TH-cam's compression on 1080p videos has definitely gotten increasingly noticeable over the years. I swear it feels like 10 years ago I didn't really notice it unless I was looking for it, and then slowly over the years, videos across the board got increasingly muddy and blocky looking.
This! It has absolutely gotten worse. I think I have been part of their trial as well because I’ve even seen straight up blurs and its been infuriating.
And have you thought about the fact that when you buy a newer smartphone or TV you have a higher screen resolution? Because on my ip6s I haven't noticed a difference in the quality of yt videos, only the bitrate which has always been low and I'm glad they fixed that
I have some ancient downloads of stuff laying around that I occasionally re-download on similar codecs/resolutions to compare the bitrates. An average video could have up to 8000kbits at 1080p AVC in 2012, whereas that rate seems (more than?) halved now. For some bitrate indulgence these days, I feel like I have to pull up the screen recording of Alcatraz' "Kill the Encoder" tho. At 4K60 it's around ~80Mb/s and burns away over 1GB of your data/bandwidth in just under 2mins - if it can buffer in time.
I don't see how this will dissuade people from simply uploading their 1080p videos in 4K to work around the issue of low bitrate like they've always done.
I used to live in Africa with very restricted data usage on my wifi (30gb/month /household). I watched at 144p and 240p, and could really notice how well TH-cam has optimised the data usage required for videos.
@NadVic17 wow that is quite sad.. I lived in Uganda, and in terms of speed we had 2MB/s, but if you only have 30GB for a whole month then that expires quickly.
@@LYoda the 30 gb option was also introduced to us at around 2013/14. Before that, we had 384 kbit/s in our village. Later, we had those 30 gb with around 2 mb/s as well over LTE, but after those 30 gb for our whole family (4-5 people at that time), we again dropped down to our usual 384 kbit/s. And that isn't even the biggest joke: We paid 70 € per month for the 30 gb option!!! I'm in IT. I use around 30-50 gb each day.... Back in the 384 kbit times, i needed around 1 day to download 1 gb... Imagine downloading a game with 30 gb XD. Germany is a joke when it comes to infrastructure like that. Everything got privatised, and the greedy companies didn't see that maybe, just maybe, access to internet should be established for everyone, and not only the bigger cities. We had like 70 people in our village. Of course it doesn't really pay off to build a new wire for those little villages. Moral of the story: don't give your precious state infrastructure to private companies that only watch their own gain.
Even 440p over the years have gotten so much better. Even with 1GB up and down I still play at 440p or in rare cases I max it out when needed. Maybe a 1 video a week. I have no idea what people are watching that makes 720p even necessary to be entertained or gather information. I mean sure sometimes I also have to pause a video and turn on max settings to read something or whatever. But 99.9% of the cases 440p is the best TH-cam have ever delivered on over all this years. Even 60fps is useless compared to the improvements at 440p. Even really dark scary horror stuff looks grate at 440p now. Yea pixle peeing is not going to do grate but laying in bed it is more then enough. Going from old 144p to modern 440p TH-cam? It is like going from black and white TV to color TV.
I keep trying to explain to people that German public TV networks transmit in 720p BUT with 50p AND 14000-16000kbit/s bitate, while the pay to view private HD stations transmit in 1080i (50i/25p) with bitrates of 6000kbit/s or lower. Most people still think resolution is more important than bitrate 😬
@@OriginalCatfish42 how? they certainly have heard of byte at least. "something something data" + rate, means speed of data, or amount of data over time
One thing that AV1 will probably improve: VP9 doesn't just hate confetti and snow like any other compressed video codec, it also really hates the strong edges present in leafless foliage.
@@chiyolate you reminded me of my favorite compression artifacts - it's particularly disturbing to watch a creature gently emerge from the surface of wavy water with surface reflections... _The waves embody the creature initially until the codec goes cross-eyed and abruptly aborts compression in confusion. Suddenly, it was a seal all along!_ _Sure, you're safe now, but the codec blacked out and forgot what just happened. If only we could be as fortunate..._
Glad most of my favorite content creators have started uploading in 1440p or higher because man 1080p is looking rough on a decent desktop monitor nowadays…
I think computing resource is also a big factor. AVC is inefficient in terms of bandwidth, but it takes much less compute power to encode in than VP9 or AV1.
@@2kliksphilip 2 things. 1. In the testing I have made, the chosen bitrate changed the encoding time a lot, especially for AV1 and VP9. On top of that if you encode at a fixed bitrate, you can change the "effort" the algorithm uses , thus giving you to videos with the same bitrate but different video quality. 2. Also I do not think you can separate the resolution, bitrate and code from each other. They all have a grate impact on the video quality. I do not care what resolution and bitrate I am watching I care about the video quality. If you pay at 1080p settings you can still get a bad quality AVC1 video, or a good quality VP9 or AV1 video. I don't know the bitrate yt have chosen for there VP9 and AV1 encodings, but it might be that AV1 has a lower bitrate than VP9, but I have not noticed any difference. On the other hand AVC1 hurts my eyes every time I see it. If 1080p normal was AVC1 and 1080p premium was VP9 or AV1 (with the current settings) this would matter a lot.
@@2kliksphilip You can technically make a point that they can use more time-efficient calculations at higher bitrates, but at the end - they need to spend them bits, and it's harder to do so sensibly at higher bitrates - so it's still a part of discussion - Whether to use h264 as that "premium" tier as well. I wonder if all devices can playback 1080p60-highish bitrate now. Otherwise it may not work best for TH-cam afterall? TH-cam recommends uploading using h264 codec - I wonder if transcoding it to high vp9/AV1 won't cause more of the generation loss than h264>h264. May they also simply use h264 uploads that they keep stored? Probably not, but is there anything that prohibits them from doing so?
a) hardware encoders whose sole purpose is to encode videos exist. they are literally only capable of encoding videos of a specific codec because they've been engineered to do so b) bandwidth has to be paid for every time a video is watched unlike a video where its rendered once and half a million people can enjoy the same thing. by reducing bandwidth costs go down which is why every video over 100 views is more or less encoded in vp9 and those below are still avc
1440p theoretically should be enough, at least that forces TH-cam to use VP9 instead of AVC (it does use VP9 for lower resolutions too if the video got enough attention apparently)
It still amazes me that TH-cam is as profitable as it is. 99% of the content on this platform is just pure expense on the side of TH-cam (personal videos like weddings/birthdays/etc), we're talking beyond Petabytes of storage/bandwidth, especially when you factor in how things gets copied around to different data centers for redundancy/performance reasons. Honestly, I expect TH-cam to be a very different and much a worse service 50 years from now, I just can't imagine how they'll keep up as South America, Africa, India continue to grow. We'll be telling our grand kids about what TH-cam was like 50 years ago and they won't believe us.
On the other hand, if they normalize paying for the platform it would encourage higher quality competition. One of the big issues is that youtube is free and nobody but a Google can compete with that business model. I could see a future where already paid streaming services like Netflix, Amazon etc. also offer video hosting if Google removes the option to watch youtube for free. Perhaps we'd even see the emergence of a new tech giant in that space.
@@omarcomming722 Third worlder here, yes, we pay for premium, and most people i know do. It is part of the "No Cable" combo, HBO+ YTPremium (with YT music) and Netflix
As a note for the end of the video, Premium is tied to the email, not the youtube account. If your other YT channels are all under one email they all get premium. You can also do YT Premium family plan for 50% more and get 5 more emails you can add the plan onto. It's what I do.
I used to COMFORTABLY be able to watch 720p videos. Around the start of the pandemic they dropped the bitrate if I recall. Since then 720p is nearly unwatchable, at least on videos that include things such as onboards from cars or anything with a lot of motion.
True. I have been watching every video in the highest possible quality for like 10 years now, but i remember this thing that happened around 2020. 720p still had the "HD" label next to it, now it doesn't
I will never give TH-cam or Google a single cent if they continue to behave in the manner that they have been. What a joke to treat their viewers and creators so poorly and then expect people to want to pay for "premium" features.
@@Smoginchibim It could've been countless more, with less algorithmic suppression, less focus on their on-contract stars for TH-cam Red and more respect for the ordinary channels. Don't needlessly succumb to media hate campaign's and governments' wishes. Be a neutral platform like a regular city street is. Like any other major platform/social media they actively work to make it more addictive, the so-called Facebook Papers was just the first drop in the ocean that will become the awakening towards the modern technology. At the moment we are too zombified to realize. Essentially TH-cam has to solve the same problem like Mozilla: How do you get people to donate? This is exactly what it looks like to me, I am not interested in their paywalled services and given Google's past and reputation I am in the same boat as @@UCVvQKWrhaVtphyWPvTD6zkg (BakedAndSteaked, idk if that link will work)
Jesus, dude. You sound super entitled. It's free and you're bitching? Lol. Bandwidth costs a HUGE amount of money. So does all the reencoding they do. Yikes.
youtube premium has a family plan that lets you add up to five accounts to the plan. It's cheaper than paying for each account individually and I give the extra seats to my family.
I have not seen this... And I have premium.... Maybe this is different from country to country. Update: I just checked, and I can now choose a family plane, I have not seen this before. Thanks.
