient on mobile and on PC I automatically download the feed in 720p too. Out of spite I might choose the max quality though :grrr: The storage of all basic formats* 4K-144p takes RU-vid 600% the size of a single 4K format. iirc the numbers are right, because I counted a while ago. *RU-vid provides a list of basic formats available to a user by default and probably has some "hidden" formats it doesn't let you play by default, like the "Original" quality years ago.
@@VADemon Yeah it defaults to 480p on mobile because most people wont notice on a phone screen and the people who do will just change it. on pc I use a chrome extension that among other things lets me set my default quality to 8k and it'll just automatically pick the highest resolution available for every video so that change never actually affected me
I view videos at 1440p windowed and not full screen because I like having full control of the play buttons at all times. It was like this when I used to have Winamp. The other reason I stream at 1440p maximum is because at 4K, RU-vid's video player is unable to keep its quality while minimizing the video size on my screen. Of course, videos that I wish to keep are always downloaded at 4K60. I'd hate to see it go for regular users.
@@BleedForTheWorld Do you not use the hotkeys? For MPC-HC I also rebound hotkeys after RU-vid: +-10s J/L, 5s with Shift, 1s with CTRL iirc. Frame step on , and .
i have noticed that quite often when i watch a video from a small channel in the 1000 ish subs range or so i often can't watch in 1440p and 1080p is also a struggle sometimes but watching Linus Tech Tips at 4k a moment later is no problem. Now quality is difficult because not all are using the same software to record and edit or setting in that software. But if i were to pay for better quality i would expect a video to look 99% like it did before uploading it to youtube, no blurry dark scenes and so on
Laughing at the twitter users because this video has nothing to do with the drama invovled. Love you Philip please don't let these people ruin your career and keep up the good work
I do pay for premium so I can't wait to just switch between the modes to see if there is a difference. Very Surprised Philip doesn't have it. I have multiple subscriptions to services, and I have been canceling to save money. Disney is gone, Amazon gone, Paramount gone, next on my list is Netflix. I just have not even considered RU-vid premium, it is the one I use most often by a magnitude.
All the features should be for free. It's exploitative of those who don't know: Adblock is free on browsers. Background play is free on browsers (works on mobile too) Downloading is free Video just went into the intentionally reduced quality, which again should be free for all users.
@@SixonQQ I am happy paying. RU-vid has given me so much throughout my life. I learned a lot, laughed tons, and genuinely I just think it is the single greatest site on the internet. So I will happily pay and make it more profitable to maintain itself or grow. Or just give massive bonuses to executives.
@@johnnylattarulo6735 That wont increase bitrate, revance still is at the mercy of RU-vid for the supplied video. Not that is matters. 1080p premium is phone only anyways so I got fucked.
I still don't like YT premium's price point. If it was like £40 a year, sure. But once you're into the £10+ a month sections, it starts to become a service competing with every other expensive monthly service you're paying for. Dropping Netflix/D+/Amazon Prime for RU-vid without ads (assuming you're not just blocking them anyway) and better bitrate ceases to be all that appealing. All that said, provided they don't just reduce 1080p bandwidth further for none-paying members (or finally kill 4K for people using a browser - I assume it'll happen in the next couple of years though) this is only a plus.
I subbed to Premium a few months ago. I've now grown fond of the YT Music offering, screen off playing (now that devanced is dead), and never seeing or hearing ads is fantastic. Is it worth the 12$ per month I pay? Well, YT is where I spend much of my time if I'm not streaming a movie or reading a book, so... Yes. I think so. I do worry that google is going to further monetize YT and inevitably raise Premiums price. We'll see, I guess.
Is the only subscription that I pay, and that I don't need to also. I've been using YT since 2012 (with adblock included) so why not give back after all these years of entertainment?
I find it more valuable than a netflix subscription since its cheaper and I watch way more stuff here anyway and supports all the channels I watch more.
If you right click on the video you can and select statistics, you can see the codec of the video. Funny thing is, the "better" premium version (1080p) with higher bitrate is just the older less efficient VP9 codec and the "free" normal 1080p has the newer more efficient AV1 codec. So in the end, they are optically/technically the same.
I was thinking to myself "ah that makes sense" and then you started talking and I realised I thought I understood it because I didn't and you thought you didn't because you did. I was listening to how they said it rather than actually considering the words offered
I already pay for YTP so it's all a win for me. I can't believe I get to comfortably download videos AND to stream music on the same service. It's also nice knowing that my views give content creators more money too.
Yes, RU-vid Premium is just perfect in my eyes and the price is veeeery fair for what it offers. Don't understand people who still rather use shady adblock software than just paying this instead of Spotify.
The only downside is that while YT is ad-free using Premium, everyone puts sponsors in anyways. While I know that's the creators' decisions and that it's not RU-vid's responsibility, it's still an ad. More importantly I hate how inconsistent sponsors are. Some videos put them at the end which is nice. Others, however, will put it at the beginning or stretch out a really short video to toss it in, others will slap it straight into the middle of an important part.
RU-vid always downscales the bitrate of videos you upload (to squeeze data saving), so your 1080p video in RU-vid is not the same quality as the original 1080p video in your local storage. i think the premium 1080p just means that, that 1080p premium version is just the original video quality without the reduced bitrate, which means bigger file size and that's why they hid it behind a paywall.
Well, thanks for explaining why 1080p has been looking worse for a few years. I thought it was my eyes! A big example is watching games such as League of Legends - it looks so muddy and washed out and it is hard to see what is happening vs in game where it's very sharp.
