10 ms·

YouTube broke for 40% of the UK population after rolling out 60 FPS videos

55 points by user5994461 6y ago

jeroenhd 6y ago
It's amazing how utter garbage large parts of the digital UK infrastructure are for a country this rich and developed.
jchw 6y ago
When I read the title I assumed it was going to be something fascinating like 500 mile email, but it sounds like it does still work, it just pushes lower bandwidth connections to lower quality. Seems pretty suboptimal especially if the 30 fps encoding will remain into the future but not what I was expecting. Side note: ouch on those internet speeds :( I think I’m too impatient for that now.
BoumTAC 6y ago
Same in france. I was able to watch 1080p now I'm stuck to 480p. That's a lot worse situation. I live in one of the biggest cities but like everywhere we have a shitty connection
onion2k 6y ago
The broadband speed numbers are from 2017, so they're a bit out of date - https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0038/194897/uk-home-broadband-performance.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0038/194897/... - The latest report from November 2019 has 26% of the UK on 10MBit or less rather than the 45% in the article. That's still significant enough to be an issue though, and YouTube really ought to give users a choice between quality and bandwidth if at all possible.
- user5994461 6y ago
  IMO the report from 2017 is the latest that was reporting on ADSL speed and didn't artificially inflate numbers like crazy. If you look at this 2019 report, they first say that only 1% has less than 10 Mbits on page 20, then 13% have less than 10 Mbits on page 22. Problem, metrics are like are so out of touch with reality, they're just made up. People actually use ADSL (copper) and it can't do more than 10 Mbps if you're a mile away from the internet center, that's the case for way more than 13% of the population. You could think that people have switched to fiber but they have not, I live in central London and it's hit and miss if you can get fiber at all in an apartment block.
lawrenceyan 6y ago
Wow, are internet speeds in the UK actually that slow? Why are they so far behind the EU?
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Not in cities where there is cheap fibre available. But in rural areas it can definitely be like this. It's at least partly because the government ordered our national telecom provider to halt their fibre rollout in the 80s/90s because it deemed it anti-competitive. It's still catching up for lost time.
- jlouis 6y ago
  Probably a complex explanation with many reasons. I dont think there is a single reason.
  - doublerabbit 6y ago
    Oh there is. The government.
  - aloisdg 6y ago
    Capitalism.
- amriksohata 6y ago
  The annual 2019 world speeds report from research firm M-Lab and Cable.co.uk has revealed that for 2019 the United Kingdom delivered an average (mean) broadband ISP download speed of just 22.37Mbps (up from 18.57Mbps in 2018 and 16.51Mbps in 2017), ranking us 34th fastest in the world (up from 35th last year).
- doublerabbit 6y ago
  Because we have a government who doesn't give a shite arse about infrastructure. And that of BT Open Reach corruption. I live in the city centre and I don't even have fibre. Meanwhile all the new corrupt housing developments all get "fibre" as a perk for buying a house on land that floods.
nrki 6y ago
An example of Silicon Valley technology assumption. Many apps assume 100% internet connectivity at all times. i.e. not even minimally functional when offline. They assume a certain speed, latency and packet loss (zero). The adage should be: plan for the worst, then adjust for reality.
- oefrha 6y ago
  YouTube does plan for the worst, you can even watch on a <100kbps connection if you're okay with 144p (and YouTube will downgrade to that automatically). It seems that OP defines downgrading to 720p60 (?) as "broken". I do support bringing back the 1080p30 stream though. Edit: Tested in Chrome with the "Slow 3G" throttling profile. YouTube automatically falls back to 240p with some buffering.
  - Twisell 6y ago
