More than you think, actually. My wife recently signed up. I’m like, Babe! I already have uBlock Origin to block ads on desktop! On mobile, Firefox also blocks ads and allows listening to videos with the screen off. 😫
But, we still get ads on our smart LG TV. So. That’s apparently enough to throw the money away.
we still get ads on our smart LG TV
That’s when I hit the mute button, hold the remote with my finger on the OK button ready to skip, and use the remote to block my view of anything but the bottom right corner of the screen. Then when I see the skip button appear, I can click it.
Recently I have discovered that I can just use the “why this ad?” menu and select “return to video”. That way you can skip any ad before the timer runs out.
It’s okay to pay for a service that you use daily.
I don’t, but I disagree it’s “to throw money away”.
Especially if you can finagle a subscription out of one of the cheaper countries, too!
Does that still work? Thought to have read here and there that Google is cracking down on that loophole? Maybe not (yet) if you are an existing ‘foreign’ sub.
Finally gave in to a 2 month free trial of YouTube premium this week. Not planning on buying into it however when the trial expires. But with the holidays thought it was a good time to accept the trial for two full months.
They are getting stricter, but there are still ways around it - and it only gets easier if you have friends/family (or are willing to make friends) in said countries; the internet is a global community, after all.
Exact same story. It’s frustrating.
We csncelled all streaming and use plex but we watch too much YouTube and am tired of having to keep up with versions of pirate apps every time they break. I already deal with having to keep patching the newest youtube apk with vanced on my phone. Not gonna bother for all the other devices.
Look into getting SmartTube for the TV. Works pretty great for me
Because of Google going out of their way to cripple YouTube in the name of advertisers, even going as far as to cripple Firefox’s performance just for using it because their videos would sometimes stop resuming, you’d need to refresh .etc
They aren’t seeing shit from me. I will use UBlock Origin as I please.
I never noticed a quality difference on my phone due to the small screen, even 1080p to 720p wasn’t bad on my 4k TV. Also, when did they change the free trial from three months to one?
when did they change the free trial from three months to one?
When they decided FUCK YOU!!! PAY US MONEY FASTER!!!
I don’t notice it on a 75" TV.
But when 99% of the content on YouTube is struggling to just get focusing right, pursuing higher quality bitrates is a useless priority. It’s all trash amateur TV. Resolution is not a factor here.
Isint higher bitrate better for busy scenes with lots of movement? Like games that have a lot going on or tall grass in the wind.
Yes
Depends. While compressing the video, it will create repetition,.artificial motion blur, etc. Either through software or directly on the device itself with its own software—GoPros are notoriously bad for this, for example.
Then when uploading to YT, it has its.own compression—because billions of petabytes—which will introduce your classic.nearest neighbour type compression problems. Colour spots, blurring, flat contrasts,.etc. All in an effort to keep bitrate and thus the file size down.
But as I said, it’s unusual to have content on YT of this quality where bitrate “ruins” the experience. There’s much worse problems at the forefront in amateur and/or.fast content video.
People can’t afford yet another monthly bill.
It’s like walking in Trador Joes for snacks. Oh, hey, this is only $3! And look, this is only $5! Get to checkout: $130 please.
Seriously, that’s how this nickel and dime subscription crap works.
More like $126, if you know what I mean
The worst part is that this doesn’t seem to be some sort of better quality. All of the other qualities seem to have tanked in the past year, so at best this just restores the previous 1080p bitrate.
Is this a vibes-based position, or did you actually check the bitrate of the segments?
100% vibes based. I’ve been noticing very atrocious artifacts. It could also be things like different encoding settings that are producing a worse result. Or I could be making up the whole thing up and confirmed it in my mind for 1080p when the launched the higher bitrate and then was primed to see the higher resolutions drop in quality after.
Notice how they don’t post the bitrate, because even the higher one will be extremely low. Every streaming service has been dropping their bitrates over the years, Netflix and HBO are the worst offenders as I’ve noticed. It probably saves them a ton of money, and 90% of their customers won’t notice because they’re on their phone while watching in the background.
To make it weirder, I’m confident they boost the bitrates on their new releases to get the approval of the enthusiastic viewers, then drop it after the reviews are in.
