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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.
The 1080p non-premium looks like shit, not better than 720p. I think they reduced the Bitrate a lot and premium restors the original Bitrate.
Bitrates have always been garbage to be fair
“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.
YouTube premium is one of the subscriptions I most often feel thankful for having. I watch enough YouTube videos that avoiding all those ads is really worthwhile, I hope that my view is worth more to the channels I watch, and YouTube music let me cancel Spotify.
I understand being pissed at YouTube and Google, but at the end of the day, of all the things I have to rage at, YouTube isn’t worth it. I like it, there are creators that use it that I like, and I understand that it costs real money to run the platform.
You’ll have ads and be paying soon enough
deleted by creator
You can get around this by running YouTube in the web browser on Android at least
Or use NewPipe
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.
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.
If you’ve used YouTube on anything besides a computer, then you would know that the experience is suboptimal.
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.
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.
yt-dlp and VLC still work. I’m good.
Do you use VLC to play the downloaded YT videos from yt-dl or is there some method to stream directly from a given YT url with VLC?
i beleive you can open a yt vid straight into vlc, not sure on the specifics of how its done tho sorry
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?
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.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.
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.
This has been a thing for a while now, hasn’t it? I remember trying to watch the Noseferatu trailer a few months ago and seeing how shit it looked. Tried to up the quality only to see that it was paywalled
At least according to YouTube, the enhanced bitrate option is higher than 1080p normal has ever been
But what about the new normal 1080p? Has it been reduced?
No, at least according to YouTube
It’s obviously noticeable from the ones they don’t pull this shit on.
Personal experience, but I feel like it has. Especially on videos with a lot of still frames like 3blue1brown, you can see the still images become slightly better quality after all the animations stopped. I noticed a few months ago and saw 1080p premium as an option.
Thought it was always that way.
It’s a year or two old at the most
Yes. And I thought that’s how it always had been.
trailer
I mean, that’s an advertisement. I feel like if you’re going to watch an ad, that the company trying to sell the product should find a way to have the ad in full quality themselves.
It looks like the official website does use YouTube, though.
I’ve just seen it for the first time now. Might be because I’m situated in Europe? Or because I mostly don’t give a damn about the pixel count.
Possibly, I don’t think its on every video
They’re especially greedy when you consider they are not only the most profitable of all their competitors (Netflix/Disney Plus/Hulu/etc), but that they’re unique in that they’re the only one who doesn’t fund creating any content at all.
At least the other companies put tons of money producing content alongside their other stuff. YouTube just lets others do that for them and then takes all the profit.
So how does YouTube really justify their costs for premium with zero production costs and the largest profit margin?
Most other companies can be selective in what they host / stream. YouTube will host/stream anything users upload and that’s actually quite insane. Current statistics say that YouTubers upload 30.000 hours of video… per hour.
Aside from the streaming/processing, only the disk space that would need is already frightening. Most of those videos will never be seen, and no ads will be played on them. The setup needed for this is massively more impressive to me than services like Netflix.
Do you perhaps have a source for those profit margins? I really wonder if they’re already running break even.
From a technical perspective, I wonder what they do with those seldom viewed videos. Do they get stored somewhere in slower, deep storage, only to be eventually transferred out and cached when they’re actively receiving views? I imagine you wouldn’t want to waste faster, more expensive storage on something that’ll likely rarely to be retrieved.
I don’t know about YouTube exactly, but when I was still using Telegram I noticed the following: When you’re scrolling back in your chat history long enough, you’ll get to a point where loading them a message takes 1–2 minutes. This indicates to me that these were stored on magnetic tape somewhere.
Don’t worry about YouTube - according to alphabets filings they account for ~10% of Googles ad revenue. Google is posting record profits every quarter, so they should manage.
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.
That’s a nice way to lose access to all Google products, including your email account.
Assuming they use Gmail in the first place
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 codecs 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.
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.
Yeah… I pay for premium and I’m not proud of it…
They finally shut off my premium account in Argentina for $3 and now I’ve been blasted with ads so much it’s unbearable. Like 3 ads every 3 mins pretty much.
Maybe I can try again in another country but I’m pretty sure they’re wise to it and demand a card used be of the same country too.
It’s fine on my phone but on the tvs where I mostly consume it’s hell on earth!
God damn YouTube. Why do we like it so much.
I am seriously thinking of cobbling together a cheap pc just to plug into my TV to watch things like YouTube without the ads.
I know right. I have Apple TV because it’s awesome and doesn’t have Ads everywhere like Google and fire tv.
I’m thinking an android tablet with revanced or similar and casting to the tv…
I’ve got smartube on my fire TV
doesn’t have Ads everywhere like Google and fire tv.
yet.
I’m not sure if it counts as an AD but seems like an AD, many many moons ago (I think when Apple TV+ was introduced), they changed the “home screen” with the apps in your Apple TV to an Apple TV+ one with their content (and some linked from other platforms).
The apps view still exists but now the “home” button gets you to the Apple TV+ one unless you click it again from there (unless you accidentally scrolled a bit and the button) or double click it to open the menu with the recently opened apps.
You can change the home button behaviour in the settings to take you to the app view.
Casting on ReVanced will still have ads, because the ads are baked into the cast feature. The ad removal only works for the app itself.
Try Invidious
I’ve heard there’s too many issues and they have to keep one step ahead of YouTube all the time and it’s getting difficult. Plus, can’t use that on TV
Any good instances? All I’ve tried are dead
You can usually pay a radom guy in any latin American country who makes a business sharing family accounts for netflix etc. or just get ublock origin.
It’s the world’s medium length video platform. If there’s an indie creator that’s good he’s there. Of course we like the whole world’s content that’s fed to us by an incredibly sophisticated algorithm.
Like 3 ads every 3 mins pretty much.
It’s crazy on both ends of the pipeline. Like, if I’m an advertiser, I want my content to be relatively exclusive. I don’t want to be the twelfth ad you see in an hour. If I’m a consumer, I want a continuous uninterrupted stream of media. I don’t want a service that repeatedly cuts out, spams me with some volume-adjusted bullshit, and then cuts back in again seemingly at random.
Yeah I honestly don’t mind a short ad in between videos like the old days. But this shit right now is horrible, forcing people on to premium. YouTube don’t care about the creators they just want subs.
You could try SmartTube
It’s a great product. It is thanklessly maintained by a single developer who is constantly fighting Youtube changes to break it. If you do use it and like it, and you can afford it, please consider a few bucks a month via patreon to keep it alive.
It is thanklessly maintained by a single developer
A lot of these services are just passion projects by odd individual developers who create something for themselves and then share it with the rest of the world.
Github is great for this kind of spontaneous innovation. But it doesn’t do a good job of organizing communities at large. Why have six different “YouTube cleanup service” alternatives when you could have a single collaborative team working towards the same end-goal? Why are people constantly trying to “fix” YouTube when what we really seem to want is an alternative media host?
Is that why I am getting about one ad for every 90 seconds of video ?
Is that how bad it is? Fuck…
Just recently it has gotten worse. The good thing is that I don’t watch TV at all any longer because I used youtube. Now I’m watching less youtube AND no TV so win win for my free time.
Oh yes, it’s gotten that bad. Like, I have a streaming stick and I can’t root it yet. I tried watching a single video on vanilla, no ad-block or anything. One video had like 4 - 5 ads within the 5 minutes of length. That is fucking inexcusable.
Creators have a say in how many ads they want to roll. Maybe try another channel.