    Why is it broken? It's clever to push lower quality, but here they push to a lower quality than what was achievable so far before the "upgrade". So from a user standpoint, YouTube have downgraded the service overnight for all low speed connections. The more frustrating being for users that could sustain 1080p yesterday and are "upgraded"(?) to 720p60 today. Roughly same bandwidth but much lower resolution for what? better frame-rate? Not sure why anyone would prioritize frame-rate over resolution with all our fancy HiDPI screen.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      It's much worse than that. When you watch a video with text or small content, like a gaming video for example, these have menus and texts, it stops being readable when downgraded from 1080p to 720p (or worse). It's broken. When you live with flatmates or family, you're getting crazy load time and erratic pauses now because of the contention. There's not enough headroom to buffer ahead with the bandwidth use increasing 50% overnight. The video is dropping as soon as somebody else opens something, it's effectively broken. The algorithm will see contention and downgrade the quality, only to upgrade it again a minute later when it sees a bit of headroom, only to fail again. There's a lesson here on network contention. Worse case is with 2 people browsing youtube, the 2 players are fighting each other for bandwidth.
ubanholzer 6y ago
This should push Boris and UK GOV to subsidise fiber development. It’s insane if 40% of the population just has <=8 Mbit/s in 2020!
- pjc50 6y ago
  They do. Like most Tory initiatives, the money makes it to shareholders but not to actual improvements. https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/government-pledges-pound5bn-for-rural-fibre https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/government-pledges-pound5b...
amriksohata 6y ago
22.37Mbps The annual 2019 world speeds report from research firm M-Lab and Cable.co.uk has revealed that for 2019 the United Kingdom delivered an average (mean) broadband ISP download speed of just 22.37Mbps (up from 18.57Mbps in 2018 and 16.51Mbps in 2017), ranking us 34th fastest in the world (up from 35th last year).
pjc50 6y ago
"Like all software updates lately, the switch happened and there’s nothing you can do about it."
- rasz 6y ago
  There are YT UI extensions allowing you to play only 30fps, force h.264 encoder etc. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-open-sour/bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-op... Default fixed Video Quality to always match your Screen and bandwidth: always 720p, 1080p, 4k, 8k ? Or simply 480p, 240p? avoid 60 frames (vs. 30 fps)? H264 codec (h264ify to speed up Player / save CPU electricity. H.264 encoding is fast, efficient in GPUs built before 2016 without VP8 VP9 )
contravariant 6y ago
Unless something drastically changed shouldn't 99% of all videos on Youtube still be 24, 25, 29.97 or 30 fps? It's pretty rare that I encounter any 60 FPS videos. Anyway for people suffering from this problem there's always https://youtube-dl.org/ https://youtube-dl.org/. It has some advanced options to download the right stream or even just grab the URLs to play the stream directly.
1023bytes 6y ago
60FPS is also noticeably more power hungry. I wish YouTube made it optional.
Fumtumi 6y ago
I upgraded away from my x220 because i could hear when a YT Video was 60fps... I think its good to push boundaries but making my x220 no longer feasible for YT no.
- rasz 6y ago
  You could of went with https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-open-sour/bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-op... instead of hardware replacement.
hoseja 6y ago
There was a userscript that forced 30fps but it stopped working recently.
- rasz 6y ago
  just checked and https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-open-sour/bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-op... works, is able to default YT into 1080p@30 and play fine on Thinkpad x220
  - hoseja 6y ago
    Thanks, never would have found that.
0xUser 6y ago
clickbaity title.
wasmitnetzen 6y ago
I noticed that the fans on my PC (Core i5-4570, GTX750TI) started spinning loudly yesterday when watching a 1080p livestream in Firefox on Linux, which I think didn't happen before. Granted, that setup is getting old and I'm already planning a replacement, but still.
- cehrlich 6y ago
  That's really bad design/accessibility on YouTube's part, especially as the median PC is likely significantly slower than yours (I'd guess it's a dual core of some sort and intel integrated graphics). Outside of some very specific things like gaming etc, I don't think I've ever watched a YouTube video and wished that it was 60fps. Even if there was a ton of bandwidth and CPU available on the client side, I'd prefer if they spent it on putting more information into each of the 24/30 frames.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    There is nothing wrong with integrated intel graphics. They may suck for complex 3d and gaming, but have video decode units which are very well supported.