So the reason no one posts the bitrates is because it’s not exactly interesting information for the the general population.
I’m highly skeptical of the claim that streaming services would have intentionally dropped their bitrates at the expense of perceived quality. There’s definitely research going on to deliver the same amount of perceived quality at lower average bitrates through variable bitrate encodings and so on, but this is sophisticated research where perceived quality is carefully controlled for.
It probably saves them a ton of money, and 90% of their customers won’t notice because they’re on their phone while watching in the background.
So this is fundamentally not how video streaming works, and I think this is important for the average person to learn - if you stream a video in the background or with your screen turned off, video data will stop loading. There’s literally no point in continuing to fetch the video track if it’s not being rendered. It would be like downloading the audio track for French when the user is watching with the English track turned on, i.e. nonsensical.
This subsequently removes this as a possible reason for any video streamer intentionally reducing their bitrate, as the savings would not be materialized for background playback.
To make it weirder, I’m confident they boost the bitrates on their new releases to get the approval of the enthusiastic viewers, then drop it after the reviews are in.
Depending on the usage patterns for the platform in question, this probably doesn’t make sense either.
the reason no one posts the bitrates is because it’s not exactly interesting information for the the general population.
But they post resolutions, which are arguably less interesting. The “general public” has been taught to use resolution as a proxy of quality. For TVs and other screens this is mostly true, but for video it isn’t the best metric (lossless video aside).
Bitrate is probably a better metric but even then it isn’t great. Different codes and encoding settings can result in much better quality at the same bitrate. But I think in most cases it correlates better with quality than resolution does.
The ideal metric would probably be some sort of actual quality metric, but none of these are perfect either. Maybe we should just go back to Low/Med/High for quality descriptions.
I think resolution comes with an advantage over posting bitrates - in any scenario where you’re rendering a lower resolution video on a higher resolution surface, there will be scaling with all of its negative consequences on perceived quality. I imagine there’s also an intuitive sense of larger resolution = higher bitrate (necessarily, to capture the additional information).
there will be scaling with all of its negative consequences on perceived quality
In theory this is true. If you had a nice high-bitrate 1080p video it may look better on a 1080 display than any quality of 1440p video would due to loss while scaling. But in almost all cases selecting higher resolutions will provide better perceived quality due to the higher bitrate, even if they aren’t integer multiples of the displayed size.
It will also be more bandwidth efficient to target the output size directly. But streaming services want to keep the number of different versions small. Often this will already be >4 resolutions and 2-3 codecs. If they wanted to also have low/medium/high for each resolution that would be a significant cost (encoding itself, storage and reduction in cache hits). So they sort of squish the resolution and quality together into one scale, so 1080p isn’t just 1080p it also serves as a general “medium” quality. If you want “high” you need to go to 1440p or 2160p even if your output is only 1080.
I just lost my premium subscription after about 2 years of paying $3/month in Argentina. Here it’s $24/month (family plan). YouTube is unbearable with all the ads. Sometimes a 10-minute video has 3 as breaks. I’m only using it for precise purposes now, not scrolling and exploring, and finding alternatives as much as possible.
OK, am I the only person that has a working ad blocker and doesn’t get YT ads? Literally never seen one.
If you’ve used YouTube on anything besides a computer, then you would know that the experience is suboptimal.
I agree, however most mobile platforms have some sort of AdBlocking solution/app. The same applies to popular tv brands as well (I use TizenTube for my Samsung) and worst case scenario you can plug a Chromecast and AdBlock it instead.
There are ad blockers on mobile browsers, too. Besides, there are other ways to block ads, like DNS blocklists. Or if it’s just for Youtube use an alternative front-end like Piped or Invidious or Grayjay for built in ad- and Sponsorblock
I’ve used the alternatives and the experience isn’t really nearly as polished and consistent as using the YouTube app, especially if you just want to sign in and use your YouTube account. I’m not saying premium is cheap but it’s really not out of the ordinary to pay for the service as some people think it is. There are also YouTube kids and music that provides some value.
If there are DNS blocklists that work for YouTube, please provide a link or guide.
Exactly. Why bother paying? Firefox + uBlock Origin on the computer, SmartTube Next on Android TV, ReVanced on Android phone. I haven’t been seeing ads on YouTube for years.
