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Topic: Poor quality YouTube videos and Vimeo blocked outside North America (Read 1129 times) previous topic - next topic
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Poor quality YouTube videos and Vimeo blocked outside North America

Recently I have noticed very poor quality on YouTube videos as you go to lower resolutions, I think this is probably YouTube not some software issue. One of my laptops has a 1600x900 display so 720P should look near perfect, but that resolution on YouTube is horrible now, and even at 1080P any areas of motion have compression artifacts and look like they are running at about 10fps. If I go to 2.7K it looks better but that shouldn't be needed. It looks like there is too much compression being applied to the video streams, but I don't know, if everyone else is getting better results then it might just be my local problem.

I went to Vimeo to compare, I haven't looked at that site for a while but now the search feature is blocked outside of North America, goodbye Vimeo:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vimeo/comments/1gh1kc0/what_happend_to_vimeo/

Re: Poor quality YouTube videos and Vimeo blocked outside North America

Reply #1 –
Check for in-browser codec support, there was a spec change recently for Firefox 137 to support HEVC H.265 videos, but at least since 130 they've fucked something bigtime there and I had several severe problems with it:

And the funny thing is that in this configuration EVEN if you have HW accel marked and reported as "present" and "working", buffering won't work and youtube will downgrade the codec... So yeah, this is a big problem and this is just purely mozilla's (because it affected the forks too) incompetence (I analised the subpar codebase of this matter and I was just shaking my head throughout...). This got fixed by accident on some combination of ffmpeg (+ and family) and browser updates two months ago, and since mozilla was changing shit up way before that I blame them instead of ffmpeg, because it worked perfectly fine with all other applications like for example mpv.

Re: Poor quality YouTube videos and Vimeo blocked outside North America

Reply #2 –
On both my laptops Waterfox about:support shows everything in that table supported as software not hardware, except hevc which isn't supported in either column.
This is an example of what I was talking about, the first 3/4 of the video was a Hero 9 and the last 1/4 a Hero 7 which doesn't seem to affect things in this respect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8dSOZahCHo
If you look at the gravel trail, when you have a fast moving scene, on 720p it has blotches of greyish color appearing randomly in places, the front of the ATV develops a sort of bow wave of artifacts on it's front edge. The surface becomes more clearly defined as you go to 1080 and 1440. But with a 900 screen height, 1080 ought to be higher resolution than it is possible to display, which suggests to me the lower resolutions were created with a lot of compression applied. Also at times the trees and things which move faster onscreen as they near the edges of the picture and disappear behind seem to move in a jerky fashion, this is not improved by higher resolutions, but that aspect could be network speed causing frames to be dropped I suppose.

Re: Poor quality YouTube videos and Vimeo blocked outside North America

Reply #3 –
I think this is due to GoPro's and some other modern cameras having a very high bitrate which gives a glossy high quality look. But something has to give due to bandwidth constraints.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbitrate
If a GoPro HD video is compressed to the recommended 8Mbps like this:
ffmpeg -i input.MP4 -c:v libx264 -b:v 8M -pass 1 -f null /dev/null && \
ffmpeg -i input.MP4 -c:v libx264 -b:v 8M -pass 2 output.MP4
it looks like it was shot with a higher ISO, or on a more run of the mill camera, but probably wouldn't have those issues. If using ffmpeg and crf you need a far higher number than normally recommended to get 8Mbps, like 35 instead of low to mid 20's, because the initial bitrate is so high.