- rasz 6y ago
  You shouldnt notice a difference, 750ti has zero problems hardware decoding 1080p@60 h264.
jgalt212 6y ago
dumb question: What percent of videos can the user actually detect 60 fps vs 30 fps?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  When people try doubling frame rate, such as in the Hobbit, everyone makes a huge deal out of it, so I'm guessing everyone can.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  It's easy to tell in panning shots. I found a fairly neat site that demonstrates this. Even at slower pan rates it's quite obvious, and I think it would be even more obvious with a full frame rather than just a strip. https://www.testufo.com/ https://www.testufo.com/ E.g. https://www.testufo.com/framerates-versus#photo=eiffel.jpg&pps=960&framepacingerror=0&direction=rtl&framerate=30&compare=2&showfps=1 https://www.testufo.com/framerates-versus#photo=eiffel.jpg&p... It is a little unfair because you'd hope film makers use a high duty cycle exposure (I can't remember the technical name, but basically it will blur the result), but I've seen plenty of films that don't.
- rasz 6y ago
  every video with any movement
fraencko 6y ago
I think decoding performance is something to consider, too. This might be anecdotal but when we switched to encoding videos in 60 FPS on a channel I was involved in ~4 years ago, some users complained that their Android TV sets (afair a Sony model was mentioned) weren't able to play our new videos stutter free anymore. 30 FPS should stay the default option. At least YouTube should make the FPS setting manually configurable independently from resolution.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  1st Gen Chromecasts also can't do some resolutions/framerates of videos stutter free, and the user has no way to select the quality, so video producers get complaints if they upload too high res... Seems to happen most frequently with slideshow video content, not sure why.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sigio 6y ago
Thank $deity for gigabit fiber to the home for €40/month. Netherlands is one of the countries with the highest average bandwidths available (though not the cheapest)
andor 6y ago
Only videos that are uploaded at 60fps are served with 60fps
hexo 6y ago
60fps videos look so bad to me, I'd really love to have possibility to switch to classic frame rates all the time. :(
- rasz 6y ago
  Classic framerates like 16 fps?
  - hexo 6y ago
    Like 24, 25 or 30 fps. Well below eye's Nyquist rate. Everything above that looks like garbage unless there was special care taken to look good or real reason to shoot at higher fps. Upsampling to 60fps seems like even worse idea because it usually introduces soap opera-like effect.
gushie 6y ago
Would those people who truly care about 60fps also care about resolution, so have a 1080p or 4K screen? I would like to think most people watching at 720p would be happy with 30fps.
Crosseye_Jack 6y ago
I find it hard to believe that 40% of the UK still only have access to ADSL only connections. Thinkboardband have "superfast" (>24 Mbps) at 96.83% UK household/business coverage. 91% Openreach >30 Mbps coverage. Basically "Fibre" (FTTC/VDSL/G.fast/Cable/FTTP) has a 98.73% coverage atm. - https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/ https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/ VDSL (Pretty much the cheapest of the list above - though Virgin (Cable) have slower speed packages priced to compete with VDSL) comes in 3 flavours. Upto 38Mbps, Upto 50Mbbps and upto 80Mpbs (The upto depends on the copper cable quality and distance from modem to the Streetside VDSL cabinet). The data they list is for ADSL2+ connections which max out in ideal worlds at 24Mpbs (When ADSL2+ was the fastest I could get I was getting 16Mpbs). Its dependant on the quality and the distance of the copper cable between the modem and the exchange the line is connected to, a much further distance) With the push from ISP's to get more people onto VDSL or better lines the price between VDSL and ADSL is next to nothing (A cost differnce of £2 per month for my ISP). I know many households that have been auto upgraded to VDSL by their ISP's (If you have a modem from recent years then the upgrade can happen