For about a year I had a side project involving learning a lot about encoding (with ffmpeg) to cram as much resolution, quality, and detail into short videos while keeping them under 3 megabytes. Most of my source material was from YouTube so I ended up learning a lot about their bitrate, and I can guess a fair few of the compression and encoding settings they must be using (theyâre not great, but thatâs to be expected as they have to optimize for compatibility and compute efficiency across a ridiculous range of content). It is practically certain that itâs possible for YouTube pack more quality into the same bits, so I hope theyâre offering more than just âhigher bitrate with the same settingsâ.
One way to higher quality I found was you can represent more uncompressed data with the same number of compressed bits (so you end up with slightly less lossy compression). Another way was you can get higher subjective quality by picking the right bits to throw away (your compression is just as lossy but youâve shifted where that loss happens into subjectively less important parts of the data). I think there might be some gotcha where these two things are actually identical in some deeper way, but it feels like theyâre quite different.
The fact that theyâre offering it to paying customers is hopefully the leverage needed by engineers to justify spending a bit more compute on better encoding settings.
(Another thought in this area is that since encoding is paid roughly once per video uploaded, you could have a âpremium uploaderâ service that lets uploaders play around with some of the settings, or at least use a better quality preset. Many uploaders would pay ten bucks per video to do that, I have no doubt.)
The actual cost to them, in most cases, is just so marginal. It is a sign of an uncompetitive space when products create nearly pointless product segmentation, when it's not based in cost.
> According to YouTube, the new 1080p Premium option is âan enhanced bitrate version of 1080pâ thatâs supposed to make things look crisper, particularly with videos heavy on detail and motion.
So they agree that 1080p and UHD are only names for whatever they want to give you.
And how crisper is the new "enhanced bitrate version of 1080p" ?
YouTube with Ads is akin to browsing the internet with no Adblockers. I have seen people browsing around with it and I keep hearing Janeâs voice, âI have it how I like it.â[1]
YouTube Premium is an easy fix, and with its subsidized pricing in India, it is a steal. The family plan is less than $2.5 monthly. Unfortunately, my wife would sometimes complain, âWhy am I not seeing any ads? I have it how I like it.â
Ha, timely, as vanced appears to have finally stopped working for me today. I dunno if there's an update or successor yet, but time to figure that out or cough up for premium I guess.
For $16/month, yeah right, okay.
There is little reason to not pay for YouTube Premium, in my opinion. Worth every penny.
YouTube TV, on the other hand, well, I need to cancel that.