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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
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.
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…
One downvote and you start complaining about downvotes? Have another. Maybe it’ll help thicken your skin.
My screen shows you having one single downvote. I wouldn’t worry about a single techfruit loyalist.
More than you think, actually. My wife recently signed up. I’m like, Babe! I already have uBlock Origin to block ads on desktop! On mobile, Firefox also blocks ads and allows listening to videos with the screen off. 😫
But, we still get ads on our smart LG TV. So. That’s apparently enough to throw the money away.
We csncelled all streaming and use plex but we watch too much YouTube and am tired of having to keep up with versions of pirate apps every time they break. I already deal with having to keep patching the newest youtube apk with vanced on my phone. Not gonna bother for all the other devices.
Exact same story. It’s frustrating.
It’s okay to pay for a service that you use daily.
I don’t, but I disagree it’s “to throw money away”.
Especially if you can finagle a subscription out of one of the cheaper countries, too!
Does that still work? Thought to have read here and there that Google is cracking down on that loophole? Maybe not (yet) if you are an existing ‘foreign’ sub.
Finally gave in to a 2 month free trial of YouTube premium this week. Not planning on buying into it however when the trial expires. But with the holidays thought it was a good time to accept the trial for two full months.
They are getting stricter, but there are still ways around it - and it only gets easier if you have friends/family (or are willing to make friends) in said countries; the internet is a global community, after all.
Look into getting SmartTube for the TV. Works pretty great for me
As with most things in the modern world that have gone to shit. It is not the monetization scheme in of itself that is the issue. It is the never ending desire for more profit this quarter than last forever.
If it was acceptable to stop trying to make even more once the cost to operate is covered and some healthy profit is made predictably then a lot less people would have issues. And enshitification would slow down.
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.
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
13 per month. That’s over 100 per year. Did not expect it to be that expensive.
It is because it includes YouTube Music. A really crappy Spotify clone that nobody asked for.
For some magical reason, YouTube music has less AI music than Spotify.
The playlists are significantly worse, but I haven’t really heard any AI Christmas music that has infested Spotify.
Which replaced Google Play Music, which was actually good.
Yeah that I think is the most upsetting part to me. Replace a perfectly fine product with a half baked one.
That’s been Google’s thing for decades now
I unironically use ytmusic more than spotify because finding niche artists is a lot more easier, which is basically the entirety of edm and its many subgenres.
I use revanced though because I dont like google that much
I use both and find yt music is far better for discovering new music and artists and I love that it can play music from YouTube video as well. Everything else about it is worse though.
That’s almost one cent per video. Outrageous!
If you watch 43 videos per day on every day, yes…
Some of us go to work or school or whatever and can’t therefore do that every single day, especially not when the videos are longer…
The package for couples is 25. I save a dollar.
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
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.
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 :(
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.
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
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
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.
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.
„I don’t want to watch ads and I want everything to be free.”
My brother in christ, this is not how services work.
It would be fine if there were so many ads
According to Google, YouTube had made US$15.1 billion in ad revenue in 2019, […] nearly 10% of the total Alphabet revenue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Finances quoting https://abc.xyz/assets/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf?cache=05bd9fe
But have you considered how clever you look if you simp for the bourgeoisie?
It wouldn’t be so bad if the ads were reasonably placed.
Don’t target people who come in from another domain or on the first viewed video. Pre- roll ads after that. Most importantly, ad breaks at creator-defined times only. Sick of ads coming in at arbitrary times in the middle of a sentence. That’s the worst part of it, IMO.
Oh and a time limit on ads. That has to happen too.
Also could somebody tell all the streaming companies that they know what language I watch all my videos in and to stop giving me Spanish language ads? Like, I got no problem with other languages, I just really feel like you’re wasting your advertisers money showing them to people who don’t know a quesadilla from a carton of pickles.
I was fine with it back when it was just one ad that you could skip.
I was fine with it back when it was just two ads that you could skip.
I was fine with it back when it was just two ads, and you could skip one, and the other was 5 seconds long. 10 was a stretch, but I’m patient.
Without an adblocker, now it’s playing an unskippable, 10+ seconds long ad at the start AND at the end. Some ads are as long as 20 seconds. If the video is long enough, it dares to abruptly play an ad right in the middle. You can’t skip that one, either. We’re back to television content-to-ad ratios - the exact thing I was happy to dump once there was enough content on YouTube. I was patient. That wasn’t enough for them. They can suck a beehive.
We’re back to television content-to-ad ratios
I hate ads too but we’re not there yet. When I stopped watching tv it was like at least 30% ads and I am sure it got worse the decade after I quit while it was still relevant.
I wonder if it’s (about) the same in every country but I stopped watching it a long time ago (over a decade). If it got even worse then there’s no way I’m ever going back, but it was too much for me below that 30%.
I can be patient if the content is >10min long.
If I need to watch an ad for every 2-5min video of streamer clips I’d go balistic as that are even more ads than the broadcast tv nonsense.
I don’t mind paying. Except if it’s evilcorp. Which it is.
Lol, yep that’s how it works in tha GAFAM ecosystem because YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. So I’m not giving a dime to google but I’m hapoy to support creators directly.
Line must go up
Well companies do need to make money, yeah
Companies don’t need to make infinite money. That’s just a weird incentive that modern corporations seem to be chasing and burning everything down around them to achieve.
they already did
Nah, they have enough money. They won capitalism. Billions in profit. Fuck advertisements. Directly support the creators in your life.
Free-at-point-of-service is a common feature of amenities provided by countries with socialist economies.