without anyone even visiting the home). For an example of an alt to ADSL. They live in London, they have decent 4g/5g coverage, a no contract pay per month unlimited data sim from Three cost £35 p/m and less if you commit to a contract period. I was happily pulling 100Mpbs down on that plan and using 2TB+ per month with 0 complaints from Three. Granted you have to have the luck of the draw of being in decent range of an non over utilised mast which would be harder in a more dense area like London. Yes we still have blackspots (Mainly people who live a distance away from their closest cabinet) in the UK where connectivity is still shit and there are pushes and grants from the goverment to reduce those blackspots. I just don't buy the 40% of the UK number quoted. I think they mean that YT broke for 40% of the people still on ADSL connections. To OP (if they are reading) buy a 4G router off eBay (They are cheap and slap a Three simcard in it and give it a spin to test speeds in your area), OK you are now going to be CGNAT'ed (on ipv4) but if that is a problem (it was rarely a problem for me) there are ways around that too using a £5 per month VPN - I lived with using a 4G connection for 12 Months just fine. I Feel bad for the people who live in the real sticks and don't have even that option to consider. The bad parts of using a 4G conenction from Three? At the time I couldn't get IPv6 but towards the end of my time with them that was more down to my hardware than Three's problem. A slighlty higher ping then using a fixed line connection but I was happily playing online FPS's on the connection. And when I wanted to host a IPv4 server I had to use something like ngrok or spin up a VPN and tunnel to that and then use the VPN's ipv4 address. ngrok is easiler to set up but VPN will give you a static IP. Oh and (if like what happened to me) if your local mast get knocked offline for what ever reason (A car driving into it for example... Yup that happened to me) you will have to use a mast thats further away which now has more users using it so speeds will get slower. On the plus side for that if soemone crashes into your local cabinet (Also happened to me but years prior) you are going to get knocked offline with no fallback until the cabinet operater comes out and repairs it.
londons_explore 6y ago
Youtube engineers 100% reviewed the effect (via an A/B test) of deploying 1080p60. If it didn't lead to overall more watch time (as a proxy for user happiness with the service) they wouldn't have launched. They'll have diced the metrics by user device (to see if specific devices perform poorly at those frame rates), ISP (to look for incompatibilities with ISP QoS settings targeted at youtube), country, and a bunch of other metrics. They wouldn't have launched until the vast majority of users saw a better overall experience, and all regressions were at least understood. You're right that some changes within Google aren't properly AB tested, or are pushed out at the direction of management whatever the metrics say, but this one I guarantee was. From all of the above, I can conclude that the majority of users in your position probably prefer 720p60 over 1080p30.
- majewsky 6y ago
  > more watch time (as a proxy for more ad money) FTFY
londons_explore 6y ago
My computer (Linux, Chrome, Intel gfx) struggles with some 60 fps youtube content. If I accidentally play it at more than 1.0x speed fullscreen, the whole browser will lock up while still playing the video. All interactions with buttons and UI elements can get delayed by seconds or even minutes. It means if you play a video at 2.0x, and then you click pause 1 minute into the video, that pause will take 1 extra minute before having an effect! I figure it's because my screen is only 60 fps, and it still displays 1 video frame per display frame, and doesn't skip video frames as it should. The bugs been around for 2+ years...
tgpc 6y ago
London here Max. normal offering: ADSL2 only, 12mbit down, 1mbit up We had to buy a leased line for the building (1gbit down/1gbit up)
throwaway189262 6y ago
AV1 cannot come soon enough. My family is stuck on DSL, nothing they can do. 10 megabits down is annoying, but the 700 kbps upload is worthless. I can't do any video chat. But AV1 encode is relatively fast for low resolution. I could have decent video on chat if companies cared enough to use AV1 for slow connections. Youtube is slowly migrating. The only video chat I can find so far is Duo and nobody uses it for work