For the bit that you don't understand, here's my take. I'm still fairly confused on it, but I have the very prestigious label of "has used FFmpeg" so I gave it some thinking: Take a look at figure 4's probabilities superimposed against the quality/bitrate graph. Reasonably, they play the highest video resolution that can be supported for that connection. But notice how flat the curve is within that region. They have a lot of wiggle room before the operating point before the quality begins to drop off drastically. So, they don't start showing you that resolution once you hit the operating point for it; rather, the operating point is the place where they upgrade you to the next highest resolution. For example, when you hit the operating point for 360p, they switch your stream to 480p at the lower bitrate. There's still the point that you brought up in the beginning about 1000Kbps 1080p being worse than 1000Kbps 720p. But, notice that the article treats 1080p as the absolute highest, not the "normal" resolution. They seem to care more for this in the lower resolution/bitrate space, where the data pipeline is smaller. I did some encoding testing with 360p and 480p at low bitrates for Beat Saber videos (a surprisingly bitrate-sensitive game) and found that ~600Kbps was where 480p started to look better than 360p at the same bitrate. At 800Kbps, the 480p stream was significantly better, so we could maybe call that the operating point. 480p still has a while to go before it gets to diminished returns (the operating point that would send you to 720p), but why stay on 360p when 480p is marginally better for the same cost? The idea is that they upgrade the stream to a higher resolution before they even approach the point of diminished returns, since the higher resolution has already started to look better. --- As an aside, I hope AV1 takes off. Haven't been able to play with it myself because I lack the hardware (and AV1 CPU encode is mega slow, if it even works right), but it looks really promising. Great for details in black areas, which is a massive problem for x264 and even NVENC.
I think it may be changing approach from fixed bitrate ladder to "per-category" - "per region" and all those metrics (or playback reliability, when using harder to decode functions?) that where mentioned in the article. I don't know, it's probably a bit complicated, as simply fixing their bitrate goals, doesn't sound post worthy. but it's quite vague at the end.
I don't know what data it was based off of, but the dev notes you referenced said there was no drop in "perceived" image quality. So, I'm guessing they used some data that suggests people didn't notice the quality difference (most likely measured in an indirect and dubious fashion). The image quality was almost certainly objectively worse, but they had information to suggest that it wasn't consequential (at least that's my read of it)
A long time ago I saw an article (couldn't find it now) which explored how the same JPEG image looked when downscaled vs. the quality slider on JPEG moved to make the file size lower than the downscaled version. Almost universally, the lower bitrate higher pixel count versions looked better. So I think this is what the TH-cam document means. Seems like something you can explore in a video as well :)
This is generally how it works, but only to a point. An example is streaming, since the bitrate has a definite maximum. A 720p30 will look noticeably better than any 1080p60 if the bitrate is low enough. But if a game for example moves slowly then a 1080p30 stream at the same bitrate as 720p30 will look better. Motion is what causes blocking and smearing. If videos are fast paced they're going to look bad without a huge bitrate. If they're slow, you always want higher res even at low bitrates. Hence why a jpg--being a still image has less to worry about.
@@flameshana9 well, even for anime that is mostly static images with flat colours and not many details I still prefer 720p with higher bitrate than bit starved 1080p
I swear video quality has gotten worse and they're definitely doing this shit on purpose becase they want people to pay for that premium trash, as if the imtrussive ads weren't bad enough
Maybe you should try testing the video quality at fixed bitrates for different codecs. There are a lot of settings and you can keep testing forever. But in the testing I made my self, I was very impressed with AV1 at super low bit rates. VP9 is still quite good, and AVC1/H.264/H.265 are lacking behind. I have yet to try to find settings where the encoding takes the same amount of time (I have only tried CPU encoding) for a test video, and see witch are better. Cause AV1 and VP9 takes a lot longer than h.264, when optimizing for quality at a fixed bitrate. The settings are nearly endless. 🙂
I upload my videos at 1440p to get around the awful bitrate of 1080p on youtube (extremely noticeable a 60fps in videos with a lot of foliage or many small moving objects.. be they particle effects or leaves). While 1440p is less than 50% better resolution, youtube allocates double the bitrate for 1440p videos vs 1080p. It's even worth just upscaling a 1080p video to 1440p before uploading just to ensure you get a better bitrate on youtube and most modern editing tools can do this in a mere few minutes now.
@@tteqhu More people will upload to 4k when youtube doesn't routinely take anywhere from 24 hours to 2 WEEKS to process your 4k video. If you upload a 4k video longer than a couple minutes long, there's a good chance it will be in processing hell for days, possibly weeks. I've had over half my 4k video uploads takes a minimum of 3 days to process (20 to 30 minutes long each). Quickest on a "good day" is 24 hours processing. In contrast, a 1080p video gets processed in minutes. A 1440p video usually a couple hours. But 4k taking days to process, nobody really wants to spend the time dealing with that (it's not a technlogy issue. If I can render and process the video myself in an hour or 2, there's no reason TH-cam should need several days to do it in their server farms).
@@Hathur Yeah that is slow for your channel because it's efficient. I think it would be great to have option to encode video on your own, but making encoder that widely works is probably not worth it for youtube (when few people would do that). Anyway: 4k is 4x pixels (relatively to 1080p). There are also likely seperate setups for 60fps. Try to think what is least important category for youtube: gaming: -high % base blocking ads, which doesn't even pay well. To that most of them will use 4k (so delaying processing might save them some bandwidth for impatient people) -relatively small channel: fewer people to notice, and again not hugely profittable to make their experience better. It'd be wasteful for them to have 2x as much hardware lying around, just because people post x3 as many videos around fri-sun. Instead load is spread throughout the week neatly, which delays purchases of new hardware for as long as possible = more $ It may also manage itself to work more extensively during times when energy is cheapest (example, their grid has significant wind/solar prod - check the forecasts)
The music made me think that my computer was about to explode until I paused the video + is there any noticeable differrence between 1080p Premium and normal 1080p?
For the bit you don't understand, looks like what they do is adjust the parameters of the video encoder to tweak specific areas of video quality that are least affected on the most devices. Assuming most people watch on their phones, I would bet this would look something like maintaining colour accuracy for everything but blacks, or focusing on maintaining the quality of small text at the cost of other small details - essentially "improving" the quality on these devices at a lower cost.
maybe this can explain the visual quality reduction on some really old videos(5+ years). like, blobby mess kind of quality reduction thanks to that repeated compression over time
5:45 I don't think You need to buy several subscriptions. The premium status is linked to your Google account. Unless you have various accounts to manage your different channels, all get premium. At least that's how it works for me. I agree with your opinion, Premium should add benefits and not take them away from free users. I subscribed when I worked in the navy and wanted to save videos and music while in harbour to play offline later. Sure, I could've pirated the music and downloaded the videos, but it was just more convenient at the time. We'll see what TH-cam does, but I'm sure they have the viewers and creator's best interest at heart, as they usually do. Right?
There is an enhanced bitrate option for some shows, but when I look at bitrate, it says AV1 2500kps for regular and vp9 2500kps for enhanced bitrated and av1 is supposed to be the better codec. So is there something wrong?
am i the only person to remember the "original" quality option we had a few years ago for free? i remember using it to check the battlefield 3 gameplay before i had a good gpu to run the game, it was mind blowing how amazing the quality was
Enhanced bitrate is such BS. Now 1080p Premium is just what we always used to have. and the now "regular" 1080p is a very noticable downgraded one. Aint paying shit for something I've always had before.
Regarding the multiple TH-cam Premiums issue, you can get a family subscription for a small additional premium (hah) over the normal price, which allows you to share it with up to 6 accounts in your household. That's what I've ended up doing since I want to make different accounts for different purposes (like work and language learning) but I've become too accustomed to the lack of ads, mobile background play, and the general sense of superiority I get from knowing that I'm providing support to my favourite TH-camrs regardless of whether their content gets demonetised or not to go back to the free experience.
The ad free experience knowing that the random TH-camr that I will not be able to support on patreon will still get paid is cool, better than just adblocking
not my case where i mainly use youtube for scrolling memes where most of the times ad revenue goes straight to yt but when i use it to stream music it just automute and autoskip ads, which i think is split ad revenue
You can add different accounts into a TH-cam family group, as long as they are in the same country. And use one TH-cam premium subscription for this group.
I’ve been paying for TH-cam premium for about 2 years now and I can’t imagine going back to free. Any time I’m on a TV and for whatever reason I’m not signed in, the ads are so incredibly jarring it’s actually painful.
@@maxtheawesome4255 yeah, I know that's a problem now. I thankfully got it when it was still official. I can't recommend anything safe. I guess, try to download it on PC on an emulator from some torrent, and run it on a virtual android phone, ensure it's safe and then download it on your phone
0:20 to be clear, encoders don't "drop the resolution". They simply encode in blocks and average out colors. Flatter colors are going to be averaged more, saving more space. It's why a flat color PNG is significantly smaller than a really complicated PNG.
Yeah, it's rather ironic to talk about misconceptions and then make the same one that uneducated people make. The res does not drop (easily tested with something like text) but the compression becomes a lot heavier.
