15 ms·
YouTube to limit default video quality around the world for a month
- ponsin 7y agoIt would be nice if they have a 0 pixel option. I use YouTube mostly for the music and I let it play in the background
- spullara 7y agoMaybe something like this? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/audio-only-youtube/pkocpiliahoaohbolmkelakpiphnllog?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/audio-only-youtube...
- noir_lord 7y agoNewPipe free on f-droid and it allows "download audio" in whatever format is available, it's great on phone for music from non-traditional studio sources (NewWaveRetro) etc.
- symplee 7y agoI think most "Lyric" videos, where the screen is a single image, or nearly the same image, can be compressed to be almost the size of just the audio. If not, I would second the "zero pixel" option!
- Insanity 7y agoI think this is a safe assumption, there should be no difference between each frames thus nothing should be sent.
- nightfly 7y agoVideos usually have key frames (full pictures) after ever interval of x seconds/frames. So new data will be sent occasionally even with no changes.
- est31 7y agoYeah, I've downloaded this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwHpDOWhkGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwHpDOWhkGk youtube-dl -k gave me two files, one webm/opus audio file and one mp4/av1 video file. The files had roughly same sizes, the audio being 9728k large, the video 9476k. The video had 127 keyframes, out of 17030 frames total, distributed over 567 seconds of video (one keyframe every 4.5 seconds). I don't have a method at hand to measure the encoded size of the keyframes but if I extract the first 90k of the file using dd (bs=90k count=1), I get 21 frames, so that's a lower bound for the size that's actually needed to encode one single keyframe, more shouldn't actually be neccessary. So of the 9.4M video file, > 99% is waste. Quite literally as 1% of 9476k is 95k. With the addition of audio, the amount of waste has to be adjusted to roughly half of the total audio+video data. Still a large amount of data that can be saved, especially at youtube scale where reductions of traffic in the sub-percent range are material for promotions.
- the8472 7y agoThis could also be solved by youtube detecting these situations and simply spacing keyframes farther apart or using duplicate frame decimation/vfr encoding. Seeking would still be fast since it could just fetch and skip a huge bunch of empty P-frames.
- clouddrover 7y agoFor static image videos YouTube's H.264 version of the video is generally significantly smaller than either the VP9 or AV1 versions. Either YouTube's detection and modification of the encoder settings for this type of video or something intrinsic to the x264 encoder delivers better results from their H.264 encoding pipeline. The 480p video-only file sizes for this video as reported by youtube-dl have VP9 at 9.70MiB, AV1 at 9.25MiB, and H.264 at 3.55MiB.
- 6510 7y agoSo we give them something 13 kb-ish[0] and they compress it to 4.16 MB. I'm sure I'm already not putting it kind enough. Combined with the tiny battery in my phone I really feel like people are pulling a prank on me. I'm a behavioral experiment now! I think my roomba just looked at me. [0] http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/DwHpDOWhkGk/hqdefault.jpg http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/DwHpDOWhkGk/hqdefault.jpg
- close04 7y agoYoutube doesn't offer a "no video" option for free because the ToS for the free service says you are not allowed to separate the video and audio streams. This is to prevent free streaming on devices like Sonos since it's harder (if possible at all) to monetize those videos. It's also why when using the free service the app doesn't allow streaming with the screen off. A 0 pixel video would defeat this by being in effect an audio stream separated from the video. I always wondered why manufacturers don't just resize the video stream to 1 pixel and use any of the device LEDs to "display" the video thus bypassing this part of the ToS.
- cwkoss 7y ago> resize the video stream to 1 pixel and use any of the device LEDs to "display" the video thus bypassing this part of the ToS Hilarious hack, love this idea
- NoodleIncident 7y ago> Youtube doesn't offer a "no video" option for free because the ToS for the free service says you are not allowed to separate the video and audio streams. Isn't this backwards? It seems more likely that the TOS follows the business decision here. I believe old versions of the official mobile apps continued to play the video with the phone screen off.
