YouTube doesn't create H.264 versions for 1440p or higher. If there's no VP9 support, the best resolution you'll get is 1080p. Some Apple devices are (or used

YouTube doesn't create H.264 versions for 1440p or higher. If there's no VP9 support, the best resolution you'll get is 1080p. Some Apple devices are (or used to be?) affected by this. For example, on Mac, Firefox or Chrome have been able to play 8K YouTube videos for a long time while Safari couldn't go past 1080p. This was "fixed" a few months ago, but only because Apple added VP9 support. I don't think H.264 will disappear from YouTube anytime soon. They'll continue to use it as a fallback for devices that can't play VP9 or AV1 files. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if VP9 was dropped before H.264 when AV1 support (and YouTube's encoding capabilities) improve. At the end of the day, Google/YouTube doesn't have to use a paid and proprietary codec like H.265 and Roku doesn't have to support VP9 or AV1 with hardware (or software) decoding. But since H.264 support is still there, the hardware should be able to play 1080p YouTube videos without a problem.