They dont really average out, a block is quantized in the encoding process depending on Quality Factor (not practical to explain here how that exactly works, look up quantization in JPEGs for a basic understanding, but its important that its an entirely different thing than "averaging out"), thats how JPEGs work, PNG is a very bad example since its lossless and its basically just normal file compression. But besides quantization depending on the encoding standard lots of complex transformation are performed, both in time domain and spatial domain and in more advanced encoding standards even on the block layout itself, these are what mostly sets apart the different encoding standards.
Well, thanks for explaining why 1080p has been looking worse for a few years. I thought it was my eyes! A big example is watching games such as League of Legends - it looks so muddy and washed out and it is hard to see what is happening vs in game where it's very sharp.
Stop wasting data and start upscaling 😅 Do you understand 4k content huge amounts of data? A one hour film could be 10GB😅 Replace your browser with Opera and start using Lucid Mode to stay on 720p to waste MB instead of GB😅
@@100Bucks I mostly watch content on a landline connection so I get good speeds and don’t have to worry about how much data I use why not just use 4k looks better 😅
@@dean1100110 If you have unlimited Internet then my advice does not matter. If you don't then it does matter. Your bill will rise. Watching a one hour 4k video eats a lot of data vs a 720p hour video which is like 700mb. If you have unlimited Internet then ignore everything I said.
Today I styumbled upon this option in the gearwheel, midst watching a 1080p video, trying to increase the quality as it was a rather pixelated mess, only to realize that option is now behind a pay wall. I'd understand having 4K behind pay wall, but 1080? that has been the standard hi-def available for free for a decade.... complete corporate greed BS
The blog post is basically saying that the bitrates in which a video is encoded are based partly on the expected audience. So if a video's expected audience is in a region where bandwidth is more limited, then all of the resolution options will have lower bitrates, allowing more people to watch at higher resolutions than they otherwise would. This also reduces loading time and buffering events. I imagine they also use different encoding algorithms based on the types of devices in a regional video's audience, because some are more CPU intensive to decode than others (so if they know most people in a region are using slow phones, they can compensate for that, which improves the overall experience).
Does this mean TH-cam's past "4K only in Premium" was not a joke. Will they actually lock 1440p and 4K too when they do this? (haha this is discussed at 3:45) Because with some videos 1440p on a 1080p monitor is significantly better thanks to the increased bitrate. (this is also discussed at 5:00)
4k maybe but probably not 1440p. 4k isn't even a necessity, That change would affect something like 11% of users. I'm one of very few people who would be affected by that change, I use a 55 inch 4k tv as my main display and Even I can barely tell a difference between 1440p and 4k TH-cam content, Its compressed to shit anyway. 4k costs TH-cam an insane amount of money store and stream to you, and on phones where like 60% of all TH-cam views are from it makes 0 difference whatsoever since 4k screens on phones aren't a thing except for a couple attempts a few years ago that quickly went away because it was dumb and useless.
@@whitepaws60 YT defaults to 480p on mobile since an app update 1-2 years ago. Often stays at 480p too. Personally I find 720p sufficient on mobile and on PC I automatically download the feed in 720p too. Out of spite I might choose the max quality though :grrr: The storage of all basic formats* 4K-144p takes TH-cam 600% the size of a single 4K format. iirc the numbers are right, because I counted a while ago. *TH-cam provides a list of basic formats available to a user by default and probably has some "hidden" formats it doesn't let you play by default, like the "Original" quality years ago.
@@VADemon Yeah it defaults to 480p on mobile because most people wont notice on a phone screen and the people who do will just change it. on pc I use a chrome extension that among other things lets me set my default quality to 8k and it'll just automatically pick the highest resolution available for every video so that change never actually affected me
I view videos at 1440p windowed and not full screen because I like having full control of the play buttons at all times. It was like this when I used to have Winamp. The other reason I stream at 1440p maximum is because at 4K, TH-cam's video player is unable to keep its quality while minimizing the video size on my screen. Of course, videos that I wish to keep are always downloaded at 4K60. I'd hate to see it go for regular users.
@@BleedForTheWorld Do you not use the hotkeys? For MPC-HC I also rebound hotkeys after TH-cam: +-10s J/L, 5s with Shift, 1s with CTRL iirc. Frame step on , and .
I couldn't believe my eyes when I once saw a 720P video, with stupidly high bitrate, it actually looked as good as a blu-ray to my eyes. Bitrate is king.
One point though, I'd love to pay for an actual "almost bluray" 1080p / 4k... alas, I cannot (not on yt, netflix, hbo max, amazon...). It's incredibly annoying First world problem for me.
Since you mentioned having multiple TH-cam accounts and therefore needing multiple Premium subscriptions, I just want to point out that a single Premium subscription will cover all of your channels ("brand accounts") as long as they belong to the same Google account.
I've all but given up at this point. video editing and media production in general is one of my many hobbies and it's ultimately art for me. It's painful when 36+ hours of rendering and a 195GB video file gets completely obliterated by youtube compression and get zero views for it and then I proceed to be recommended 5 second shitty videos of stolen content that get hundreds of thousands of views by the algorithm. I fucking hate it here.
They might roll it out to free users as they were talking about getting rid of 4k for free users the other day, but 1080p premium will probably be a noticeable jump over regular 1080 while preventing free users destroying their costly bandwitdh at 4k for premium only? Edit: 3:47 Linus from LTT said they basilcaly held off on that because of backlash but this may be their solution. The small number of 4k users accounted for something insane like 70% of the total websites bandwidth despite being only a few % of actual users.
I think it's just unsustainable that way. If 4K is that horrible in bandwidth. They really should limit it. I totally get that. But tampering with other resolutions is wrong Give us free users one great resolution. You can even keep 1440p behind a premium. Heck you can keep 1080p premium behind a paywall on mobiles But for pc/tv users. Let us get the best 1080p. Take details away from 720p. That's fine. But 1080p should just be great
Honestly, it is TH-cam’s fault for not adapting to the advancement in tech. Locking a resolution behind a paywall way after it was thrown in for free was objectively and factually a step backwards for service wise. I don’t mind “enhanced bitrate”, since it wasn’t something was offered for free. And it is something that they can do with no problem, except the very few people who is more knowledgeable about video codec and bitrate to who would want it for free. But to my knowledge, TH-cam had been using VP9 for ages.
dear philip, could you talk about how the cracked version of hogwarts legacy has 20% better performance than the official one from steam? anti tamper/anti piracy is getting out of hand and its hitting the low/medium spec gamers!
Thats a very interesting idea. Perhaps, using Jdownloader, you could investigate in further detail, what TH-cam is now supplying us. I'd like to see some actual measured bitrates on video and audio. Currently upscaling my entire collection of Tintin from 576i to 1152p- I'm glad I can play Half Life 1 and RTCW in VR on my Quest 2 without needing my desktop, cause it looks like it'll be buggered for a few days haha
Idiots nerfed the 1080p bitrate years ago, that's why everyone now uploads at 4k for a way better bitrate and overall quality even upscaled. the bitrate they use for standard 1080p is terrible.
Hopefully replacing 1440p with this option will make the importance of bitrate more obvious to the general public. And since the TH-cam 1440p option is just 1080p with additional bitrate, the company would be more honest about it, too.
For the most part, I don't really see much difference between 1080p and 1080p Premium. Where I do see a major difference, is when using Opera and enabling Lucid Mode. It's really just an image sharpener, but it works rather well... for the most part. Now, on a video like this where 1440p/60 is available, THAT gies me a much cleaner video. And here's the funny thing. THIS computer that I'm on right now, only has a max res of 1080p! It's a Windows 7 box (I have my reasons) and when switching to the supposed 1440P res, it SHOULD fail! But it doesn't! Rather, the video now looks "better", which makes me question just what YT's 1080p REALLY is!!! ??? Again, 1440p/60 should not even work! So there's something going on behind the YT scenes, or so it seems. What I suspect is that most (if not all) of their formats are HIGHLY COMPRESSED! Now, when I do watch a video up in my Lab on a 49" true 4K TV and flip to 1440 or 2160, the videos that are actually in full real 4K (not those fakers out there) then the images are stunning. I also use Opera for those and enable Lucid Mode which further sharpens the videos. (sometimes too much, so I disable those).. Opera did a good job on their Lucid mode option. To my surprise, it doesn't cause a video to get jerky or studder as some other "sharpening" methods can do.
TH-cam premium is tied to the email, not the channel. So if the multiple accounts are brand channels, you can just give access to those channels to any other gmail (or apps account) that subscribes to Premium. Then as long as you're signed in to the subscribed account you're able to pick which TH-cam channel you use TH-cam as. Premium works just fine because you're still signed in to the subscribed email, just using TH-cam as a owner/manager/whatever of the brand account. Been using it like that for years with multiple channels, even as the non-primary subscriber for a TH-cam Premium family plan.
Laughing at the twitter users because this video has nothing to do with the drama invovled. Love you Philip please don't let these people ruin your career and keep up the good work
I do pay for premium so I can't wait to just switch between the modes to see if there is a difference. Very Surprised Philip doesn't have it. I have multiple subscriptions to services, and I have been canceling to save money. Disney is gone, Amazon gone, Paramount gone, next on my list is Netflix. I just have not even considered TH-cam premium, it is the one I use most often by a magnitude.