- close04 7y agoI imagine the ToS were written as such in order to make sure some features can be monetized (like offline or screen-off playback). But this just means they would not offer any feature for free that undermines this decision. A "0px" video would effectively turn it into an audio-only stream and be an "official" way for others to bypass some of those restrictions. It would make streaming to all devices that now require a Premium/Music membership, or stream ripping (something they don't actually sue for but insist it's illegal) fair game.
- gray_-_wolf 7y ago> since it's harder (if possible at all) to monetize those videos it's not like we don't have ads on radio
- qwerty456127 7y agoI just wonder why wouldn't they put the lyrics into the subtitles channel.
- jmiskovic 7y agoThe 'they' part is critical. YouTube relies on users to provide actual content. Digitalized music is uploaded by people with vast differences in tech abilities, access to tools, and even personal tastes. Some get creative and want to have HD city time-lapse as background and power point animation of lyrics. What do you do with those? It is not impossible to go over all music videos, automatically fetch lyrics and replace video with static album cover or something, but who would do it? If YouTube does this then they are responsible for any copyright infringement, and they become huge competition to user-created content on their own platform.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI thought they did switch to audio feed only in the background? After all, youtube-dl usually reports an audio-only file.
- smichel17 7y agoyoutube-dl violates the YouTube terms of service. That's why they scrape the website intstead of using the api.
- nickthegreek 7y agoYoutube music app allows this. I don’t think the website does.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TrinaryWorksToo 7y agohttps://music.youtube.com/ https://music.youtube.com/ This does what you want.
- filoleg 7y agoI like the concept of it, but the app has atrocious UX on mobile. For a specific example, it has a nice toggle above every track, where you can flip between video and audio-only. It works great, except that I cannot find a way to force it to stay on audio-only. As soon as the current track ends, the toggle resets back to "video". And this kind of stuff is all over the app.
- weatherperson 7y agothat's weird, I use the app and don't have this problem. I love the UI even on iOS.
- lone_haxx0r 7y agoYou should try Newpipe if you're on Android.
- ferysurya 7y agoYou can toggle off the video mode in the app setting.
- eastbayjake 7y agoI wish more ASMR content were available on music streaming services instead of with bulky videos on YouTube!
- qwerty456127 7y agoThe video channel plays a serious role in ASMR.
- jdminhbg 7y agoYou can use youtube-dl to pull down audio-only tracks. I do this frequently for talks without much in the way of visual presentation that I then listen to as podcasts. youtube-dl -F https://youtube.com/video-url That will give you a list of formats, pick an audio-only one, and use the -f flag to download that format.
- James_STT 7y agothe 'bestaudio' format is particularly useful, you can't be certain of the container it serves you but it avoids having to check '-F'
- JJMcJ 7y agoPick the lowest resolution, usually 144. The audio quality seems unchanged and the video network bandwidth greatly reduced.
- pjc50 7y agoOn Android you have to pay extra to not watch the video.
- TrinaryWorksToo 7y agoThis is YouTube Music: https://music.youtube.com/ https://music.youtube.com/
- lukifer 7y agoI think the iOS player will stream only audio if the app is backgrounded; it seems to restart the stream to get video back if the app is brought to front again. As others have said, if the "video" is a static image, the bandwidth usage should be negligible in practice. But I've seen lots of promotional album streams that intentionally add busy graphics, motion lyrics, etc; while they're sometimes cool, they're wastes of bandwidth and processing if I just want it play audio in a background tab.
- Cyberdog 7y agoBackground audio play only works if you're paying for the subscription service. Otherwise both video and audio stops when the app is backgrounded. Many times I've listened to a YouTube video or stream without watching it by just starting the video and then pocketing my phone and being careful not to touch it. I hear the audio and continue my shopping or cleaning or whatever while battery and bandwidth is wasted displaying the video to the debris inside my pocket. I can only assume Google has run the numbers and decided it's actually more profitable for them to make something so silly and wasteful on both sides of the connection necessary, but that's what it is.
