AV1 won't stop YouTube's 4K Paywall. Here's why.

YouTube might be paywalling 4K content soon, and I don't believe AV1 will actually save it. I can hope so, and AV1 could bring a TON of advantages overall - but I think the problem goes much deeper.

Referenced links & videos:

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[TechnicalGamingChannel]

Years ago a new hire at google reworked the company's logo to be a little more vibrant and saturated. The changes made the logo file a few kb bigger but nothing crazy. His rework submission was denied because that extra few kb would amount to GIGABYTES of increased data usage per hour or something astronomical. People often don't realize the scale of a site like Google or YouTube. Literally billions of people are actively using these sites concurrently. It's a miracle any of this even works.

[neutronpcxt]

Top tier video in my opinion, and outlines the main issue with YT's video quality: encoding quality and bitrate.
It honestly baffles me that LTT had a narrow view on the video quality issues that YT has, as well as the audio quality "issues" that they mentioned. The audio example is especially egregious since 128kbps stereo Opus is psycho-acoustically transparent for the vast majority of cases.

Well made and researched video. Would watch again.

[Kidsnd]

Just as you were talking about Digital Foundry's video, and showing it on screen, I started buffering hard lmao. Once that segment ended, the buffering stopped. I have a 1gbps fibre connection and was watching in 4K.

[jamespeters]

I didn't realise you could get your videos back in original quality. I used an ai tool to try and fix the compression on a vid I put on youtube which came out alright but original quality is so much better. Thanks for making me aware of this.

[EdgardR.]

An audio only option would do wonders for me, nowadays I listen more than watch anything because I usually am doing something else

[Cvolton]

i love how your part about the digitalfoundry video exhibits the exact same issues that you're describing

[EVPointMaster]

I mostly upload gameplay videos to Youtube. Since I prefer high frame rates, I'm gaming at 1440p.
Even at 1440p, video quality on Youtube is often poor, so I made it a routine to upscale my videos to 4K to upload them to Youtube. Even with the quality loss from scaling and re-encoding, the 4K upscaled video looks a lot better on youtube than the native 1440p video.
If Youtube would fix that with AV1, I don't think I'd even be mad about 4K being locked.

I also really like the idea of providing source quality options on Youtube, obviously within certain limits.

[abhisekmukherjee]

This is the same reason I view youtube at 4k in my 1080p monitor. Its usually much more crisp and detailed.

[webslinger]

Great video. Really nice to see someone not trash YouTube's audio quality. Opus is really good and is transparent at bitrates YouTube transcodes. As an audiophile I think it's as good as lossy audio's gonna get while being royalty free.

Strongly agree with you recommending YouTube transcode it's source files to lossless AV1 to save storage. It would save a ton of space on videos that have static images like powerpoint presentations, screen recordings, long form podcasts etc.

AV1 encoded videos already does this with screen recorded videos, talking face with minimal moment etc, making them significantly smaller. It would be great if they atleast use AV1 lossless for these kinds of source files, as the insignificant quality downgrade from AV1 lossless transcode would be a non issue.

YouTube's video infrastructure is really good. I've compared the same screen recorded video uploaded to YouTube and Rumble. Rumble videos are sometimes 5 to 10 times larger while looking visually similar and sometimes better. Being able to reduce bitrate when necessary is really good. Netflix has quality based chunk encoding that fine tunes quality and size even better but at YouTube's scale that's too resource intensive.


It would also be interesting to see a comparison between video quality of different VOD platforms. With proper bitrate and vmaf scores for each type of video.

Really appreciate the quality, well researched information provided in the video.

[muizzsiddique]

From my tests, you can upload 5K (5120x2880) and YT will recognise that resolution and render that with AV1 (maybe it has changed by now?). 2880p used to be an option for many videos until it disappeared, and now the same has been happening for 4320p. Seriously, there's a series of 8K videos on YT that do not have their 8K encodes anymore.

Then again, my test video was 5120x2160 and was a little over a minute long. That still took over a day to get AV1 availibility, whereas VP9 takes hours and H264 is the first one processed.

[cube_cup]

Nice video! With the LTT video I had a lot of 'I get what you mean, but the way you explain it doesn't quite work'. Their points were generally great, their explanation just felt lacking.
Also they didn't mention the master reels at all. That's a pretty big issue.

[Parbruek]

All these things being said, I wish we could use a metric like megabytes or gigabytes per minute "MB/min" rather than megabits per second "Mb/sec". We often see video runtimes in minutes, so putting bitrate in MB/min would make output size easier to ballpark calculate. Mb/sec * 60/8 = MB/min. And we often talk about capacity in megabytes and gigabytes, not megabits.

[Standard.Candle]

OMG!!! @6:17 on this video, Youtube started showing the circle of death, having to pause to buffer the video. Right at the point when EposVox was talking about how bandwidth-intensive the Digital Foundry Quake 2 RTX video is. Madness!

[StYfReX]

I pay yt premium just because i use it a lot. It's an amazing platform that its "free" to use and allows you to save VODs. My hope its that AV1 brings 1080p120

[thHour]

This was a great video with a very measured approach in explaining the problem and potential solutions. You've got my sub!

[selectiverisk]

Loved hearing your take on this topic! Next, I'd love to see an av1 cpu encoding optimization/secret sauce guide, so some people without the gpu to encode it, can!

[lec_R]

Fun fact I bought a 4k monitor for a 100 bucks. No it's not some El cheapo monitor. It can show the entire adobe RGB spectrum
It's the NEC EA244UHD. It was used and had a few panel defects. Which don't annoy me so I'm pretty happy

I watch 99.5 of my videos on mobile at 720p
0.4 on mobile at 1080p and 0.1 on desktop at 4k. Cuz not every video needs to watched at 4k and only some videos (especially dark cinematic videos) benefit from it. I would like YouTube to at least allow us a little bit of 4k streaming at the free tier, if only 30 minutes of content a month.

[somewhatfrog]

That's a good addition to LTT video, more in-depth, just as always. Thank you!

[MistyKathrine]

11:03 Many of us are actually using a 4K TV as a PC monitor. I have the LG C1 55'' for my main and absolutely love it.

[Housestationlive]

whaou love the merch . if you've done it alone it's abolutely amazing GG