55 points by user5994461 6y ago

It's amazing how utter garbage large parts of the digital UK infrastructure are for a country this rich and developed.

jchw 6y ago

When I read the title I assumed it was going to be something fascinating like 500 mile email, but it sounds like it does still work, it just pushes lower bandwidth connections to lower quality. Seems pretty suboptimal especially if the 30 fps encoding will remain into the future but not what I was expecting. Side note: ouch on those internet speeds :( I think I’m too impatient for that now.

BoumTAC 6y ago

Same in france. I was able to watch 1080p now I'm stuck to 480p. That's a lot worse situation. I live in one of the biggest cities but like everywhere we have a shitty connection

onion2k 6y ago

The broadband speed numbers are from 2017, so they're a bit out of date - https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0038/194897/uk-home-broadband-performance.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0038/194897/... - The latest report from November 2019 has 26% of the UK on 10MBit or less rather than the 45% in the article. That's still significant enough to be an issue though, and YouTube really ought to give users a choice between quality and bandwidth if at all possible.

user5994461 6y ago
IMO the report from 2017 is the latest that was reporting on ADSL speed and didn't artificially inflate numbers like crazy. If you look at this 2019 report, they first say that only 1% has less than 10 Mbits on page 20, then 13% have less than 10 Mbits on page 22. Problem, metrics are like are so out of touch with reality, they're just made up. People actually use ADSL (copper) and it can't do more than 10 Mbps if you're a mile away from the internet center, that's the case for way more than 13% of the population. You could think that people have switched to fiber but they have not, I live in central London and it's hit and miss if you can get fiber at all in an apartment block.

lawrenceyan 6y ago

Wow, are internet speeds in the UK actually that slow? Why are they so far behind the EU?

nicoburns 6y ago
Not in cities where there is cheap fibre available. But in rural areas it can definitely be like this. It's at least partly because the government ordered our national telecom provider to halt their fibre rollout in the 80s/90s because it deemed it anti-competitive. It's still catching up for lost time.
jlouis 6y ago
Probably a complex explanation with many reasons. I dont think there is a single reason.
- doublerabbit 6y ago
  Oh there is. The government.
- aloisdg 6y ago
  Capitalism.
amriksohata 6y ago
The annual 2019 world speeds report from research firm M-Lab and Cable.co.uk has revealed that for 2019 the United Kingdom delivered an average (mean) broadband ISP download speed of just 22.37Mbps (up from 18.57Mbps in 2018 and 16.51Mbps in 2017), ranking us 34th fastest in the world (up from 35th last year).
doublerabbit 6y ago
Because we have a government who doesn't give a shite arse about infrastructure. And that of BT Open Reach corruption. I live in the city centre and I don't even have fibre. Meanwhile all the new corrupt housing developments all get "fibre" as a perk for buying a house on land that floods.

nrki 6y ago

An example of Silicon Valley technology assumption. Many apps assume 100% internet connectivity at all times. i.e. not even minimally functional when offline. They assume a certain speed, latency and packet loss (zero). The adage should be: plan for the worst, then adjust for reality.

