Friendly reminder: If you know how to use Docker, you can self host Invidious on your PC and have an experience better tgan YouTube for free.
Invidious alone has been working quite badly this year (stopped working for months until inv-sig-helper was invented, etc), but combined with FreeTube it almost always works; can recommend.
I’ve done this for about 6 months, I’ve had a very mixed experience with Invidious, mostly with YouTube constantly making changes without notice or the video stream not really supporting resuming if the connection breaks briefly.
This isn’t a comment on the Herculean effort the contributors are taking on, but new users should be aware that they need a very reliable connection, update the container regularly, and exercise patience in the current state of Invidious.
YouTube has litterally attacked it by blacklisting all know cloud IPs world wide when tmaccessing YouTube.
Self-hosting is the only reliable way. Sometimes, YouTube breaks something, but after a few hours, Invidious pushes a fix…
But if you target the latest tag of all relevant images, itms just:
docker compose pull; docker compose down; docker compose up
Yeah, anything to make that line go up on YouTube’s end.
The latest tag still doesn’t support multiple audio tracks, which might sound niche, but YouTube just rolled out AI dubbed audio tracks, and so Invidious can just play the wrong track and you can’t do anything about it and it’s been this way for about a month.
That being said, it seems that the team’s plan is to put more dev time into changing the back end to video.js so they don’t have to brunt the video retrieval workload, and video.js supports multiple audio tracks as far as I know. I look forward to when that happens, but in the meantime the latest tag is not 100% usable :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it’s more expensive in Europe, my premium is 7.99 usd
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?
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
when did they change the free trial from three months to one?
When they decided FUCK YOU!!! PAY US MONEY FASTER!!!
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?
That’s the Euro symbol. Just FYI.
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…
Does that require you to watch via vpn all the time or just when you make the account?
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
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 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).
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 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.
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.
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 used to be able to play videos in the background but they removed that feature specifically to lock it behind a paywall. YouTube will never see a dime from me because of this.
Charging for new features? Sure I guess. Removing features to charge for them later? Get fucked.
You can get around this by running YouTube in the web browser on Android at least
Or use NewPipe
You’ll have ads and be paying soon enough
Cancelled YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, and Netflix this month. Prime is up next. Will keep Spotify unless they decide to jack rates up again soon.
Spotify is an evil company. They’ve started adding fake songs in to pay themselves instead of paying royalties to real artists.
Yeah, I agree about them being evil. Unfortunately, I got outvoted on which services to keep.
Oh they will jack rates again, don’t put it pass them. Their recent rate hiking was like 6 months ago.
I was paying for it until it got to like $16.99 on iOS. As much of an annoyance to use a work around like AD Guard. I can now afford it but refuse to give those greedy mofos a dime.
That is because you are paying for the premium of signing up through ios; apple takes a cut so to make money they raise the rates. It’s extremely common signing up to any service through ios, that you will be charged higher than if you went to the website on your browser and sign up for it there. First link has link to Hank Green who does a great break down and investigation but provided many more examples.
https://www.devicemag.com/youtube-premium-cost-iphone/
https://lifehacker.com/dont-sign-up-for-subscriptions-in-the-app-1850298355
https://umatechnology.org/psa-subscriptions-cost-more-when-bought-on-an-iphone/
Apple fan boys down voting me? I make a valid point with proof without bashing apple products and even a solution to get the same rates as everyone else and i get down voted. That makes sense…
My screen shows you having one single downvote. I wouldn’t worry about a single techfruit loyalist.
One downvote and you start complaining about downvotes? Have another. Maybe it’ll help thicken your skin.
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 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.
I can’t believe people still even use YouTube when shit like this is happening. Paywalling resolution? Get fukt.
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
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.
That actually makes more sense to me compared to most premium features. Higher quality directly costs more money to stream.
Even with premium they will send lower quality if they think they can get away with it, I have to change the quality on every video that plays on my tablet now: it completely ignores the preferred quality in the settings.
I haven’t noticed any issues on Firefox, can also use an add-on to force specific quality.