- NoodleIncident 7y agoYour phone might be saving you some battery; there is a sensor to detect when your face is close to the phone, turning off the screen and disabling touch. Not sure if it actually works when it's in your pocket though. There's a serious "light in the refrigerator" problem, where trying to measure it changes the outcome
- Dylan16807 7y agoIt's really easy to see if that sensor is active. It's not fridge light at all, it triggers at a distance and you could test against your shirt to see if the light shines through. I've never seen it be active outside of a phone call.
- lukifer 7y ago
- catalogia 7y agompv --no-video [youtube url] (This uses youtube-dl, without saving it to your hard drive.)
- rampant_ai 7y agoYou're still pulling down the video data itself, it's just being removed after-the-fact. But this will save your battery on a laptop since you're not rendering the video.
- arandomsapien 7y agoThis is an option in the mobile app, but only if you're a paid premium user. Otherwise, to listen to audio only on mobile you need to keep the screen on.
- Waterluvian 7y agoTwitch has audio only mode. I use it when working outside.
- Hamuko 7y agoyoutube-dl -f bestaudio https://youtu.be/YT0k99hCY5I Or if you want to listen to it straight away mpv --ytdl-format=bestaudio https://youtu.be/YT0k99hCY5I
- dredmorbius 7y agompv is absolutely transformative for Youtube (and a huge number of other platforms, services, & urls). youtube-dl can directly stream as well, e.g., youtube-dl -o - "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj" | vlc - (from the manpage). And there's mps-youtube as well.
- Zhyl 7y agoif you want to search for a song: mpv --ytdl-format=bestaudio 'ytdl://ytsearch1:John Butler Trio Ocean' As a function: !#/bin/bash yt(){ mpv --ytdl-format=bestaudio "ytdl://ytsearch1:$*" } Edit: as per comment below, swapped '--no-video' for '--ytdl-format=bestaudio'
- sidcool 7y agoThey have YouTube premium for that feature.
- rustybolt 7y agoYoutube is a lost cause. It has too many ads now, I don't use it anymore.
- swebs 7y agoInstall ublock origin. It blocks Youtube ads.
- Crash0v3rid3 7y agoI'd rather we don't suggest options that limit the amount of money creators get. If you don't like the ads, just pay for premium.
- icebraining 7y agoThe problem is that the price is poorly adjusted to local markets. The subscription in, say, Spain is actually higher than in Sweden, which makes no sense! Everyone here goes on about how "it's just the price of 3 cups of coffee", but here it's most definitively not.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoFor another data point, in Mexico it's down to 119 MXN (4.80 USD) per month.
- bad_user 7y agoIn Romania it's 5.37 EUR for the solo account, or 8.06 EUR for the family pack. 5.37 EUR is the price of 2 Starbucks lattes, 8.06 EUR the price of 3 lattes. Not insignificant, but given the lack of ads (very important for my kid to not be exposed to brainwashing crap), or option of playing in the background for my phone, it's totally worth it. And I think overall I watch more YouTube than Netflix.
- icebraining 7y ago> 5.37 EUR is the price of 2 Starbucks lattes, 8.06 EUR the price of 3 lattes. Yeah, and that's why there are like three Starbucks in my whole EU country. A latte in any coffeeshop here costs 1.2€, because they're adjusted to local salaries.
- dang 7y agoUrl changed from https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-24-youtube-standard-definition-default-worldwide-coronavirus-covid-19.html https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-24-youtube-standard-definit..., which points to this.
- thelean12 7y agoYou should also change the title to be less misleading. They said they're changing the default quality, not completely limiting quality.
- mh- 7y agoyes, that's quite a bit different.
- dang 7y agoOk, we've stuck a default up there.
- herpderperator 7y agoIf it's default then it's not a limit. It should just says YouTube to change default [...]. It mislead me for sure.
- xiphias2 7y agoIt's great that I can still override it. Companies are taking away important features, at least this stays (for now)
- TomGullen 7y agoYou do understand why they are doing this right?