oefrha 6y ago
YouTube does plan for the worst, you can even watch on a <100kbps connection if you're okay with 144p (and YouTube will downgrade to that automatically). It seems that OP defines downgrading to 720p60 (?) as "broken". I do support bringing back the 1080p30 stream though. Edit: Tested in Chrome with the "Slow 3G" throttling profile. YouTube automatically falls back to 240p with some buffering.
- Twisell 6y ago
  Why is it broken? It's clever to push lower quality, but here they push to a lower quality than what was achievable so far before the "upgrade". So from a user standpoint, YouTube have downgraded the service overnight for all low speed connections. The more frustrating being for users that could sustain 1080p yesterday and are "upgraded"(?) to 720p60 today. Roughly same bandwidth but much lower resolution for what? better frame-rate? Not sure why anyone would prioritize frame-rate over resolution with all our fancy HiDPI screen.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    It's much worse than that. When you watch a video with text or small content, like a gaming video for example, these have menus and texts, it stops being readable when downgraded from 1080p to 720p (or worse). It's broken. When you live with flatmates or family, you're getting crazy load time and erratic pauses now because of the contention. There's not enough headroom to buffer ahead with the bandwidth use increasing 50% overnight. The video is dropping as soon as somebody else opens something, it's effectively broken. The algorithm will see contention and downgrade the quality, only to upgrade it again a minute later when it sees a bit of headroom, only to fail again. There's a lesson here on network contention. Worse case is with 2 people browsing youtube, the 2 players are fighting each other for bandwidth.

ubanholzer 6y ago

This should push Boris and UK GOV to subsidise fiber development. It’s insane if 40% of the population just has <=8 Mbit/s in 2020!

pjc50 6y ago
They do. Like most Tory initiatives, the money makes it to shareholders but not to actual improvements. https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/government-pledges-pound5bn-for-rural-fibre https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/government-pledges-pound5b...

amriksohata 6y ago

22.37Mbps The annual 2019 world speeds report from research firm M-Lab and Cable.co.uk has revealed that for 2019 the United Kingdom delivered an average (mean) broadband ISP download speed of just 22.37Mbps (up from 18.57Mbps in 2018 and 16.51Mbps in 2017), ranking us 34th fastest in the world (up from 35th last year).

pjc50 6y ago

"Like all software updates lately, the switch happened and there’s nothing you can do about it."

rasz 6y ago
There are YT UI extensions allowing you to play only 30fps, force h.264 encoder etc. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-open-sour/bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-op... Default fixed Video Quality to always match your Screen and bandwidth: always 720p, 1080p, 4k, 8k ? Or simply 480p, 240p? avoid 60 frames (vs. 30 fps)? H264 codec (h264ify to speed up Player / save CPU electricity. H.264 encoding is fast, efficient in GPUs built before 2016 without VP8 VP9 )

contravariant 6y ago

Unless something drastically changed shouldn't 99% of all videos on Youtube still be 24, 25, 29.97 or 30 fps? It's pretty rare that I encounter any 60 FPS videos. Anyway for people suffering from this problem there's always https://youtube-dl.org/ https://youtube-dl.org/. It has some advanced options to download the right stream or even just grab the URLs to play the stream directly.

1023bytes 6y ago

60FPS is also noticeably more power hungry. I wish YouTube made it optional.

Fumtumi 6y ago

I upgraded away from my x220 because i could hear when a YT Video was 60fps... I think its good to push boundaries but making my x220 no longer feasible for YT no.

rasz 6y ago
You could of went with https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-open-sour/bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-op... instead of hardware replacement.

hoseja 6y ago

There was a userscript that forced 30fps but it stopped working recently.

rasz 6y ago
just checked and https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-open-sour/bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-op... works, is able to default YT into 1080p@30 and play fine on Thinkpad x220
- hoseja 6y ago
  Thanks, never would have found that.

0xUser 6y ago

clickbaity title.

wasmitnetzen 6y ago

I noticed that the fans on my PC (Core i5-4570, GTX750TI) started spinning loudly yesterday when watching a 1080p livestream in Firefox on Linux, which I think didn't happen before. Granted, that setup is getting old and I'm already planning a replacement, but still.

cehrlich 6y ago
That's really bad design/accessibility on YouTube's part, especially as the median PC is likely significantly slower than yours (I'd guess it's a dual core of some sort and intel integrated graphics). Outside of some very specific things like gaming etc, I don't think I've ever watched a YouTube video and wished that it was 60fps. Even if there was a ton of bandwidth and CPU available on the client side, I'd prefer if they spent it on putting more information into each of the 24/30 frames.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  There is nothing wrong with integrated intel graphics. They may suck for complex 3d and gaming, but have video decode units which are very well supported.
rasz 6y ago
You shouldnt notice a difference, 750ti has zero problems hardware decoding 1080p@60 h264.