All the features should be for free. It's exploitative of those who don't know: Adblock is free on browsers. Background play is free on browsers (works on mobile too) Downloading is free Video just went into the intentionally reduced quality, which again should be free for all users.
@@SixonQQ I am happy paying. TH-cam has given me so much throughout my life. I learned a lot, laughed tons, and genuinely I just think it is the single greatest site on the internet. So I will happily pay and make it more profitable to maintain itself or grow. Or just give massive bonuses to executives.
@@johnnylattarulo6735 That wont increase bitrate, revance still is at the mercy of TH-cam for the supplied video. Not that is matters. 1080p premium is phone only anyways so I got fucked.
I have defienty noticed a huge dip in 1080p quality, but primarily in videos that offer the 1080p higher bitrate option with premium. My underatanding is that creators have the option to offer this in the hopes of getting more revenue from You Tube Premium subs. I have to believe this is largly backfiring as I can't be the only non premuim user that tends to spend less time watching less videos when they look like carp.
i have noticed that quite often when i watch a video from a small channel in the 1000 ish subs range or so i often can't watch in 1440p and 1080p is also a struggle sometimes but watching Linus Tech Tips at 4k a moment later is no problem. Now quality is difficult because not all are using the same software to record and edit or setting in that software. But if i were to pay for better quality i would expect a video to look 99% like it did before uploading it to youtube, no blurry dark scenes and so on
I subbed to Premium a few months ago. I've now grown fond of the YT Music offering, screen off playing (now that devanced is dead), and never seeing or hearing ads is fantastic. Is it worth the 12$ per month I pay? Well, YT is where I spend much of my time if I'm not streaming a movie or reading a book, so... Yes. I think so. I do worry that google is going to further monetize YT and inevitably raise Premiums price. We'll see, I guess.
Is the only subscription that I pay, and that I don't need to also. I've been using YT since 2012 (with adblock included) so why not give back after all these years of entertainment?
I find it more valuable than a netflix subscription since its cheaper and I watch way more stuff here anyway and supports all the channels I watch more.
I don't like TH-cam doing updates this crappy shit. I have been in YT since 2008 when I was kid and it make me feels like old TH-cam that I just love to comeback but now Google has changed with this shit.
I already pay for YTP so it's all a win for me. I can't believe I get to comfortably download videos AND to stream music on the same service. It's also nice knowing that my views give content creators more money too.
Yes, TH-cam Premium is just perfect in my eyes and the price is veeeery fair for what it offers. Don't understand people who still rather use shady adblock software than just paying this instead of Spotify.
The only downside is that while YT is ad-free using Premium, everyone puts sponsors in anyways. While I know that's the creators' decisions and that it's not TH-cam's responsibility, it's still an ad. More importantly I hate how inconsistent sponsors are. Some videos put them at the end which is nice. Others, however, will put it at the beginning or stretch out a really short video to toss it in, others will slap it straight into the middle of an important part.
I still don't like YT premium's price point. If it was like £40 a year, sure. But once you're into the £10+ a month sections, it starts to become a service competing with every other expensive monthly service you're paying for. Dropping Netflix/D+/Amazon Prime for TH-cam without ads (assuming you're not just blocking them anyway) and better bitrate ceases to be all that appealing. All that said, provided they don't just reduce 1080p bandwidth further for none-paying members (or finally kill 4K for people using a browser - I assume it'll happen in the next couple of years though) this is only a plus.
Buy one premium and add the other accounts as family members? Dont see why you need multiple premium membership for multiple channels unless you have more than 6, in which case, I would argue it is fair to pay for more Premium subscirptions.
5:09 HOLY CRAP THAT'S A GREAT POINT! We always complained that we had to upscale with nearest neighbor or Lanczos to force TH-cam to give us VP9/AV1 or 1440p for higher bitrates. The 1080p Premium finally gives us what we've always asked for. Good quality without having to upscale/re-render a video, and the bitrate isn't an absurd 20mbps version of the original 8mbps video. However, TH-cam knows this and is trying to profit over a feature we value so highly... It's a perfect system-pay up for if you're willing to see 1080p only videos in original quality.
5:35 "My main issue is that someone with multiple TH-cam accounts that I'm regularly switching between, I'd need to buy multiple TH-cam Premiums, and that's just going too far" Depends, are the TH-cam accounts on different emails, or are they accounts tied to the same email? From my experience with Premium, it's tied to the underlying Google account rather than the individual TH-cam channels/accounts.
DAB digital audio broadcasting in Europe was pushed with promises of amazing CD quality. Then they just jammed a gazillion stations into single multiplex resulting in near AM quality and far from normal FM quality. We all know what youtube will do.
A while ago i found a youtube test channel with 100 subs by chance, over the past few months they kept uploading videos with titles talking about "premium exempt bits" or something like that, now i finally understand what that was referencing to
TH-cam's compression on 1080p videos has definitely gotten increasingly noticeable over the years. I swear it feels like 10 years ago I didn't really notice it unless I was looking for it, and then slowly over the years, videos across the board got increasingly muddy and blocky looking.
You could just be getting better at noticing it
I always watch in 1080p and I've rarely seen any bad quality videos. You sure it isn't your connection? I have 1gbit, for reference.
This! It has absolutely gotten worse. I think I have been part of their trial as well because I’ve even seen straight up blurs and its been infuriating.
And have you thought about the fact that when you buy a newer smartphone or TV you have a higher screen resolution? Because on my ip6s I haven't noticed a difference in the quality of yt videos, only the bitrate which has always been low and I'm glad they fixed that
I have some ancient downloads of stuff laying around that I occasionally re-download on similar codecs/resolutions to compare the bitrates.
An average video could have up to 8000kbits at 1080p AVC in 2012, whereas that rate seems (more than?) halved now.
For some bitrate indulgence these days, I feel like I have to pull up the screen recording of Alcatraz' "Kill the Encoder" tho.
At 4K60 it's around ~80Mb/s and burns away over 1GB of your data/bandwidth in just under 2mins - if it can buffer in time.
I don't see how this will dissuade people from simply uploading their 1080p videos in 4K to work around the issue of low bitrate like they've always done.
wow, first time hearing of that trick
That's how I used to do it. I'd upload my 1080p clips at 1440p to get a higher bitrate. This was the way.
because 4K is next on the chopping block
3:43
Until they do the same thing with 4k
I liked the part where he compared 1080p Premium vs 1080p
ME Too that was the best part
Where did he do that? I've looked and I couldn't find that
@@alexpopescu6492 that's the joke
@@alexpopescu6492he making it too long
@@alexpopescu6492 Life's gonna be harder for you
I dreamt of Phillip last night
i dream of philip every night
@bird of the abyss oh
🤨
@bird of the abyss he's not French that's a big plus
I dreamt of Odgrub.
I used to live in Africa with very restricted data usage on my wifi (30gb/month /household). I watched at 144p and 240p, and could really notice how well TH-cam has optimised the data usage required for videos.
Africa? You're basically in the high end sector of internet. Until a few years back, i watched on 144p as well. Germany btw. Thx Kohl
@NadVic17 wow that is quite sad.. I lived in Uganda, and in terms of speed we had 2MB/s, but if you only have 30GB for a whole month then that expires quickly.
@@LYoda the 30 gb option was also introduced to us at around 2013/14. Before that, we had 384 kbit/s in our village. Later, we had those 30 gb with around 2 mb/s as well over LTE, but after those 30 gb for our whole family (4-5 people at that time), we again dropped down to our usual 384 kbit/s.
And that isn't even the biggest joke: We paid 70 € per month for the 30 gb option!!!
I'm in IT. I use around 30-50 gb each day.... Back in the 384 kbit times, i needed around 1 day to download 1 gb... Imagine downloading a game with 30 gb XD.
Germany is a joke when it comes to infrastructure like that. Everything got privatised, and the greedy companies didn't see that maybe, just maybe, access to internet should be established for everyone, and not only the bigger cities. We had like 70 people in our village. Of course it doesn't really pay off to build a new wire for those little villages.
Moral of the story: don't give your precious state infrastructure to private companies that only watch their own gain.
Even 440p over the years have gotten so much better. Even with 1GB up and down I still play at 440p or in rare cases I max it out when needed. Maybe a 1 video a week. I have no idea what people are watching that makes 720p even necessary to be entertained or gather information. I mean sure sometimes I also have to pause a video and turn on max settings to read something or whatever. But 99.9% of the cases 440p is the best TH-cam have ever delivered on over all this years. Even 60fps is useless compared to the improvements at 440p. Even really dark scary horror stuff looks grate at 440p now. Yea pixle peeing is not going to do grate but laying in bed it is more then enough. Going from old 144p to modern 440p TH-cam? It is like going from black and white TV to color TV.
@@TheDiner50 480 you mean
Me in Australia on satellite internet watching in 144p to save data: fockin beautiful mate huge difference
Starlink has entered the chat
our modems and home internet aren't much better
..(come on government you promised to upgrade it get on with it)
@@chickennugget6684it’s fine as long as you live in the city and have FTTP or HFC.
