YouTube now adding VP9 option to popular videos

[foxyshadis]

It's amazing that they apparently run x264 on ultrafast/realtime for everything and give it wretched quality, then likely spend hundreds of times as much cpu time on their VP9 encodes that aren't universally compatible. You'd almost think it was intentional, maximizing the differences to sell their format. (The way On2 used to.)

VP9 is a good format, there's no denying that, but if they'd done the same for their h.264 encodes they'd look quite a bit better.

[zerowalker]

Can't deny this, and i am pretty much crossing my fingers they keep it this way.

As, no matter what there intentions are, we earn on it, and it will increase the force of development on VP9.

Win/Win situation;P

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Originally Posted by foxyshadis

It's amazing that they apparently run x264 on ultrafast/realtime for everything and give it wretched quality, then likely spend hundreds of times as much cpu time on their VP9 encodes that aren't universally compatible. You'd almost think it was intentional, maximizing the differences to sell their format. (The way On2 used to.)

Actually for the YouTubes this method makes a lot of sense. Get the h.264 versions encoded as fast as possible so that the video is rendered ASAP while bringing in the high quality formats later. Heck this is what YouTube does even within h.264 and VP9 - they encode the smallest resolution first and then encode progressively larger resolutions.

Anyway, here's something interesting I noticed. For resolutions 480p and smaller, VP9 actually is of a considerably smaller filesize than the h.264 DASH formats; it would seem that Google is indeed trying to use VP9 to reduce bandwidth. However it would seem that at the same time they're trying to make their HD formats still look good, which can make sense since if the user is watching those resolutions then they probably care at least a bit about the video quality.

[zerowalker]

I think they pretty much encode small resolutions first cause it's faster, HD takes ages compared to SD, Youtube probably just want Quantity before Quality (Speed in this case).

Hmm, how would you say VP9 looks at those bitrates compared to h264?
And how big difference are we talking, 1000 vs 200?

Really hope you are correct about there aim on HD, i have my doubts as it's extremely dynamic in bitrate however, but as long as VP9 improves, hopefully the bitrate difference won't be large enough to make the efficient difference lose.

[xooyoozoo]

Not sure when they flipped the switch, but Youtube now has 4K VP9 (format 272). Example 1. Example 2.

You can grab the original upload for the 2nd example the downloads section .

[mzso]

Originally Posted by xooyoozoo

Not sure when they flipped the switch, but Youtube now has 4K VP9 (format 272). Example 1. Example 2.

You can grab the original upload for the 2nd example the downloads section .

Any tools that support downloading 1080p+ videos? What I have ( 1 2 ) doesn't show anything for these above 1080p.

[foxyshadis]

Originally Posted by mzso

Any tools that support downloading 1080p+ videos? What I have ( 1 2 ) doesn't show anything for these above 1080p.

Keepvid will show every available stream, including DASH (as separate streams). Just turn Java off, it works much better with Javascript.

[mzso]

Originally Posted by foxyshadis

Keepvid will show every available stream, including DASH (as separate streams). Just turn Java off, it works much better with Javascript.

Thanks. I didn't think about keepvid.
(Is it me or did something got bork with the bookmarklet. It redirects me to https which fails to load...)

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Originally Posted by xooyoozoo

If your decoding stacked is built on libav/ffmpeg, and you need faster HEVC decode, you can always use the OpenHEVC fork. Optimizations there eventually percolate outwards, but for whatever reasons, progress is intermittent and OpenHEVC is (still) 2x faster than ffmpeg-master.

Well I was just using MPC-HC v1.7.5 for playing back VP9 and HEVC. Considering that HEVC decoders are ever so slightly older than VP9 decoders I never would have imagined that VP9's decoder in MPC-HC was actually more optimized. This is even more-so the case since, as an outsider (I'm an audio guy), it seems like the video gurus absolutely adore HEVC and yet treat VP9 as the red-headed step child.

Originally Posted by foxyshadis

Keepvid will show every available stream, including DASH (as separate streams). Just turn Java off, it works much better with Javascript.

There's also "Complete YouTube Saver" and "YouTube Video and Audio Downloader" for anyone using Firefox-based browsers:
http://www.cys-audiovideodownloader.com/
https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/fir...and-audio-dow/


EDIT: I just realized that YouTube has an actual separate 1440p format, even for h.264. I could have sworn that 1440p and 2160p had the same base format meaning that if your video had 2160p then it didn't have 1440p (and obviously vice versa).

[mzso]

Originally Posted by Nintendo Maniac 64

There's also "Complete YouTube Saver" for anyone using Firefox-based browsers:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...youtube-saver/

CYS wasn't updated yet for the new formats.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Originally Posted by mzso

CYS wasn't updated yet for the new formats.

Derp, you're right. It's just that CYS already supported VP9 for the other resolutions by the time we found out about it.

[zerowalker]

Originally Posted by Nintendo Maniac 64

EDIT: I just realized that YouTube has an actual separate 1440p format, even for h.264. I could have sworn that 1440p and 2160p had the same base format meaning that if your video had 2160p then it didn't have 1440p (and obviously vice versa).

I am quite sure of this as well.

Remember the "Original" talk before, i am pretty sure that was the same, being anything above 1080p and up to a certain size.

Then i think they changed name to, 2160p or something, which was anything, 1200p etc, up to 4k or what it was, i think they later changed it to a lower resolution, at least i read something about that.

