Youtube 1080p Premium VS 1080p?

Youtube's 1080p Premium option is coming. Or maybe it will be cancelled. Or maybe it'll be free for everybody. Or maybe not. I don't know much about it, so instead, here's a load of stuff I know about Youtube's various quality settings. Or in the case of the blog post, don't know.

0:00 - What IS 1080p?
3:20 - Benefits for Youtube
4:10 - AV1
4:51 - RIP 4K uploads?
5:19 - Youtube Premium
5:45 - How much quality do you need?

[dave]

Youtube'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.

[escape]

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.

[LYoda]

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 YouTube has optimised the data usage required for videos.

[OUmSKILLS]

I liked the part where he compared 1080p Premium vs 1080p

[MrMoriardy]

Me in Australia on satellite internet watching in 144p to save data: fockin beautiful mate huge difference

[NicMediaDesign]

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 😬

[SirCrest]

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.

[Spookyhoobster]

It still amazes me that Youtube is as profitable as it is. 99% of the content on this platform is just pure expense on the side of Youtube (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 Youtube 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 Youtube was like 50 years ago and they won't believe us.

[Exponaut_R-]

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…

[hammerth]

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.

[S己G]

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.

[Yoshi]

5:00 yes it is so annoying having to export every 1080p video in 4K, just to have decent 1080p quality when its online...

[jumpman]

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.

[Tommo_]

Love seeing phillips patch note comparison skills being put to good use in other fields

[haloharry]

About time, I've been asking for this for years.

[Zatore_]

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.

[Jmcgee]

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.

[DemoT]

1440p looks like 1080p 2 years ago now

[PintsofGuinness]

I’ve been paying for YouTube 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.

[potatofuryy]

Wow, I have to say thank you for mentioning the blog. It was a great read and super interesting!