Hey Albanese said it was my turn on the internet today
Isn't is summer there, you can go outside and have fun
I keep trying to explain to people that German public TV networks transmit in 720p BUT with 50p AND 14000-16000kbit/s bitate, while the pay to view private HD stations transmit in 1080i (50i/25p) with bitrates of 6000kbit/s or lower.
Most people still think resolution is more important than bitrate 😬
It's the same dilemma as penis' length versus thickness.
@@EdgarFroescertainly an interesting comparison
To be fair, most people never heard of bitrate.
@@OriginalCatfish42 how? they certainly have heard of byte at least. "something something data" + rate, means speed of data, or amount of data over time
@@helper_bot Even if you can explain the concept to them, most people have nothing to compare to. 1000? 10,000? Is that a lot?
One thing that AV1 will probably improve: VP9 doesn't just hate confetti and snow like any other compressed video codec, it also really hates the strong edges present in leafless foliage.
You forgot the slightly moving clouds or sea waves.. that looks terrible also.
@@chiyolate Oh yeah, because VP9 thinks it's an undetailed unmoving area it doesn't have to waste bitrate but it actually is moving.
@@chiyolate you reminded me of my favorite compression artifacts - it's particularly disturbing to watch a creature gently emerge from the surface of wavy water with surface reflections... _The waves embody the creature initially until the codec goes cross-eyed and abruptly aborts compression in confusion. Suddenly, it was a seal all along!_
_Sure, you're safe now, but the codec blacked out and forgot what just happened. If only we could be as fortunate..._
Glad most of my favorite content creators have started uploading in 1440p or higher because man 1080p is looking rough on a decent desktop monitor nowadays…
For me, youtube 1080p is looking rough on a meh laptop screen too.
Idk but it looks A-okay on my 24 inch 1080p monitor.
@@sid6645 for me it doesn't, lol, and I don't even sit close to my monitor
I think computing resource is also a big factor. AVC is inefficient in terms of bandwidth, but it takes much less compute power to encode in than VP9 or AV1.
@@2kliksphilip 2 things.
1. In the testing I have made, the chosen bitrate changed the encoding time a lot, especially for AV1 and VP9. On top of that if you encode at a fixed bitrate, you can change the "effort" the algorithm uses , thus giving you to videos with the same bitrate but different video quality.
2. Also I do not think you can separate the resolution, bitrate and code from each other. They all have a grate impact on the video quality. I do not care what resolution and bitrate I am watching I care about the video quality. If you pay at 1080p settings you can still get a bad quality AVC1 video, or a good quality VP9 or AV1 video. I don't know the bitrate yt have chosen for there VP9 and AV1 encodings, but it might be that AV1 has a lower bitrate than VP9, but I have not noticed any difference. On the other hand AVC1 hurts my eyes every time I see it.
If 1080p normal was AVC1 and 1080p premium was VP9 or AV1 (with the current settings) this would matter a lot.
Computing isn’t the biggest issue, bandwidth or storage is.
@@2kliksphilip
You can technically make a point that they can use more time-efficient calculations at higher bitrates, but at the end - they need to spend them bits, and it's harder to do so sensibly at higher bitrates - so it's still a part of discussion -
Whether to use h264 as that "premium" tier as well.
I wonder if all devices can playback 1080p60-highish bitrate now. Otherwise it may not work best for TH-cam afterall?
TH-cam recommends uploading using h264 codec - I wonder if transcoding it to high vp9/AV1 won't cause more of the generation loss than h264>h264.
May they also simply use h264 uploads that they keep stored? Probably not, but is there anything that prohibits them from doing so?
TH-cam made a ton of VP9 hardware encoders not too long ago for their datacenters.
a) hardware encoders whose sole purpose is to encode videos exist. they are literally only capable of encoding videos of a specific codec because they've been engineered to do so
b) bandwidth has to be paid for every time a video is watched unlike a video where its rendered once and half a million people can enjoy the same thing. by reducing bandwidth costs go down which is why every video over 100 views is more or less encoded in vp9 and those below are still avc
5:00 yes it is so annoying having to export every 1080p video in 4K, just to have decent 1080p quality when its online...
1440p theoretically should be enough, at least that forces TH-cam to use VP9 instead of AVC (it does use VP9 for lower resolutions too if the video got enough attention apparently)
It still amazes me that TH-cam is as profitable as it is. 99% of the content on this platform is just pure expense on the side of TH-cam (personal videos like weddings/birthdays/etc), we're talking beyond Petabytes of storage/bandwidth, especially when you factor in how things gets copied around to different data centers for redundancy/performance reasons.
Honestly, I expect TH-cam to be a very different and much a worse service 50 years from now, I just can't imagine how they'll keep up as South America, Africa, India continue to grow. We'll be telling our grand kids about what TH-cam was like 50 years ago and they won't believe us.
On the other hand, if they normalize paying for the platform it would encourage higher quality competition. One of the big issues is that youtube is free and nobody but a Google can compete with that business model.
I could see a future where already paid streaming services like Netflix, Amazon etc. also offer video hosting if Google removes the option to watch youtube for free. Perhaps we'd even see the emergence of a new tech giant in that space.
@@gamingmarcus I'm never paying for it, nor is almost anyone from non-first world countries
@@omarcomming722 Third worlder here, yes, we pay for premium, and most people i know do. It is part of the "No Cable" combo, HBO+ YTPremium (with YT music) and Netflix
I don't think TH-cam was ever profitable up untill a couple years ago.
@@OriginalCatfish42 it definitely was profitable imo, then companies started to pull out from their ads game then blame the creators
As a note for the end of the video, Premium is tied to the email, not the youtube account. If your other YT channels are all under one email they all get premium.
You can also do YT Premium family plan for 50% more and get 5 more emails you can add the plan onto. It's what I do.
I'm sure the professional youtuber is aware of how TH-cam channels work 😅
Imagine paying ONE CENT for youtube lmao.
@@poika22 premium is worth it
@@poika22 happily
@@poika22 do you have any clue how expensive it is to handle & host terabytes of videos in HD every day
I used to COMFORTABLY be able to watch 720p videos.
Around the start of the pandemic they dropped the bitrate if I recall.
Since then 720p is nearly unwatchable, at least on videos that include things such as onboards from cars or anything with a lot of motion.
True. I have been watching every video in the highest possible quality for like 10 years now, but i remember this thing that happened around 2020. 720p still had the "HD" label next to it, now it doesn't
I will never give TH-cam or Google a single cent if they continue to behave in the manner that they have been. What a joke to treat their viewers and creators so poorly and then expect people to want to pay for "premium" features.
Just host 800 million videos for free. Its that easy 4Head
TH-cam has made countless people rich and since the start it has been free to use.
@@Smoginchibim It could've been countless more, with less algorithmic suppression, less focus on their on-contract stars for TH-cam Red and more respect for the ordinary channels. Don't needlessly succumb to media hate campaign's and governments' wishes. Be a neutral platform like a regular city street is.
Like any other major platform/social media they actively work to make it more addictive, the so-called Facebook Papers was just the first drop in the ocean that will become the awakening towards the modern technology. At the moment we are too zombified to realize.
Essentially TH-cam has to solve the same problem like Mozilla: How do you get people to donate? This is exactly what it looks like to me, I am not interested in their paywalled services and given Google's past and reputation I am in the same boat as @@UCVvQKWrhaVtphyWPvTD6zkg (BakedAndSteaked, idk if that link will work)
Jesus, dude. You sound super entitled. It's free and you're bitching? Lol. Bandwidth costs a HUGE amount of money. So does all the reencoding they do. Yikes.
Open-source will fix this.
youtube premium has a family plan that lets you add up to five accounts to the plan. It's cheaper than paying for each account individually and I give the extra seats to my family.
This.
I have not seen this... And I have premium.... Maybe this is different from country to country.
Update:
I just checked, and I can now choose a family plane, I have not seen this before. Thanks.
Plus no georestriction
It's the only subscription service I use, family gets all the YT music too.
Literally our family
For the bit that you don't understand, here's my take. I'm still fairly confused on it, but I have the very prestigious label of "has used FFmpeg" so I gave it some thinking:
Take a look at figure 4's probabilities superimposed against the quality/bitrate graph. Reasonably, they play the highest video resolution that can be supported for that connection. But notice how flat the curve is within that region. They have a lot of wiggle room before the operating point before the quality begins to drop off drastically. So, they don't start showing you that resolution once you hit the operating point for it; rather, the operating point is the place where they upgrade you to the next highest resolution. For example, when you hit the operating point for 360p, they switch your stream to 480p at the lower bitrate.
There's still the point that you brought up in the beginning about 1000Kbps 1080p being worse than 1000Kbps 720p. But, notice that the article treats 1080p as the absolute highest, not the "normal" resolution. They seem to care more for this in the lower resolution/bitrate space, where the data pipeline is smaller. I did some encoding testing with 360p and 480p at low bitrates for Beat Saber videos (a surprisingly bitrate-sensitive game) and found that ~600Kbps was where 480p started to look better than 360p at the same bitrate. At 800Kbps, the 480p stream was significantly better, so we could maybe call that the operating point. 480p still has a while to go before it gets to diminished returns (the operating point that would send you to 720p), but why stay on 360p when 480p is marginally better for the same cost?