jgalt212 6y ago

dumb question: What percent of videos can the user actually detect 60 fps vs 30 fps?

chrisseaton 6y ago
When people try doubling frame rate, such as in the Hobbit, everyone makes a huge deal out of it, so I'm guessing everyone can.
IshKebab 6y ago
It's easy to tell in panning shots. I found a fairly neat site that demonstrates this. Even at slower pan rates it's quite obvious, and I think it would be even more obvious with a full frame rather than just a strip. https://www.testufo.com/ https://www.testufo.com/ E.g. https://www.testufo.com/framerates-versus#photo=eiffel.jpg&pps=960&framepacingerror=0&direction=rtl&framerate=30&compare=2&showfps=1 https://www.testufo.com/framerates-versus#photo=eiffel.jpg&p... It is a little unfair because you'd hope film makers use a high duty cycle exposure (I can't remember the technical name, but basically it will blur the result), but I've seen plenty of films that don't.
rasz 6y ago
every video with any movement

fraencko 6y ago

I think decoding performance is something to consider, too. This might be anecdotal but when we switched to encoding videos in 60 FPS on a channel I was involved in ~4 years ago, some users complained that their Android TV sets (afair a Sony model was mentioned) weren't able to play our new videos stutter free anymore. 30 FPS should stay the default option. At least YouTube should make the FPS setting manually configurable independently from resolution.

londons_explore 6y ago
1st Gen Chromecasts also can't do some resolutions/framerates of videos stutter free, and the user has no way to select the quality, so video producers get complaints if they upload too high res... Seems to happen most frequently with slideshow video content, not sure why.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sigio 6y ago

Thank $deity for gigabit fiber to the home for €40/month. Netherlands is one of the countries with the highest average bandwidths available (though not the cheapest)

andor 6y ago

Only videos that are uploaded at 60fps are served with 60fps

hexo 6y ago

60fps videos look so bad to me, I'd really love to have possibility to switch to classic frame rates all the time. :(

rasz 6y ago
Classic framerates like 16 fps?
- hexo 6y ago
  Like 24, 25 or 30 fps. Well below eye's Nyquist rate. Everything above that looks like garbage unless there was special care taken to look good or real reason to shoot at higher fps. Upsampling to 60fps seems like even worse idea because it usually introduces soap opera-like effect.

gushie 6y ago

Would those people who truly care about 60fps also care about resolution, so have a 1080p or 4K screen? I would like to think most people watching at 720p would be happy with 30fps.

