Does YouTube support HE-AAC properly?

[IgorC]

Maybe something is wrong around HE-AAC on YouTube.

This video from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v182nMiXNXk supposly should has HE-AAC track.
ffdshow decodes it as SBR at 44.1 khz but it's sound actually as LC part at 22khz. Maybe there is a bug on transcoding part in YouTube servers.

[Keiyakusha]

This video in SD 480p have AAC-LC 44.1 kHz 96kbps and AAC-LC 44.1 kHz 121 kbps in HD 720p.

[IgorC]

O rly?

Can you hear that is not 44.1 khz? It has strong resampling at 22khz. http://img18.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=heaac.png

Direct link to the same video
http://www.mediafire.com/?ijkd1qnohfz

[Keiyakusha]

Yes it sounds similar to me. Well i don't really get how youtube should support AAC-HE audio.

Lets say you have some source file with PCM 44.1kHz, after you encode it to AAC-HE, it will became 22kHz and it will be upscaled on the fly each time durring playback. After you upload this file on youtube, audio will be decoded to 44.1khz and encoded to AAC-LC 44.1kHz.

[IgorC]

Youtube's codecs are incredibly bad: H.264 Baseline (no Bframes, no CABAC, 1 ref) and very low quality LC-AAC audiocodec.
Even LAME MP3 encoder has higher quality.

The only thing that come in my mind is Google can't pay for license costs of H.264 Higf Profile and HE-AAC v2. Google is loosing a lot of money on Youtube due to high bandwidth.
They just could decrease bandwidth by using better quality codecs.
Let's say for "HQ" streams to obtain the same quality:
Instead of 500 kbit/s of poor quality Xvid H.264 Baseline -> 150-200 kbit/s x264.
Instead of LC-AAC 128 kbit/s -> Nero HE-AAC2 at 16-24 kbit/s.

Yes, their LC-AAC encoder is REALLY horrible. It simply lacks good lowpass filter, not talking about psy stuff.