I can’t believe people still even use YouTube when shit like this is happening. Paywalling resolution? Get fukt.
Edit: To be clear, people who keep using services like this as they enshitify are literally the problem.
Resolution is the same it has always been, they are just offering a higher bitrate stream with premium (except I think they offer 8K streams on premium? But like come on… who the fuck needs that).
Doesnt matter if the video is uploaded in 4K, you can watch that stream at 1080p with the same/better effect.
YouTube compresses the shit out of anything uploaded to it. More so than other sites.
Yes, which is why extra bitrate is valuable (depending on the video content) and the higher the resolution the video is, the higher the bitrate is. Which is why it is beneficial to watch a video at 4K even if you only have a 1080p screen.
I’m used to blu-ray and ultra hd blu-ray so now everything else looks like garbage to me. Google are cheap asses. Glad to know I’m not the only one who watches 4k videos on my 720p phone.
Yeah, I get that. Personally, it looks good for most of the content I watch and it’s free content, I really can’t complain. The compression these days is really good.
Paywalling a better resolution than the ones ALREADY present on the platform, may be the best way to approach the issue of it being fucking expensive to serve it.
Youtube has gone to shit and the enhanced 1080p bitrate is not one of the reasons
wow, premium in the usa is expensive. it’s a little under $3 per month here in india for the family plan and even that’s after a recent 16% hike. the individual plan is even cheaper.
i guess these rates are in store for us as well in the future?
Depends on economies, they can’t really charge like double minimum wage, so countries like India have “cheaper” subscriptions. So for a minimum wage worker, it’s about the same in terms of expense (ignoring other bill differences).
So it’s probably going to stay about the same for you.
Is this something that could be gamed with a vpn possibly?
Yes. I’m in Europe paying Pakistan prices. You just need to find a location that doesn’t require a local payment method.
Would that be Pakistan? Asking for a friends dogs friends owner…
Correct. There’s cheaper locations like Turkey but YMMV and you need to do it via iPhone/iDevice through the apple pay method and create a local apple account and I don’t remember the specifics.
Does that require you to watch via vpn all the time or just when you make the account?
Just when making the subscription.
That’s the Euro symbol. Just FYI.
I was happy to pay for youtube as a service until they broke the shit out of their algorithms and started shoving ads to my face in premium. Did a chargeback and got my money back. Fuck these monkeys.
I got the 2 month free trial recently and have yet to see an ad with it. Don’t plan on continuing the service if I do see one.
Watch out for the “video suggestions” in your home feed with the title “introducing ….” These are product placements they make even with the premium subscription. I HATE ads so I pulled the plug.
That’s a nice way to lose access to all Google products, including your email account.
So far so good. The fuckers at youtube support acknowledged serving ads to me even with my premium membership, so they can suck a big fat dick.
Assuming they use Gmail in the first place
Search is also completely broken on YouTube. It’s become useless.
Search for a video using the exact title? Sorry, no match. Here is 5 videos that are loosley related to a word in your search, before the completely unrelated algorithm feed begins.
Use the exact video title in quotation marks? Best i can do is two videos of the five i already showed you…
I’m frankly offended by he shittiness of youtube search.
I get hit by dumb influencers before actually seeing what I was looking for.
Maybe it’s more expensive in Europe, my premium is 7.99 usd
Google asking me for €13 a month? Their empire is built upon selling user data. Fuckers should be paying us.
And if you’re a content creator, you can opt in to allow your content to be used by AI… Without compensation. 🤡
At least that’s opt-in, unlike them using your Wi-Fi SSID to fine tune their location settings. Not only was that opt-out but you had to change your router settings (either change your SSID, which isn’t hard but shouldn’t be required, or hide your network, which alienated guests when mobile data wasn’t so ever present). I don’t even know if there’s still a (simple) way out.
But yes. The option you describe is clearly ridiculous.
I thought it was based around BSSID which cannot be changed on most devices. Changing SSID helps?
Yes, it’s bssid (the wifi mac address) which is collected by streetview cars as they pass by.