Crosseye_Jack 6y ago

I find it hard to believe that 40% of the UK still only have access to ADSL only connections. Thinkboardband have "superfast" (>24 Mbps) at 96.83% UK household/business coverage. 91% Openreach >30 Mbps coverage. Basically "Fibre" (FTTC/VDSL/G.fast/Cable/FTTP) has a 98.73% coverage atm. - https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/ https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/ VDSL (Pretty much the cheapest of the list above - though Virgin (Cable) have slower speed packages priced to compete with VDSL) comes in 3 flavours. Upto 38Mbps, Upto 50Mbbps and upto 80Mpbs (The upto depends on the copper cable quality and distance from modem to the Streetside VDSL cabinet). The data they list is for ADSL2+ connections which max out in ideal worlds at 24Mpbs (When ADSL2+ was the fastest I could get I was getting 16Mpbs). Its dependant on the quality and the distance of the copper cable between the modem and the exchange the line is connected to, a much further distance) With the push from ISP's to get more people onto VDSL or better lines the price between VDSL and ADSL is next to nothing (A cost differnce of £2 per month for my ISP). I know many households that have been auto upgraded to VDSL by their ISP's (If you have a modem from recent years then the upgrade can happen without anyone even visiting the home). For an example of an alt to ADSL. They live in London, they have decent 4g/5g coverage, a no contract pay per month unlimited data sim from Three cost £35 p/m and less if you commit to a contract period. I was happily pulling 100Mpbs down on that plan and using 2TB+ per month with 0 complaints from Three. Granted you have to have the luck of the draw of being in decent range of an non over utilised mast which would be harder in a more dense area like London. Yes we still have blackspots (Mainly people who live a distance away from their closest cabinet) in the UK where connectivity is still shit and there are pushes and grants from the goverment to reduce those blackspots. I just don't buy the 40% of the UK number quoted. I think they mean that YT broke for 40% of the people still on ADSL connections. To OP (if they are reading) buy a 4G router off eBay (They are cheap and slap a Three simcard in it and give it a spin to test speeds in your area), OK you are now going to be CGNAT'ed (on ipv4) but if that is a problem (it was rarely a problem for me) there are ways around that too using a £5 per month VPN - I lived with using a 4G connection for 12 Months just fine. I Feel bad for the people who live in the real sticks and don't have even that option to consider. The bad parts of using a 4G conenction from Three? At the time I couldn't get IPv6 but towards the end of my time with them that was more down to my hardware than Three's problem. A slighlty higher ping then using a fixed line connection but I was happily playing online FPS's on the connection. And when I wanted to host a IPv4 server I had to use something like ngrok or spin up a VPN and tunnel to that and then use the VPN's ipv4 address. ngrok is easiler to set up but VPN will give you a static IP. Oh and (if like what happened to me) if your local mast get knocked offline for what ever reason (A car driving into it for example... Yup that happened to me) you will have to use a mast thats further away which now has more users using it so speeds will get slower. On the plus side for that if soemone crashes into your local cabinet (Also happened to me but years prior) you are going to get knocked offline with no fallback until the cabinet operater comes out and repairs it.

londons_explore 6y ago

Youtube engineers 100% reviewed the effect (via an A/B test) of deploying 1080p60. If it didn't lead to overall more watch time (as a proxy for user happiness with the service) they wouldn't have launched. They'll have diced the metrics by user device (to see if specific devices perform poorly at those frame rates), ISP (to look for incompatibilities with ISP QoS settings targeted at youtube), country, and a bunch of other metrics. They wouldn't have launched until the vast majority of users saw a better overall experience, and all regressions were at least understood. You're right that some changes within Google aren't properly AB tested, or are pushed out at the direction of management whatever the metrics say, but this one I guarantee was. From all of the above, I can conclude that the majority of users in your position probably prefer 720p60 over 1080p30.

majewsky 6y ago
> more watch time (as a proxy for more ad money) FTFY

londons_explore 6y ago

My computer (Linux, Chrome, Intel gfx) struggles with some 60 fps youtube content. If I accidentally play it at more than 1.0x speed fullscreen, the whole browser will lock up while still playing the video. All interactions with buttons and UI elements can get delayed by seconds or even minutes. It means if you play a video at 2.0x, and then you click pause 1 minute into the video, that pause will take 1 extra minute before having an effect! I figure it's because my screen is only 60 fps, and it still displays 1 video frame per display frame, and doesn't skip video frames as it should. The bugs been around for 2+ years...

tgpc 6y ago

London here Max. normal offering: ADSL2 only, 12mbit down, 1mbit up We had to buy a leased line for the building (1gbit down/1gbit up)

throwaway189262 6y ago

AV1 cannot come soon enough. My family is stuck on DSL, nothing they can do. 10 megabits down is annoying, but the 700 kbps upload is worthless. I can't do any video chat. But AV1 encode is relatively fast for low resolution. I could have decent video on chat if companies cared enough to use AV1 for slow connections. Youtube is slowly migrating. The only video chat I can find so far is Duo and nobody uses it for work