I have defienty noticed a huge dip in 1080p quality, but primarily in videos that offer the 1080p higher bitrate option with premium. My underatanding is that creators have the option to offer this in the hopes of getting more revenue from You Tube Premium subs. I have to believe this is largly backfiring as I can't be the only non premuim user that tends to spend less time watching less videos when they look like carp.
I have never ever seen an ad on RU-vid in my life. Who are all these clueless people online? Oh wait, are those the normies we didn't want online back in the early 90s but we had to have them because commercialism or something? I guess it worked then. lmao
I need another comment because I just remember this fun bug RU-vid has, where if you put the video on auto it happily tells you it's running in 1080p but it's actually 720/480/360p. That makes it look like it has a shit bitrate. If you then select 1080p manually, tadaa!
As for the blog, maybe they are using slower compression settings, or maybe they are talking about av1? In any case it is possible to lower the bitrate at the same perceived quality by increasing the complexity/encode time. (Still wouldn’t put it past them though, RU-vid’s Av1 doesn’t usually look very good.) The blog is a bit of a contradiction though, right? It’s like they are admitting that it DOES affect the quality, so you should pay up.
that's older post to be clear, almost 5 years Maybe you are right and their "playback statistics" are frames dropped/playback issues, to see if more efficient encoding, can be decoded well for the lowest resolutions? It's really quite vague what they supposedly did.
I like the idea of it. I think it's based on the data they have. Most pc users have a 1080p screen. And I'm guessing most users like myself opt for 4k quality to have the higher bitrate. This feels like a good compromise
Just a heads up YTP offers a family plan, that could work for your multiple accounts. It's what we use in our household. If I'm not mistaken it comes with like 6 or so slots. Thanks for the dive into this, interesting stuff.
2:38 I'm sure they're just referring to users in general using less bandwidth than before regardless of resolution because of these lower bitrate changes, and not referring to users who can now jump up in resolution.
@2kliksphilip I'd have to read the blog for myself, but I'd go into it assuming it's written to impress as much as possible. This would explain the focus on both getting a user to a higher resolution, and showing that users will waste less data, as both will sound appealing.
Idiots nerfed the 1080p bitrate years ago, that's why everyone now uploads at 4k for a way better bitrate and overall quality even upscaled. the bitrate they use for standard 1080p is terrible.
what's sickening is that regardless, they're still processing and hosting the 1080p "premium" option for every vid, whether 95%+ of youtube's users will buy premium or not. what a ridiculous waste of resources and processing power for a chance to "compete" with streaming services when youtube doesn't even need to
I wonder if people would accept a quality feature where the extra quality was still free but it reset to a default with each new video. It'd drive me insane if the quality was lower than I wanted/needed on a particular video, or if i was watching a nicely animated tv series or something. But I'm sure there are people watching (or even just listening) to everything in 4k just because "bigger number better" and their connection can handle it. I just wish we could get back oldschool full video buffering for slow connections and scrubbing purposes.
I always watch 4K if the video is 4K and I’m not on mobile data. It just feels and looks better to me, even on my phone! My pc monitor is 4K and 1080p looks crappy on it! Even 4K looks bad often, because of the video compression! 8k content looks better, although it’s only upscaled 4K content most of the time instead of real 8k !
They implemented that during 2020 when the EU and others complained about bandwidth usage of youtube and netflix, etc, when work from home suddenly started using huge bandwidth, Annoying as hell tbh, and wasted not an insignificant amount of bandwidth as people switch quality and a portion of the video is reloaded at the higher res.
The big problem with AV1 is lack of hardware accelerated decoding. This leads to higher CPU / GPU usage which in turn leads to more heat and shorter battery life. AV1 is totally better than VP9 in most ways, but id rather use VP9 if the device I am watching content on doesn't natively support AV1 decoding. Apple is one of the last holdouts for adding AV1 decoding to their Apple Silicon. Crossing fingers M3's generation finally adds it. I will fully embrace AV1 at that point.
Other than video resolution, what I want to see more is the improvement in audio on premium. I don't know what they’re using now but when It's come to music the quality on YT can't compare to other platform.
It depends on the video quality, high quality settings almost always use OPUS at 128kbps (VBR). However I've noticed that if the initial file uploaded (music) has a lower quality codec (dated non LAME MP3 for example) the bitrate of the encode from RU-vid can be OPUS at over 200kbps.
In these conversations, I'm sometimes surprised with how much backlash youtube gets. Not from Phillip here, but the community generally Sure, no one likes getting less than before, but we're still getting it for free and the only reason RU-vid offers free uploads in 8k60fps to anyone with an internet connection is to stomp the competition to then finally be able to make a profit. They won't be allowed to reduce the quality we're getting for free too much, because stuff gets cheaper over time and other services might catch up. But it doesn't look insensible to me as a compromise as it is
The music made me think that my computer was about to explode until I paused the video + is there any noticeable differrence between 1080p Premium and normal 1080p?
I've all but given up at this point. video editing and media production in general is one of my many hobbies and it's ultimately art for me. It's painful when 36+ hours of rendering and a 195GB video file gets completely obliterated by youtube compression and get zero views for it and then I proceed to be recommended 5 second shitty videos of stolen content that get hundreds of thousands of views by the algorithm. I fucking hate it here.
so we can easily look back at this and know that what actually happened is that youtube ruined the quality of non premium users to try and force you into purchasing another subscription you dont want or need