Back when I researched this (which, as mentioned previously, was a long time ago), it was just the SSID. Possibly (probably) they were also collecting the BSSID but I don’t think they were publicly admitting it at that time.
Well, last time I looked was many years ago, so it might no longer be true. However, supposedly, adding
_NOMAPor something like that would prevent your network from being recorded. As I said, though, that was a long time ago and, of course, trusting Google to not record anything at your request was always a fool’s game.
The funny thing is, I’m nearly certain that it’s opt-in for their benefit (i.e. legal reasons) and not because it benefits the content creator, because it really doesn’t benefit the content creator at all! “Here’s my work. Do what you like with it, and don’t worry about paying.”.
I suspect any time Google gives you a choice about anything, especially anything regarding data, it’s not for your benefit. With that in mind, you’re likely right.
Don’t assume Google et al. will ever consider enough people buy their subscription. There’s never enough money for these people.
A company isn’t successful in hyper capitalism unless they are accelerating the growth of their profits every year. They have to sell more products to existing users, acquire new paid users, charge more for their existing products, or they’re considered unsuccessful. The model literally assumes a constant infinite exponential growth of the human race where success can only be achieved if every human alive is paying for every product offering possible, buying every upsell and microtransaction, freely giving their data to be sold so that more useless products can be created at minimum cost and sold at maximum price. But also hyper capitalism lobbies for less benefits, lower pay, etc. It inevitably collapses into neo-feudalism or just slavery
The model literally assumes a constant infinite exponential growth
Cancer. Capitalism models cancer.
YouTube already randomly drops me to 360p on my big-ass broadband sometimes because it just feels like it. What are the guarantees YouTube Premium won’t do that? ANSWER ME YOUTUBE, THIS IS CRUCIAL PRE-PURCHASE INFORMATION.
On mobile, many videos will start at 720 and I have to specifically select a higher resolution but it will stay there. It will have me wait for buffering if my internet isn’t capable but it won’t drop the resolution.
On pc it remembers the resolution you set last.
If your internet is flaky, there’s nothing YouTube can do about it. The alternative would be waiting for the video to buffer at 1080p.
i have 8gbps… youtube buffers nonstop for me. my connection isnt flaky, as I can maintain multi gigabit connections to upload and download sources without issue. youtube sucks
Check your browser
If it doesn’t work on Firefox, then it’s using non-standard web calls. Which Google is notorious for. That doesn’t make youtube suck any less.
Yup, i have the same issue on ff. It just stops and buffers. Goes through fine on the same pc when i test on chrome (used for work). Plays fine on embed, it’s just their website.
I just close the window. Don’t need youtube.
That’s what I do more and more. I’ve had my own invidious setup, I’ve done grayjay. If I continue to have problems, I’ll simply not use Youtube at all…
I paid for youtube red until it wasn’t reasonable anymore. I tolerated the ads until it wasn’t reasonable anymore. I can only do so many mitigations to youtube’s bullshit before I just stop…
Right now I have YT-dlp setup to import some channels into my plex setup. That may be all my house has here soon.
I on 300 mbps internet and barely had YouTube buffering on me. I can even run YouTube videos while watching multiple streams on both YouTube and Twitch and it doesn’t buffer.
Clearly the problem is either your connection is flaky or your device cannot handle a YouTube video. Maybe it’s a video driver issue or you accidentally turned on the feature that automatically upscale YouTube videos using Nvidia cards, assuming you have one. I had some buffering issue when I used this feature when it was first released.
No. On all accounts.
Linux, 7950x3d, rx7900xtx, 64 GB of ram. I’m a veteran in the IT world. It’s not my system. Those same multigig transfers happen over https traffic on domains I have control over. As far as “drivers” go… I’m on kernel 6.11.10, which is stable. If I can push 200 fps on beatsaber in VR… and that’s somehow a problem for Youtube… guess what! That’s Youtube’s fault.
What it is, Google pushes chrome and nerfs Firefox. Plain and simple. They push everything they can into their ecosystem and that makes youtube suck.
It’s well known. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/youtube-responds-to-delayed-loading-in-rival-browser-complaints
Edit:
My system pushing 7.1Gbps out it’s interface… (note the ~2gbps steady transfer happening prior to the test)
No issues with speedtest… (my 8gbps minus the 2-3gbps I’m pushing on the backend here…)
My connection is fiber. Little jitter, no fuss anywhere else. Youtube runs like ass because it IS ass.