The idea is that they upgrade the stream to a higher resolution before they even approach the point of diminished returns, since the higher resolution has already started to look better.
---
As an aside, I hope AV1 takes off. Haven't been able to play with it myself because I lack the hardware (and AV1 CPU encode is mega slow, if it even works right), but it looks really promising. Great for details in black areas, which is a massive problem for x264 and even NVENC.
I think it may be changing approach from fixed bitrate ladder to "per-category" - "per region" and all those metrics (or playback reliability, when using harder to decode functions?) that where mentioned in the article.
I don't know, it's probably a bit complicated, as simply fixing their bitrate goals, doesn't sound post worthy. but it's quite vague at the end.
I don't know what data it was based off of, but the dev notes you referenced said there was no drop in "perceived" image quality. So, I'm guessing they used some data that suggests people didn't notice the quality difference (most likely measured in an indirect and dubious fashion). The image quality was almost certainly objectively worse, but they had information to suggest that it wasn't consequential (at least that's my read of it)
4 sure that's it
Love seeing phillips patch note comparison skills being put to good use in other fields
:)
TH-cam justifying this measures by hosting prices, and yet, their profits are booming
29.24 billion U.S. dollars, up from the 28.84 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year., don't you feel sorry for them?
TH-cam is running on a lose
@@how2pick4name I see you think revenue is profit for some reason.
A long time ago I saw an article (couldn't find it now) which explored how the same JPEG image looked when downscaled vs. the quality slider on JPEG moved to make the file size lower than the downscaled version. Almost universally, the lower bitrate higher pixel count versions looked better. So I think this is what the TH-cam document means.
Seems like something you can explore in a video as well :)
This is generally how it works, but only to a point. An example is streaming, since the bitrate has a definite maximum. A 720p30 will look noticeably better than any 1080p60 if the bitrate is low enough. But if a game for example moves slowly then a 1080p30 stream at the same bitrate as 720p30 will look better.
Motion is what causes blocking and smearing. If videos are fast paced they're going to look bad without a huge bitrate. If they're slow, you always want higher res even at low bitrates. Hence why a jpg--being a still image has less to worry about.
@@flameshana9 well, even for anime that is mostly static images with flat colours and not many details I still prefer 720p with higher bitrate than bit starved 1080p
I swear video quality has gotten worse and they're definitely doing this shit on purpose becase they want people to pay for that premium trash, as if the imtrussive ads weren't bad enough
Maybe you should try testing the video quality at fixed bitrates for different codecs. There are a lot of settings and you can keep testing forever.
But in the testing I made my self, I was very impressed with AV1 at super low bit rates. VP9 is still quite good, and AVC1/H.264/H.265 are lacking behind.
I have yet to try to find settings where the encoding takes the same amount of time (I have only tried CPU encoding) for a test video, and see witch are better. Cause AV1 and VP9 takes a lot longer than h.264, when optimizing for quality at a fixed bitrate. The settings are nearly endless. 🙂
This would explain why auto-1080p is different from manual-1080p.
I upload my videos at 1440p to get around the awful bitrate of 1080p on youtube (extremely noticeable a 60fps in videos with a lot of foliage or many small moving objects.. be they particle effects or leaves). While 1440p is less than 50% better resolution, youtube allocates double the bitrate for 1440p videos vs 1080p. It's even worth just upscaling a 1080p video to 1440p before uploading just to ensure you get a better bitrate on youtube and most modern editing tools can do this in a mere few minutes now.
1440p is 77% better (pixel count)
sometimes even 4k is needed for comfortable viewing though
@@tteqhu More people will upload to 4k when youtube doesn't routinely take anywhere from 24 hours to 2 WEEKS to process your 4k video. If you upload a 4k video longer than a couple minutes long, there's a good chance it will be in processing hell for days, possibly weeks. I've had over half my 4k video uploads takes a minimum of 3 days to process (20 to 30 minutes long each). Quickest on a "good day" is 24 hours processing. In contrast, a 1080p video gets processed in minutes. A 1440p video usually a couple hours. But 4k taking days to process, nobody really wants to spend the time dealing with that (it's not a technlogy issue. If I can render and process the video myself in an hour or 2, there's no reason TH-cam should need several days to do it in their server farms).
@@Hathur
Yeah that is slow for your channel because it's efficient.
I think it would be great to have option to encode video on your own, but making encoder that widely works is probably not worth it for youtube (when few people would do that).
Anyway:
4k is 4x pixels (relatively to 1080p). There are also likely seperate setups for 60fps.
Try to think what is least important category for youtube:
gaming:
-high % base blocking ads, which doesn't even pay well. To that most of them will use 4k (so delaying processing might save them some bandwidth for impatient people)
-relatively small channel:
fewer people to notice, and again not hugely profittable to make their experience better.
It'd be wasteful for them to have 2x as much hardware lying around, just because people post x3 as many videos around fri-sun. Instead load is spread throughout the week neatly, which delays purchases of new hardware for as long as possible = more $
It may also manage itself to work more extensively during times when energy is cheapest (example, their grid has significant wind/solar prod - check the forecasts)
The music made me think that my computer was about to explode until I paused the video + is there any noticeable differrence between 1080p Premium and normal 1080p?
It’s 2 am kliks what the
i just check the time 💀
I am noticing terrible quality all over youtube now. So I guess according to youtube, I am not experiencing this blurry quality.
I’m scared of TH-cam’s new ceo if this already appears right after he took office
These programs are started way ahead of time, this is still Susan's work
Oh don't you worry, he's even worse than her somehow.
You think this was done in less than a week? lmao.
@@WayStedYou it takes less than a day to approve something, not make it. lmao
What next? TH-cam limiting how many videos we can watch per day?
For the bit you don't understand, looks like what they do is adjust the parameters of the video encoder to tweak specific areas of video quality that are least affected on the most devices. Assuming most people watch on their phones, I would bet this would look something like maintaining colour accuracy for everything but blacks, or focusing on maintaining the quality of small text at the cost of other small details - essentially "improving" the quality on these devices at a lower cost.
maybe this can explain the visual quality reduction on some really old videos(5+ years). like, blobby mess kind of quality reduction thanks to that repeated compression over time
@@proCaylakdoor stuck
the bs thing is that youtube dropped the bitrate for videos, especially 720p ones
5:45 I don't think You need to buy several subscriptions. The premium status is linked to your Google account. Unless you have various accounts to manage your different channels, all get premium. At least that's how it works for me. I agree with your opinion, Premium should add benefits and not take them away from free users. I subscribed when I worked in the navy and wanted to save videos and music while in harbour to play offline later. Sure, I could've pirated the music and downloaded the videos, but it was just more convenient at the time. We'll see what TH-cam does, but I'm sure they have the viewers and creator's best interest at heart, as they usually do. Right?
There is an enhanced bitrate option for some shows, but when I look at bitrate, it says AV1 2500kps for regular and vp9 2500kps for enhanced bitrated and av1 is supposed to be the better codec. So is there something wrong?
am i the only person to remember the "original" quality option we had a few years ago for free? i remember using it to check the battlefield 3 gameplay before i had a good gpu to run the game, it was mind blowing how amazing the quality was
Enhanced bitrate is such BS. Now 1080p Premium is just what we always used to have. and the now "regular" 1080p is a very noticable downgraded one. Aint paying shit for something I've always had before.
Regarding the multiple TH-cam Premiums issue, you can get a family subscription for a small additional premium (hah) over the normal price, which allows you to share it with up to 6 accounts in your household. That's what I've ended up doing since I want to make different accounts for different purposes (like work and language learning) but I've become too accustomed to the lack of ads, mobile background play, and the general sense of superiority I get from knowing that I'm providing support to my favourite TH-camrs regardless of whether their content gets demonetised or not to go back to the free experience.
The ad free experience knowing that the random TH-camr that I will not be able to support on patreon will still get paid is cool, better than just adblocking
not my case where i mainly use youtube for scrolling memes where most of the times ad revenue goes straight to yt
but when i use it to stream music it just automute and autoskip ads, which i think is split ad revenue
You're a sucker for giving money to Google.
it's exactly what Google wants
You can add different accounts into a TH-cam family group, as long as they are in the same country. And use one TH-cam premium subscription for this group.
I’ve been paying for TH-cam premium for about 2 years now and I can’t imagine going back to free. Any time I’m on a TV and for whatever reason I’m not signed in, the ads are so incredibly jarring it’s actually painful.
I've been using youtube vanced for 1 year now and I have the same feeling. Though I don't have to pay for it
@@MiSt3300 My bro, where can I get Vanced? After it got taken down, I've had a hard time finding a mirror.
Are you a boomer? Why would you have to watch ads without premium? Have you really never heard of the TH-cam clients without them?
🤡
@@maxtheawesome4255 yeah, I know that's a problem now. I thankfully got it when it was still official. I can't recommend anything safe. I guess, try to download it on PC on an emulator from some torrent, and run it on a virtual android phone, ensure it's safe and then download it on your phone
Isn‘t that part 2:00 talking about using AV1 encoding/decoding ?
