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YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

audiomisc.co.uk

11–20 of 108 posts

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#11

Youtube probably have stats on viewer-happyness vs bitrate. I would take a guess that a higher bitrate = longer loading times, and viewers care far more about an extra few second of buffering than they care about audio quality, especially when they don't have the original to compare to.

Couldn’t you do adaptive Bitrate and start streaming low-bitrate for a few seconds and then switch to higher quality once the video is already playing?

pretty sure they already do this.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#14
post #3

This kind of analysis is interesting but must be considered rapidly outdated since we won't know what's changing behind the scenes at YouTube. Have they ever revealed whether their VCU handles the audio?

Video takes up almost all of the bitrate/CPU time/ASIC budget, audio is a rounding error.

Server CPUs can encode audio at hundreds of times faster than realtime so there’s no need for hardware acceleration. Back in the iPod era DSPs were used to decode MP3/AAC but now only the most CPU or battery constrained devices like AirPods need hardware acceleration.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#15

Youtube probably have stats on viewer-happyness vs bitrate. I would take a guess that a higher bitrate = longer loading times, and viewers care far more about an extra few second of buffering than they care about audio quality, especially when they don't have the original to compare to.

The audio data is miniscule compared to the video data, and the size of it is tied to the video quality level. And everything is streamed in chunks. It'd only amount to milliseconds of extra buffering.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#16

Youtube probably have stats on viewer-happyness vs bitrate. I would take a guess that a higher bitrate = longer loading times, and viewers care far more about an extra few second of buffering than they care about audio quality, especially when they don't have the original to compare to.

Couldn’t you do adaptive Bitrate and start streaming low-bitrate for a few seconds and then switch to higher quality once the video is already playing?

YouTube’s most common audio codecs Opus and AAC use variable bitrate (VBR) by default.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#18
I have YouTube premium and I have access to experimental features and coincidentally they offer one feature called audio in high quality. So they are working on improving it.

Description:

High-Quality Audio

Available until February 22

With high-quality audio, you can listen to music on YouTube in the best audio quality.

How it works: Watch an eligible music video on YouTube and enjoy the benefits of higher-quality audio.

Only available on iOS and Android.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#19

Youtube probably have stats on viewer-happyness vs bitrate. I would take a guess that a higher bitrate = longer loading times, and viewers care far more about an extra few second of buffering than they care about audio quality, especially when they don't have the original to compare to.

Couldn’t you do adaptive Bitrate and start streaming low-bitrate for a few seconds and then switch to higher quality once the video is already playing?

While nothing that's been said here is inherently wrong per se, a sample YT page load is ~5s to DOMContentLoaded, and without counting the video content, transfers ~7 MiB worth of requests & ~95 requests for me, and visually, the entire page feels like it loads twice. (I thought it was redirecting, but the inspector says nope, that's a single page load.)

… while yeah… a lower bitrate upfront might lower the required bandwidth and thus, latency, to get enough of a buffer to start playback … all the bloat on the page would be a better first port of call.

Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)

#20
post #17

Nice analysis, for 1x playback speed. If you're playing back at a different speed, for example, for music practice, YouTube audio is awful. Why doesn't this huge AV platform use a better audio time stretch algorithm?

Let's be fair, for anything music related, you'll be doing 1x speed... higher than that is usually speech only, where it doesn't matter as much.
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