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YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
21–30 of 108 posts
Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
#22For music listening, the YouTube Music app has settings for higher audio quality under "Settings > Playback".
According to their documentation, this is "Upper bound of 256kbps AAC & OPUS": https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9076559?hl=en...
EDIT: FWIW, I'm a Premium member. I'm not sure if this is a standard feature.
Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
#23This kind of analysis is interesting but must be considered rapidly outdated since we won't know what's changing behind the scenes at YouTube.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.
Do you have information on this or are you just supposing? The VCU accelerator is supposedly 100x faster than software for VP9 and they have up to 20 accelerators per host. At those ratios it's not clear that a machine would be able to keep up with the audio processing, or that it would be easy to manage the division of labor between accelerators and host CPUs. Also there definitely are broadcast transcoders on the market that do the audio in hardware.
Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
#24For music listening, the YouTube Music app has settings for higher audio quality under "Settings > Playback". According to their documentation, this is "Upper bound of 256kbps AAC & OPUS": https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9076559?hl=en... EDIT: FWIW, I'm a Premium member. I'm not sure if this is a standard feature.
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Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
#25Anyone uploading audio different platforms might find Streamliner useful (I'm nowhere near the point where details on that level matter).
https://adptraudio.com/product/streamliner/
It's wild how many details sound people have to keep track of. I know when I upload to Youtube things get smoothed noticeably compared to say Soundcloud. Probably because I've mastered over their -14 LUFS requirement.
I wonder how much of the modern 'everyone needs to use closed captioning watching TV now' comes from the streaming services Codecs and other decisions and not just the A/V sound peoples' decisions. Do movies sound people now need to listen through on something like Streamliner above for every decision?
Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
#26For music listening, the YouTube Music app has settings for higher audio quality under "Settings > Playback". According to their documentation, this is "Upper bound of 256kbps AAC & OPUS": https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9076559?hl=en... EDIT: FWIW, I'm a Premium member. I'm not sure if this is a standard feature.
I wonder if I upload a video to standard Youtube and tag it 'music' so it's shows up over on Youtube Music does it get a better audio quality than the video encode gets?
Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I assume most viewers will already have most of the youtube javascript warm in the cache...
How much is loaded for a navigation from one video to the next?
Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
#28Nice 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.
If you're learning guitar, drums, piano, trumpet, etc, you'll want to start playing along at about 75% speed then work up until you can play 110% faster than you need to. YouTube's built in audio time stretch makes this a painful exercise.
Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
#29Why would it be 6.5 ms late? It's not much, but way larger than I'd expect. I never knew encoding might shift the audio track.
Re: YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
#30Nice 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?
Because this is such a niche use the number of users taking advantage of this "feature" would be so small as to not get anybody a promotion