0:20 to be clear, encoders don't "drop the resolution". They simply encode in blocks and average out colors. Flatter colors are going to be averaged more, saving more space. It's why a flat color PNG is significantly smaller than a really complicated PNG.
Yeah, it's rather ironic to talk about misconceptions and then make the same one that uneducated people make. The res does not drop (easily tested with something like text) but the compression becomes a lot heavier.
They dont really average out, a block is quantized in the encoding process depending on Quality Factor (not practical to explain here how that exactly works, look up quantization in JPEGs for a basic understanding, but its important that its an entirely different thing than "averaging out"), thats how JPEGs work, PNG is a very bad example since its lossless and its basically just normal file compression.
But besides quantization depending on the encoding standard lots of complex transformation are performed, both in time domain and spatial domain and in more advanced encoding standards even on the block layout itself, these are what mostly sets apart the different encoding standards.
Well, thanks for explaining why 1080p has been looking worse for a few years. I thought it was my eyes!
A big example is watching games such as League of Legends - it looks so muddy and washed out and it is hard to see what is happening vs in game where it's very sharp.
As someone with a 1080p display on my PC, I have indeed used the 4K option every time when applicable
Stop wasting data and start upscaling 😅 Do you understand 4k content huge amounts of data? A one hour film could be 10GB😅 Replace your browser with Opera and start using Lucid Mode to stay on 720p to waste MB instead of GB😅
@@100Bucks I mostly watch content on a landline connection so I get good speeds and don’t have to worry about how much data I use why not just use 4k looks better 😅
@@dean1100110 Wasting MB is a lot better than GB. a 300mb video vs 8GB video. 720p mb is the way to go.
@@100Bucks Why dose it matter
@@dean1100110 If you have unlimited Internet then my advice does not matter. If you don't then it does matter. Your bill will rise. Watching a one hour 4k video eats a lot of data vs a 720p hour video which is like 700mb. If you have unlimited Internet then ignore everything I said.
yt premium is nice. i find it worth it. It also supports my creators without watching the ads.
Today I styumbled upon this option in the gearwheel, midst watching a 1080p video, trying to increase the quality as it was a rather pixelated mess, only to realize that option is now behind a pay wall. I'd understand having 4K behind pay wall, but 1080? that has been the standard hi-def available for free for a decade.... complete corporate greed BS
You'd hope TH-cam makes it so the logged in account can watch their own videos in highest quality at least lol
I like the bit from Odgrub where he pisses himself
The blog post is basically saying that the bitrates in which a video is encoded are based partly on the expected audience. So if a video's expected audience is in a region where bandwidth is more limited, then all of the resolution options will have lower bitrates, allowing more people to watch at higher resolutions than they otherwise would. This also reduces loading time and buffering events. I imagine they also use different encoding algorithms based on the types of devices in a regional video's audience, because some are more CPU intensive to decode than others (so if they know most people in a region are using slow phones, they can compensate for that, which improves the overall experience).
1440p looks like 1080p 2 years ago now
Does this mean TH-cam's past "4K only in Premium" was not a joke. Will they actually lock 1440p and 4K too when they do this? (haha this is discussed at 3:45)
Because with some videos 1440p on a 1080p monitor is significantly better thanks to the increased bitrate. (this is also discussed at 5:00)
4k maybe but probably not 1440p. 4k isn't even a necessity, That change would affect something like 11% of users. I'm one of very few people who would be affected by that change, I use a 55 inch 4k tv as my main display and Even I can barely tell a difference between 1440p and 4k TH-cam content, Its compressed to shit anyway.
4k costs TH-cam an insane amount of money store and stream to you, and on phones where like 60% of all TH-cam views are from it makes 0 difference whatsoever since 4k screens on phones aren't a thing except for a couple attempts a few years ago that quickly went away because it was dumb and useless.
@@whitepaws60 YT defaults to 480p on mobile since an app update 1-2 years ago. Often stays at 480p too. Personally I find 720p sufficient on mobile and on PC I automatically download the feed in 720p too. Out of spite I might choose the max quality though :grrr:
The storage of all basic formats* 4K-144p takes TH-cam 600% the size of a single 4K format. iirc the numbers are right, because I counted a while ago.
*TH-cam provides a list of basic formats available to a user by default and probably has some "hidden" formats it doesn't let you play by default, like the "Original" quality years ago.
@@VADemon Yeah it defaults to 480p on mobile because most people wont notice on a phone screen and the people who do will just change it. on pc I use a chrome extension that among other things lets me set my default quality to 8k and it'll just automatically pick the highest resolution available for every video so that change never actually affected me
I view videos at 1440p windowed and not full screen because I like having full control of the play buttons at all times. It was like this when I used to have Winamp. The other reason I stream at 1440p maximum is because at 4K, TH-cam's video player is unable to keep its quality while minimizing the video size on my screen. Of course, videos that I wish to keep are always downloaded at 4K60. I'd hate to see it go for regular users.
@@BleedForTheWorld Do you not use the hotkeys?
For MPC-HC I also rebound hotkeys after TH-cam: +-10s J/L, 5s with Shift, 1s with CTRL iirc. Frame step on , and .
I couldn't believe my eyes when I once saw a 720P video, with stupidly high bitrate, it actually looked as good as a blu-ray to my eyes. Bitrate is king.
do you have the link?
One point though, I'd love to pay for an actual "almost bluray" 1080p / 4k... alas, I cannot (not on yt, netflix, hbo max, amazon...). It's incredibly annoying First world problem for me.
Interesting. I'll check it out when it comes. I rarely care past 480p though unless I'm watching something cinematic.
ew what the fuck
same
especially with my shit wifi setup currently
rarely go above 480p'
Me: Tries to upload Video in 1440p in AV1 Source.
Result: it's still transcoded in VP9 instead.
WHERE AV1 ?
Since you mentioned having multiple TH-cam accounts and therefore needing multiple Premium subscriptions, I just want to point out that a single Premium subscription will cover all of your channels ("brand accounts") as long as they belong to the same Google account.
I've all but given up at this point. video editing and media production in general is one of my many hobbies and it's ultimately art for me. It's painful when 36+ hours of rendering and a 195GB video file gets completely obliterated by youtube compression and get zero views for it and then I proceed to be recommended 5 second shitty videos of stolen content that get hundreds of thousands of views by the algorithm. I fucking hate it here.
They might roll it out to free users as they were talking about getting rid of 4k for free users the other day, but 1080p premium will probably be a noticeable jump over regular 1080 while preventing free users destroying their costly bandwitdh at 4k for premium only?
Edit: 3:47 Linus from LTT said they basilcaly held off on that because of backlash but this may be their solution.
The small number of 4k users accounted for something insane like 70% of the total websites bandwidth despite being only a few % of actual users.
I think it's just unsustainable that way.
If 4K is that horrible in bandwidth. They really should limit it. I totally get that. But tampering with other resolutions is wrong
Give us free users one great resolution. You can even keep 1440p behind a premium. Heck you can keep 1080p premium behind a paywall on mobiles
But for pc/tv users. Let us get the best 1080p. Take details away from 720p. That's fine. But 1080p should just be great
Honestly, it is TH-cam’s fault for not adapting to the advancement in tech.
Locking a resolution behind a paywall way after it was thrown in for free was objectively and factually a step backwards for service wise.
I don’t mind “enhanced bitrate”, since it wasn’t something was offered for free. And it is something that they can do with no problem, except the very few people who is more knowledgeable about video codec and bitrate to who would want it for free.
But to my knowledge, TH-cam had been using VP9 for ages.
@@killertruth186 That's what this post modern internet is, taking many steps backwards.
@@dividedstatesofamerica2520It was kind of inevitable, though, 4k is extremely data intensive.
@@Olivia-W Self fulfilling prophecy.
dear philip,
could you talk about how the cracked version of hogwarts legacy has 20% better performance than the official one from steam?
anti tamper/anti piracy is getting out of hand and its hitting the low/medium spec gamers!
Thats a very interesting idea.
Perhaps, using Jdownloader, you could investigate in further detail, what TH-cam is now supplying us. I'd like to see some actual measured bitrates on video and audio.
Currently upscaling my entire collection of Tintin from 576i to 1152p-
I'm glad I can play Half Life 1 and RTCW in VR on my Quest 2 without needing my desktop, cause it looks like it'll be buggered for a few days haha
Idiots nerfed the 1080p bitrate years ago, that's why everyone now uploads at 4k for a way better bitrate and overall quality even upscaled. the bitrate they use for standard 1080p is terrible.
Hopefully replacing 1440p with this option will make the importance of bitrate more obvious to the general public. And since the TH-cam 1440p option is just 1080p with additional bitrate, the company would be more honest about it, too.
You deserve more likes.
For the most part, I don't really see much difference between 1080p and 1080p Premium.
Where I do see a major difference, is when using Opera and enabling Lucid Mode.
It's really just an image sharpener, but it works rather well... for the most part.
Now, on a video like this where 1440p/60 is available, THAT gies me a much cleaner video.
And here's the funny thing. THIS computer that I'm on right now, only has a max res of 1080p!