But I’m watching YouTube on Firefox without spoofing my browser and never had this problem. It’s funny how some people are downvoting me for suggesting some solution to your problem, but idk.
Another potential issue is that it’s your ISP that is causing the problem. I have a less powerful system than you and a slower Internet while using Firefox, yet I’m not having any buffering issue, so our different ISPs might be the reason.
It could also be that you have a stricter standard for what you deem buffering than I do, considering your experience with that good of an Internet connection and PC. Mine only buffers less than a second at the start of the video while it loads, but I’ve never considered that an issue.
It’s a 70/30 split. 30% of the video I watch will have issues. And those videos will often spend more time buffering than playing the video.
And nearly 100% of the content I watch should be in youtube’s caching system. As I almost universally watch new releases from my subscription page and don’t tend to let the algorithm recommend anything to me. This has been my normal for years.
Except lately it’s gone up to nearly 100%. I can’t load a damn thing anymore (as of the past month or so). It just sits and spins, multiple devices including phone on cell network. I can only get phone to work using something like Grayjay.
You can claim that my ISP interchange might be at fault… But that wouldn’t explain why I have no issues with virtually any other platform on the entirety of the internet that I exchange packets with. This would still be squarely youtube’s fault. My ISP is one of the big ones, Lumen (Centurylink/Quantum). Lumen owns backhaul. A lot of backhaul. While it’s possible my local interchange is completely crammed full in other situations, I happen to know it’s not. We’re not even 1/4 of the way through their build out in my area. And the fiber goes straight to the head end for my area. There’s capacity galore.
What’s likely, and has already been cited is the fact that youtube has been waging war again firefox for a long time. It’s well documented. Further Google also has a history of targeting specific users where an account simply being logged in will achieve the same effect of constant buffering.
Youtube is bad. Here’s the kicker… Other platforms? Never have an issue. Twitch, Odysee, Rumble (Cringe platform, but a couple people I watch went there even though I wish they went elsewhere), hell even most peertube instances work with better results than Youtube does for me.
At this point I’m not interested in help fixing it. It’s clear there’s no helping Youtube. The platform is broken, both in the business sense and technologically.
It’s pretty easy to check if this is caused by YouTube throttling Firefox. Just install a chromium browser for testing or check if the YouTube app is still buffering. Well, only if you’re actually interested in finding out the cause of the issue.
If you just disagree with YouTube’s actions, it’s best to just boycott them altogether. My personal anecdote is that I’ve only had issues with YouTube on Firefox but not any other browser for a short period, which does prove that they had history of throttling Firefox, whether intentional or not. It’s just hadn’t been a problem in my area of the world currently.
Premium user since Red launched.
Mobile defaults to 320p no matter what I do. I have to manually select 1080p each and every video
Yow answer after this message from our sponsor!
“Enhanced” bitrate? I’ve heard of high bitrates, and I’ve heard of low bit rates, but I ain’t never heard of no enhanced bitrates. Does Google know something we don’t, or do they think we’re suckers? (Rhetorical question, don’t answer.)
Bitrate and resolution do their own thing.
You can have high bitrates, but non enhanced bitrates are just worthless no matter what
I think, there is usually 1080p with 30fps and with 60fps. So, they are probably selling you 30 more frames per second… for $13…
That’s not what Bitrate means. They use a lossy compression to send you the video. When targeting lower bandwidth/bitrate you see more artifacting.
I paid for premium recently which helps a bit except now the problem is a lot of the content I watch ppl are doing sponsored segments which I get but at the same time fuck off.
You need to install the sponsor block extension
Majority of what I watch is on my TV. Phone is fine as is computer because of extensions and/or revanced
Sponsor block is great for that.
Majority of what I watch is on my TV. Phone is fine as is computer because of extensions and/or revanced
Last I heard it also pays the creators more per view than standard Adsense, and a portion of each individual subscription is always divided among creators you watch. This info could be out of date.
Actually you paying for premium hurts the rest of us. You’re rewarding them for the shit show that is modern-day-YT