But they only work when the economy is actively managed. If you’re just pumping cash into a big banking machine and telling people to grab for it, you’re not incentivizing any particular economic activity. You’re just encouraging entrepreneurs to get particularly good at snatching money out of the air and elbowing one another in the face.
uBlock Origin 🥳
Yes, certainly, fuck their ads; but that wont restore the degraded resolution now will it.
I see this recommendation all the time. It frustrates me. I’m in favor of blocking ads and modding clients and whatever it takes to optimize one’s experience, but the majority - by far - of my YouTube experience takes place on my TV. I can’t do much to control it (pihole and other DNS solutions don’t work on YouTube since their ads are hosted in the same servers as their videos).
I could perform various modifications to the operating system of my TV, and trust me it’s tempting for a lot of reasons, but it was a very expensive (by my standards) TV so I want to at least wait until the warranty expires until I start experimenting.
I could also use something hooked up to my TV and mod that, which is my favorite idea, but my wife likes the interface as it is. It’s an LGTV with the … Sigh … “Magic” remote, which I absolutely hate, but I don’t want to take it away from her. It seems like that interface, especially the “magic” cursor, would be hard to replicate. I’d prefer not to go through the tedium of having two different systems.
Especially because we also have a console hooked up and no solution I’ve found so far has provided a simple way of switching between HDMI sources without running a disgusting number of cables. I did recently order a new receiver, so hopefully that helps with the multiple origins issue.
Obviously this is very much a a first world problem, and I apologize for my privilege, I just wanted to point out that uBO (or other software based solutions) aren’t always the solution.
LG AI Voice Remote?! That’s a huge no from me dawg hahaha
All of my screens just have computers hooked up to them, controlled by wireless keyboards with built-in touchpads. Adblocking on everything!
If I lived alone, this would be the way for me as well.
I recently spoke to LG support, rather at length, about an unrelated issue. During that conversation I asked if there was a way to turn off the “magic” cursor because fuck do I hate it. Apparently, there is: turn on narration - that is, the accessibility option that reads anything you highlight on screen in case you have vision issues. Why are the two things related, you ask, and why is it a binary option? I’m sure the answer is because LG leadership wants you to use the cursor, but apparently they couldn’t think of a PR friendly answer, because every time I asked support changed the subject.
Woof… I’m so sorry you hafta deal with that. I hate anything listening to me. D: I’m thankful both my partner and myself love using keyboard with touchpad.
May I ask which devices (computers/keyboards) do you use for your screens? I’d like to do the same, since we mostly watch the same TV channels in my house and one subscription would cover most of the content my family watches.
Sure! I have a bunch o Logitech k400s controlling some standard windows 10 PCs, and a couple screens have Raspberry Pis connected. Even a very old windows computer can run 1440p videos or YouTube just fine if it has a solid state drive, and those are mega cheap now!
Thanks! I’ll check which similar hardware I can find near me :D
Thanks for bringing this up, because it frustrates me as well. Most of the time I’m watching on a TV, and there’s no way to block YT ads on a TV. The people I share my house with aren’t technical and will watch YouTube even with ads. So to keep them out of my house I pay for YT premium.
Suggesting that people just do something technical and janky to block ads isn’t a solution for me, not because I can’t do it, but because there’s no way my family will do it.
Thank you for the recommendation and I’ll investigate this.
I totally get that, I have a few suggestions since I’ve been in the same situation for years and have recently improved it.
Our Yamaha stereo takes many HDMI inputs, and has a single TV output, so the TV never needs to change inputs. It’s quite easy and quick on the Yamaha.
I bought a Raspberry Pi 500 for ~$100 US and am loving it. I think it could use a speed upgrade (I hear the SD card will do it). Of course it’s mouse and keyboard, but we only use it for Netflix, YouTube, etc, so it was easy to make shortcuts and get a small/nice living room keyboard/mouse combo.
It’s led to zero ads, and the household discussion was like “would you trade some ease of use to not see this stupid ad?” And we both agreed that it’s worth it. So far it’s been really nice.
Living room? Logitech k400!
I’ve been eyeing this little gadget, maybe it would solve the inconvenience issue?
Logitech K400 on all my machines!
thank you! i was hesitant to get one that was unbranded, but i am more inclined to get one by Logitech!
You’re me but elsewhere it seems.
I don’t have a solution either unfortunately
I certainly haven’t had time to investigate them, but there are one or two decent solutions proposed in this thread. So far I think the “dev mode” suggestion is my favorite idea. I’ll look into that and try to remember to let you know how it goes.
Even if you have a device connected to your TV to block ads when you’re using Youtube, nothing prevents her from using the TV OS when she does.
If your wife wants her familiar interface with ads, then she made the choice that you’re watching ads on YouTube on your TV.
I agree. Once my warranty expires or I get brave enough to tinker with the OS hopefully the “ads” part will no longer be relevant.
I recently set up dev mode on my LG TV and installed a patched version of YouTube with ad block and sponsor block. I don’t think this voids warranty.
If there’s interest I could look up the instructions I used (I’m traveling right now).
I don’t care that enhanced Bitrate is premium only. I do care that you still need to click “advanced resolution settings” to access this even for premium users on mobile.
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The speed at which you are connected to the internet via your ISP is only part of the path to youtube’s content servers. You could easily have a fast connection to an ISP with a congested uplink, you could be located a long way from the nearest google CDN, or that CDN could be overloaded.
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ReVanced :)
Grayjay.app :)
NewPipe :)
PipePipe :)
SmartTube :)