It's a Windows 7 box (I have my reasons) and when switching to the supposed 1440P res, it SHOULD fail!
But it doesn't! Rather, the video now looks "better", which makes me question just what YT's 1080p REALLY is!!! ???
Again, 1440p/60 should not even work! So there's something going on behind the YT scenes, or so it seems.
What I suspect is that most (if not all) of their formats are HIGHLY COMPRESSED!
Now, when I do watch a video up in my Lab on a 49" true 4K TV and flip to 1440 or 2160, the videos that are actually in full real 4K (not those fakers out there) then the images are stunning.
I also use Opera for those and enable Lucid Mode which further sharpens the videos. (sometimes too much, so I disable those).. Opera did a good job on their Lucid mode option. To my surprise, it doesn't cause a video to get jerky or studder as some other "sharpening" methods can do.
TH-cam premium is tied to the email, not the channel. So if the multiple accounts are brand channels, you can just give access to those channels to any other gmail (or apps account) that subscribes to Premium. Then as long as you're signed in to the subscribed account you're able to pick which TH-cam channel you use TH-cam as. Premium works just fine because you're still signed in to the subscribed email, just using TH-cam as a owner/manager/whatever of the brand account.
Been using it like that for years with multiple channels, even as the non-primary subscriber for a TH-cam Premium family plan.
The Switch doesn’t support 4K but holy moly, 1080p looks absolutely dogwater.
Laughing at the twitter users because this video has nothing to do with the drama invovled. Love you Philip please don't let these people ruin your career and keep up the good work
I can confirm that 1080p premium barely looks better than normal 1080p. 1080p looks like crap on TH-cam now.
I do pay for premium so I can't wait to just switch between the modes to see if there is a difference.
Very Surprised Philip doesn't have it. I have multiple subscriptions to services, and I have been canceling to save money. Disney is gone, Amazon gone, Paramount gone, next on my list is Netflix. I just have not even considered TH-cam premium, it is the one I use most often by a magnitude.
TH-cam Vanced is TH-cam Premium for Free
All the features should be for free. It's exploitative of those who don't know:
Adblock is free on browsers.
Background play is free on browsers (works on mobile too)
Downloading is free
Video just went into the intentionally reduced quality, which again should be free for all users.
@@SixonQQ I am happy paying. TH-cam has given me so much throughout my life. I learned a lot, laughed tons, and genuinely I just think it is the single greatest site on the internet. So I will happily pay and make it more profitable to maintain itself or grow. Or just give massive bonuses to executives.
@@deathab0ve well if you are happy, and I am happy to use youtube revanced extended, so...
@@johnnylattarulo6735 That wont increase bitrate, revance still is at the mercy of TH-cam for the supplied video.
Not that is matters. 1080p premium is phone only anyways so I got fucked.
I have defienty noticed a huge dip in 1080p quality, but primarily in videos that offer the 1080p higher bitrate option with premium. My underatanding is that creators have the option to offer this in the hopes of getting more revenue from You Tube Premium subs. I have to believe this is largly backfiring as I can't be the only non premuim user that tends to spend less time watching less videos when they look like carp.
You're one of the few TH-cam creators that got it.
So many others didn't upscale to 4k before uploading for far too long.
And the worst creators are those that just reupload 6mbit/s (!) twitch captures.
@@kwinzman or even worse, clips from Twitch that have already been re-encoded from the 6mbps stream and then uploaded to TH-cam at only 720p.
TH-cam is making regular 1080p blurrier and blurrier but I like using youtube bandwidth anyway as I don't watch commercials.
i have noticed that quite often when i watch a video from a small channel in the 1000 ish subs range or so i often can't watch in 1440p and 1080p is also a struggle sometimes but watching Linus Tech Tips at 4k a moment later is no problem. Now quality is difficult because not all are using the same software to record and edit or setting in that software. But if i were to pay for better quality i would expect a video to look 99% like it did before uploading it to youtube, no blurry dark scenes and so on
their standard 1080p bitrate is total crap for anything involving movement.
I subbed to Premium a few months ago. I've now grown fond of the YT Music offering, screen off playing (now that devanced is dead), and never seeing or hearing ads is fantastic. Is it worth the 12$ per month I pay? Well, YT is where I spend much of my time if I'm not streaming a movie or reading a book, so... Yes. I think so. I do worry that google is going to further monetize YT and inevitably raise Premiums price. We'll see, I guess.
If they raise the price above 20 I will no longer pay for it.
Is the only subscription that I pay, and that I don't need to also. I've been using YT since 2012 (with adblock included) so why not give back after all these years of entertainment?
It's not dead tho
Revanced is not dead
I find it more valuable than a netflix subscription since its cheaper and I watch way more stuff here anyway and supports all the channels I watch more.
I don't like TH-cam doing updates this crappy shit.
I have been in YT since 2008 when I was kid and it make me feels like old TH-cam that I just love to comeback but now Google has changed with this shit.
I already pay for YTP so it's all a win for me. I can't believe I get to comfortably download videos AND to stream music on the same service. It's also nice knowing that my views give content creators more money too.
Yes, TH-cam Premium is just perfect in my eyes and the price is veeeery fair for what it offers.
Don't understand people who still rather use shady adblock software than just paying this instead of Spotify.
@@NicMediaDesign what shady AdBlock software lol? Vanced and ublock are perfectly legit
you pay for youtube poops?
@@NicMediaDesign price is only fair for until they reach a targeted subscription, then they will pull a Netflix
The only downside is that while YT is ad-free using Premium, everyone puts sponsors in anyways. While I know that's the creators' decisions and that it's not TH-cam's responsibility, it's still an ad.
More importantly I hate how inconsistent sponsors are. Some videos put them at the end which is nice. Others, however, will put it at the beginning or stretch out a really short video to toss it in, others will slap it straight into the middle of an important part.
I still don't like YT premium's price point. If it was like £40 a year, sure. But once you're into the £10+ a month sections, it starts to become a service competing with every other expensive monthly service you're paying for. Dropping Netflix/D+/Amazon Prime for TH-cam without ads (assuming you're not just blocking them anyway) and better bitrate ceases to be all that appealing. All that said, provided they don't just reduce 1080p bandwidth further for none-paying members (or finally kill 4K for people using a browser - I assume it'll happen in the next couple of years though) this is only a plus.
To be honest what's compelling is that you're getting YT music with premium, which is pretty solid, also family plans do look pretty cheap.
Use a VPN to turkey and get it for like £3 a month
where's the fucking comparison??
Well, I have YT Premium but I don't see the premium quality option
You make a video about comparing 1080p to 1080p Premium...yet you don't actually compare them side by side😐
Thank you for subtitling so both me and my sleeping niece can be happy
Honestly, I just want be able to turn off 60fps. When my WiFi is awful I'd rather 1080p 30 than 480p
Buy one premium and add the other accounts as family members? Dont see why you need multiple premium membership for multiple channels unless you have more than 6, in which case, I would argue it is fair to pay for more Premium subscirptions.
You can make a family group and pay for one membership for 5 or 6 account
funny how this video doesn't have that option 🤣
I do not care about resolution, I care about bitrate.
You can give me 480p with 18Mbps bitrate and I will be fine
5:09 HOLY CRAP THAT'S A GREAT POINT! We always complained that we had to upscale with nearest neighbor or Lanczos to force TH-cam to give us VP9/AV1 or 1440p for higher bitrates. The 1080p Premium finally gives us what we've always asked for. Good quality without having to upscale/re-render a video, and the bitrate isn't an absurd 20mbps version of the original 8mbps video. However, TH-cam knows this and is trying to profit over a feature we value so highly... It's a perfect system-pay up for if you're willing to see 1080p only videos in original quality.
5:35 "My main issue is that someone with multiple TH-cam accounts that I'm regularly switching between, I'd need to buy multiple TH-cam Premiums, and that's just going too far"
Depends, are the TH-cam accounts on different emails, or are they accounts tied to the same email? From my experience with Premium, it's tied to the underlying Google account rather than the individual TH-cam channels/accounts.
So on this point of uploading 1080p videos as 4k to be able to use that bitrate, how would one go about doing that? Asking for a friend obviously
modern gpus are plenty powerful enough for perfect 1080p. I swear we are going 1 step forward 2 steps back.
I watch everything in 360p on my phone lol. All I want is a low resolution but 60fps setting.
its either 1080p or its not. youtube scamming eeveryone
No 1080p Premium isn't better than regular 4K.
DAB digital audio broadcasting in Europe was pushed with promises of amazing CD quality. Then they just jammed a gazillion stations into single multiplex resulting in near AM quality and far from normal FM quality. We all know what youtube will do.
they lowered the normal 1080p bitrate it got blurry on many video's
I swear, in 4 years you'll have to pay to change the resolution from 144p.
TH-cam just wants to be replaced.
A while ago i found a youtube test channel with 100 subs by chance, over the past few months they kept uploading videos with titles talking about "premium exempt bits" or something like that, now i finally understand what that was referencing to
Also just checked back and all the titles have been changed, interesting
I love the 4K60 quality
DLSS Video Upscaling be like, hold my beer.