I guess they added it back cause of 4k being the next "high-end stream", and i guess more resolutions add compatibility, i just hope they could get on with VP9 on at least 1440p, cause my resolution is 1200p which my videos are in most cases.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

It's my understanding that it went like this:

Introduce 4096x3072 as "Original" -> rename format to "2160p" -> introduce a separate "1440p" resolution.

And I just noticed that the Wikipedia article for YouTube states the following:

The default video stream is encoded in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format, with stereo AAC audio.[73]

From my tests, if the browser supports both VP9 and MSE via HTML5 then it'll use VP9 as the default; I've seen this with both Chrome and Opera. Can anyone else confirm/deny this?

[zerowalker]

That is most probable, it goes hand in hand with what i said i think.

Just not sure, does Youtube support 4k or not?
I mean, 2160 is not 4k, but the naming can be deceiving as they have been before on Youtube.

Also, has any of your new videos become VP9?
Or was it just a rare case back then?

[Asmodian]

Isn't 2160p = 4K? I understand 4K = 3840x2160, 8K = 7680x4320. No idea why we switched from vertical to horizontal pixel counts for naming, maybe 2K sounded too 14 years ago? 2160p doesn't sound bad to me but it must have focus tested worse than 4K.

[zerowalker]

Oh right, forgot about the different definitions of 4k, 3840 is the correct one, quite frustrated about that, for me 4k is 4000, which means 4096 = 4k in the byte world.

I am guessing the naming sense is simply for the next-gen flash.

For example, it sound much more high end in the market if you say, Skip your 1080p video today and get 4k!
The things that comes to mind is, 1000 *4 = 4k, which is quite the more impact then 2160p which sound like it's just twice as good compared to four times.

Then there is also "Full HD" which is the correct opposie to "4k", i am guessing 2160p is the true 1080p opposite.

From my tests, if the browser supports both VP9 and MSE via HTML5 then it'll use VP9 as the default; I've seen this with both Chrome and Opera. Can anyone else confirm/deny this?

I can confirm that if VP9 is available, it will always be used, even if it doesn't support the resolutions h264 got (as >1080p), which i think can be quite bothersome.
Downsizing has much more impact then the codec difference cause of 2 things.

1: Downsizing is always bad, and is only used for squeezing less bitrates while making it appear better than it is.
2: Higher resolutions on youtube yield higher bitrates, which makes less resolutions with VP9 negligible in quality difference.

Both these together makes it quite clear that the highest resolution will probably always be the winner (In the Youtube case).

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Originally Posted by zerowalker

Oh right, forgot about the different definitions of 4k, 3840 is the correct one, quite frustrated about that, for me 4k is 4000, which means 4096 = 4k in the byte world.

Well guess what, YouTube's 4k format supports up to 4096x3072.

Originally Posted by zerowalker

Also, has any of your new videos become VP9?

In fact most of my videos have VP9 encodings, the only ones that don't usually only have 1000 or so views anyway. The issue is that my videos with VP9 encodings (other than the F-Zero GX video) were uploaded due to their audio - the actual video stream is just a single still image.

However, I do upload those audio-focused videos with completely lossless audio (lossless the entire way - source, editing, and upload) so if you want to do an audio quality comparison then they'd work great.


EDIT: However, if you are doing any audio testing you need to make sure you download the audio via CYS rather than KeepVid - it seems that KeepVid only links to the middle quality DASH audio format while CYS is able to download the low, medium, and high quality DASH audio formats.


EDIT 2: Uh, wow. While doing an audio quality comparison between 1080p WebM and 1080p MP4 I think I may have discovered a semi-widespread vorbis decoding bug. During the very second note of a specific song there's an audible pop that shouldn't be there, but it's there in Foobar2000, Firefox, and Audacity. However, the pop is not there in Chrome, VLC, and MPC-HC. For reference this pop is not present in the AAC encodings as well and to be clear isn't in the original audio either. Also converting the vorbis file to WAV via Foobar makes the pop still be there but converting the same vorbis file via VLC (though at 16 bit) results in the pop being present.

I think I'm going to need to go to the HydrogenAudio guys for this one...


EDIT 3: Even wierder, when I put the save vorbis file into an matroska container and then everything is fine...

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

So then, more on-topic, I just realized that CYS hasn't actually been updated in over 2 months (does that mean YouTube's been doing VP9 since March?!). I've been in contact with the author of that extension over the last several months over several things so I'm going to shoot him an email right now about adding the VP9 4k format.

EDIT: Email sent. The guy usually responds anywhere from within a single to to about a week, so it shouldn't take too long.

[zerowalker]

So then, more on-topic, I just realized that CYS hasn't actually been updated in over 2 months (does that mean YouTube's been doing VP9 since March?!). I've been in contact with the author of that extension over the last several months over several things so I'm going to shoot him an email right now about adding the VP9 4k format.

That's quite nice, over 2 months (i am guessing like 2-4 months) is not that long a time, and still they have pushed out quite a bit of VP9 videos, both new (which is expected) and old, which must be hard if you think of the quantity, even if you take only the 20k views ones.

Though what do you mean VP9 4k format, have i missed something?
As far as i know, VP9 is Only up to 1080p atm.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Originally Posted by zerowalker

Though what do you mean VP9 4k format, have i missed something?

You totally did.

Originally Posted by xooyoozoo

Not sure when they flipped the switch, but Youtube now has 4K VP9 (format 272). Example 1. Example 2.