- xiphias2 7y agoI do, but I usually can't read any of the code examples and small text slides when I don't set the videos to the highest definition :( I wish they would use special compression for text that's not moving. Do you have a better suggestion?
- cbhl 7y agoIt's totally okay to manually set the YouTube player to 4K for this use case. For low-motion static content like a slideshow or console window, a ultra-low frame rate usually results in acceptable fidelity while minimizing bandwidth, but not all hardware decoders (think Chromecasts, TVs) play well with them, so it wasn't possible to go down this road in general. (Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion and not that of my employer.)
- Hamuko 7y agoI understand that this isn't a problem where I live. The traffic and communications ministry has already stated that the networks are going to be fine. The peak is just shifting towards daytime and our networks are built so that there's still ample room on top of the peak.
- neonate 7y agohttps://archive.md/aOqCc https://archive.md/aOqCc
- noodlesUK 7y agoI'm still confused by all of this. Surely most video services are capable of adapting to lower bandwidth (and congested) links very easily. I personally have a fibre line directly to my house, and whilst the peering isn't great with my provider (Frontier), the network is more than capable of doing basically any video task. Why should the video bitrate be dropped because some second rate ISPs are oversubscribing super badly? Isn't all of this totally against the principles of net neutrality?
- 121789 7y agoyou're making a big assumption that most of the world has great in-home broadband access. this isn't true in many places (e.g. India). mobile networks would get crushed by the uptick in traffic combined with the shift in geographic usage that will be caused by the lockdown
- IndrekR 7y agoIt is not about the last mile. Problem is mostly with increased international traffic saturating the large pipes.
- GhostVII 7y agoHow would lowering YouTube quality help with that? Pretty sure videos are going to be served to users by CDN servers close to them.
- unethical_ban 7y ago...and initially those videos have to be seeded by central servers. CDNs are caches. I am sure it gets much more complex with systems at Youtube scale, but they don't keep all files at all edges. Furthermore, they know what the fuck they are doing, and if ISPs and governments are going "shit, our bandwidth is nuts, hey Youtube/Netflix can you cool it a little?" then maybe there is something to it. Why and how is everyone an armchair NOC operator/epidemiologist/supply chain manager? How is it so hard to believe that when you get past certain politicians/bureaucracies, there are smart people working to figure out these hard problems that likely know a little bit more than we do?
- swebs 7y agoAnd if you don't know, you can use Youtube-dl to download videos from most sites for offline viewing. https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#description https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#description
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- woofie11 7y agoTo be frank, I'd like this all the time. For most videos, buffering is more annoying than resolution, and I don't care about quality. The only time I care about quality is some educational content where there are e.g. small equations on the screen. Good call.
- SahAssar 7y agoYou do know that you can select the resolution you want, right?
- Naac 7y agoFor those who only read the title, this is actually only setting the default quality to standard definition. You can still watch 4k videos by changing the setting manually.
- vorpalhex 7y agoThat seems exceedingly reasonable. 4k when you need it, by a lower default.
- Dylan16807 7y ago480 instead of 720 seems a bit excessive of a first-step cutback.
- SECProto 7y agoI hope YouTube keeps this, even as a preference - I am often satisfied with 720p, and it uses less bandwidth consumption for those occasions when I am constrained.
- NoPicklez 7y agoSurely you would have gathered that from only reading the title right?
- Narishma 7y agoThe title was changed. It didn't include 'default' before.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- SeanLuke 7y agoI have noticed Youtube's landing page to be quite slow to load compared to most other sites. I had assumed it was some stupidity in my low-bandwidth network connection: but I now wonder if Youtube's just getting killed by all of us staying at home.
- scrumbledober 7y agoTheir search from my PS4 youtube app has been very noticeably slow the last couple days.
- smichel17 7y agoAdd &disable_polymer=1 to the end of the url and see if it's different. Here's an add-on to do this automatically: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-polymer-youtube/?src=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-polym...
