You can watch the enhanced 1080p version without a premium account with yt-dlp by just adding:
--extractor-args "youtube:player_client=default,ios"
to the command. The ID for the enhanced bitrate 1080p is 616.
YouTube Introduces 1080p Premium
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: YouTube Introduces 1080p Premium
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting to see how tiny Netflix mobile download files are. 200MB - 300MB for full-length movies, ~150MB for series episodes. This is on "Standard quality", but still. After some quick Googling (grain of salt) I see that a standard DVD of 4.7GB tends go have (usual encoding) up to 135 min of 480p video. That's a big difference! Even when considering that modern encoding might be more efficient. It is lossy co…
DVD's definitely didn't use up the entire 4.7GB. A movie was anything from 700MB to 1GB
Commercial DVD movies were bigger than this. They used dual-layer DVDs and the main movie was often 6-7GB.
Re: YouTube Introduces 1080p Premium
#23Is this different from selecting a higher resolution stream (with increased bitrate) and downscaling it on a 1080p display? If not, will they hide 1440+p options behind a paywall as well? Most creators upload at 1080p, and YouTube has always given bitrate recommendations to match their service. Even with updated documentation, I'm expecting lots of people using their existing encoding presets for future 1080p uploads…
You can grab the enhanced bitrate 1080p option with yt-dlp.
It's not better than the 1440p or 4K downscaled. The main use I see for it is for videos that were only uploaded in 1080p in the first place, and so they don't have a 1440p or 4K option.
But even then, I am not seeing a very big difference at all between the regular 1080p and enhanced 1080p.
Re: YouTube Introduces 1080p Premium
#24Am I seeing the past in a nostalgic light or were DVD 480p considerably better than YouTube 480p? I feel like streaming services compress their streams so hard that the resolution indicators become meaningless.
I watch 4320p (8K) streams when possible because it noticeably improves the quality on my 4K screens — and this is with my worsening eyesight! That shouldn’t be noticeable if the 4K stream was encoded properly.
Similarly, 4K video looks much better on a 1080p screen than a 1080p video. A youtuber posted a comparison, its easy to see even in a still image. Its all in their encoding algorithm.
Re: YouTube Introduces 1080p Premium
#25Higher Bitrate but doesn't say the actual bitrate.
It also doesn't mention about Codec. I assume it is still H.264? Or could it be HEVC given Google already pays the maximum cap on royalty for their Pixel Phone, tablet or other Appliance.
Re: YouTube Introduces 1080p Premium
#26Am I seeing the past in a nostalgic light or were DVD 480p considerably better than YouTube 480p? I feel like streaming services compress their streams so hard that the resolution indicators become meaningless.
The difference is bitrate. DVDs were 10 mbit of MPEG-2 while YouTube 480p is 2.5mbit of h264 (or transcodes thereof). These are different encodings so it's not a 1 to 1 comparison of bitrates as h264 is more efficient, but this article indicates that you'd need 4mbit of h264 (which is closer to that YouTube allocates to 720p video) to match the perceived quality of 10mbit of MPEG-2: https://streaminglearningcenter.co…
I am not sure where you get the 2.5Mbps and 4 Mbps number from because those are very high numbers for streaming ( or even for torrent downloading ) for those resolution and Youtube dont use any where near those number. A quick check shows Youtube only uses around 600Kbps on 720P video. And anywhere between 1.5 to 1.8Mbps for 1080P content. I am guessing their relatively low quality compared to their bitrate is because their encoding process optimise for encoding time rather than quality per bit simply because of the volume they have per day.
Re: YouTube Introduces 1080p Premium
#27Am I seeing the past in a nostalgic light or were DVD 480p considerably better than YouTube 480p? I feel like streaming services compress their streams so hard that the resolution indicators become meaningless.
Yep, streaming sites use so much compression to save on costs that everything looks much worse then it should.
Re: YouTube Introduces 1080p Premium
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is bitrate. DVDs were 10 mbit of MPEG-2 while YouTube 480p is 2.5mbit of h264 (or transcodes thereof). These are different encodings so it's not a 1 to 1 comparison of bitrates as h264 is more efficient, but this article indicates that you'd need 4mbit of h264 (which is closer to that YouTube allocates to 720p video) to match the perceived quality of 10mbit of MPEG-2: https://streaminglearningcenter.co…
I am not sure where you get the 2.5Mbps and 4 Mbps number from because those are very high numbers for streaming ( or even for torrent downloading ) for those resolution and Youtube dont use any where near those number. A quick check shows Youtube only uses around 600Kbps on 720P video. And anywhere between 1.5 to 1.8Mbps for 1080P content. I am guessing their relatively low quality compared to their bitrate is becau…
2.5mbps are youtube's own recommendations: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zipp...
They will then transcode it to h265, or webm which uses even less bandwidth, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here and assuming they target their transcoding setup to preserve as much quality as they recommend providing them.
And of course this is VBR not CBR, so some scenes will use less.
4mbps is the linked article description of where h264 matches DVD quality. Yes, 4mbps is more than most streaming sites will give for 480p. This does mean that most streaming sites are inferior to DVDs at 480p. The fact that most streaming sites use less bitrate than a DVD-equivalent quality is therefore not surprising, giving that people have noticed that exact fact.
Streaming sites do not pick their bitrate to maximise quality given a fixed maximum filesize, so it's not surprising that they choose a lower bitrate (and therefore lower quality) than DVDs. They're instead optimizing for things like their server costs, time to playback start, or the ability to perform uninterrupted playback over the internet connection of users resorting to these lower resolution settings.
Re: YouTube Introduces 1080p Premium
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure where you get the 2.5Mbps and 4 Mbps number from because those are very high numbers for streaming ( or even for torrent downloading ) for those resolution and Youtube dont use any where near those number. A quick check shows Youtube only uses around 600Kbps on 720P video. And anywhere between 1.5 to 1.8Mbps for 1080P content. I am guessing their relatively low quality compared to their bitrate is becau…
2.5mbps are youtube's own recommendations: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zipp... They will then transcode it to h265, or webm which uses even less bandwidth, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here and assuming they target their transcoding setup to preserve as much quality as they recommend providing them. And of course this is VBR not CBR, so some scenes will use less. 4mbps is t…
>2.5mbps are youtube's own recommendations: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zipp...
That is for uploading. They will transcode your H.264 file when you upload it regardless of bitrate.
Re: YouTube Introduces 1080p Premium
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
2.5mbps are youtube's own recommendations: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zipp... They will then transcode it to h265, or webm which uses even less bandwidth, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt here and assuming they target their transcoding setup to preserve as much quality as they recommend providing them. And of course this is VBR not CBR, so some scenes will use less. 4mbps is t…
>2.5mbps are youtube's own recommendations: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zipp ... That is for uploading . They will transcode your H.264 file when you upload it regardless of bitrate.
It's like you didn't even read the very next sentence.