- TrinaryWorksToo 7y agoWhere's the extension that will automatically upgrade my video quality when this happens?
- lewisj489 7y agoMake it yourself?
- RealStickman 7y agoThis extension should allow you to set basically anything you want for YouTube. Preferred resolution, audio level, playback speed and much more. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-...
- xhrpost 7y agoIs this ultimately just to free up bandwidth in areas limited by poor last mile infrastructure? The US has some of the cheapest transit network bandwidth costs in the world. Most ISPs can peer to YouTube(Google) for free minus the cost of equipment/data center ports. Thus, is this just addressing the last mile problem again, when the video finally makes it to the neighborhood and you just have too many people on a single DOCSIS node?
- walshemj 7y agowell trying to use a cable network is your problem there
- kitteh 7y agoSimilar bottlenecks occur in FTTx/DSL networks. For example, uplink congestion on a DSLAM or L2 aggregation device.
- op00to 7y agoA well engineered DOCSIS network can really scream. Unfortunately it’s way cheaper to oversubscribe since 99.99% of the time no one complains.
- sneak 7y agowell-engineered vs oversubscribed is a false dichotomy. A well-engineered network is an oversubscribed one.
- thedance 7y agoWhat is the primary source on this? None of Alphabet's mouthpieces contain this information. I glanced at Google's own blog, various YouTube blogs, several official Twitter accounts, and SEC filings in EDGAR. I search PR Newswire etc.
- icebraining 7y agohttps://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9777243?p=covid19_updates https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9777243?p=covid19_...
- holoduke 7y agoI wonder if the reason to lower quality is really because of being generous to the rest of the world. That's just not Google. I am quite into the online advertising world and I know that the current cpm/rpm ad revenue in many premium countries went down by 30-60%. This means a way lower margin for Google. One way to decrease the loss is lowering the total bandwidth
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoI'm all for calling out Google where it's warranted, but come on, I think the simplest explanation for this (reducing default bandwidth - note it doesn't prevent people from manually choosing HD - helps the world without costing Google much of anything) is the correct one. Lowering their bandwidth isn't going to make a lick of difference in their overall stock price one way or the other.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- prawn 7y agoI don't know that it's calling them out to describe a specific business reason behind a decision. It's not unreasonable for a business to adjust to maintain financial stability, especially for a "free" product served in exchange for ads.
- gundmc 7y agoI'm not sure it would actually save them any money at all. They are still transcoding into the higher quality, so you don't save compute resources. The videos themselves are served from edge CDN nodes. Through peering agreements I doubt Google is paying much for bandwidth. I'm not sure where this would save Google any money. It seems to just be a helpful (if more symbolic) thing to do.
- ahupp 7y agoThat's not how costs for these companies work. They have CDNs inside the networks of large ISPs, and everything else goes over leased lines with fixed capacity. They aren't paying by the byte like some Comcast overage fee.
- everdrive 7y agoI'm really glad to hear it. To be honest, I've always seen the race to 4k or whatever else to be inherently decadent.
- overeater 7y agoSeems like another thing that would help is every browser and media service adopted AV1 for video and WEBP for images. That itself would save an insane amount of bandwidth (maybe a quarter of the world's bandwidth).
- cbhl 7y agoAV1 encoding/decoding is still expensive. Netflix only started rolling it out for part of its catalog recently. It's been interesting watching them scale up Netflix Party in the meantime...
- aaron695 7y agoI noticed a lot of the recent torrents are smaller than usual. Not sure if they have regulated themselves or the sources are reduced. Or both.
- kalleboo 7y agox265 has been gaining in acceptance, and those are noticeably smaller
- tudorw 7y agoSymmetric connection speeds we miss you, sorry about taking the internet and turning it into a few mega nodes, we'll learn eventually.
- maallooc 7y agoUgh, can’t Europe behave? Healthcare, Internet.... they should get their s* together.
- vonseel 7y agoOh so it’s like PornHub on any usual day
- sidcool 7y agoI never imagined the big G would have to worry about scalability