UKposts's compression on 1080p videos has definitely gotten increasingly noticeable over the years. I swear it feels like 10 years ago I didn't really notice it unless I was looking for it, and then slowly over the years, videos across the board got increasingly muddy and blocky looking.

I don't see how this will dissuade people from simply uploading their 1080p videos in 4K to work around the issue of low bitrate like they've always done.

I used to live in Africa with very restricted data usage on my wifi (30gb/month /household). I watched at 144p and 240p, and could really notice how well UKposts has optimised the data usage required for videos.

I liked the part where he compared 1080p Premium vs 1080p

I keep trying to explain to people that German public TV networks transmit in 720p BUT with 50p AND 14000-16000kbit/s bitate, while the pay to view private HD stations transmit in 1080i (50i/25p) with bitrates of 6000kbit/s or lower. Most people still think resolution is more important than bitrate 😬

One thing that AV1 will probably improve: VP9 doesn't just hate confetti and snow like any other compressed video codec, it also really hates the strong edges present in leafless foliage.

Glad most of my favorite content creators have started uploading in 1440p or higher because man 1080p is looking rough on a decent desktop monitor nowadays…

I dreamt of Phillip last night

Me in Australia on satellite internet watching in 144p to save data: fockin beautiful mate huge difference

I think computing resource is also a big factor. AVC is inefficient in terms of bandwidth, but it takes much less compute power to encode in than VP9 or AV1.

Love seeing phillips patch note comparison skills being put to good use in other fields

I used to COMFORTABLY be able to watch 720p videos. Around the start of the pandemic they dropped the bitrate if I recall. Since then 720p is nearly unwatchable, at least on videos that include things such as onboards from cars or anything with a lot of motion.

It still amazes me that UKposts is as profitable as it is. 99% of the content on this platform is just pure expense on the side of UKposts (personal videos like weddings/birthdays/etc), we're talking beyond Petabytes of storage/bandwidth, especially when you factor in how things gets copied around to different data centers for redundancy/performance reasons. Honestly, I expect UKposts to be a very different and much a worse service 50 years from now, I just can't imagine how they'll keep up as South America, Africa, India continue to grow. We'll be telling our grand kids about what UKposts was like 50 years ago and they won't believe us.

As a note for the end of the video, Premium is tied to the email, not the youtube account. If your other YT channels are all under one email they all get premium. You can also do YT Premium family plan for 50% more and get 5 more emails you can add the plan onto. It's what I do.

5:00 yes it is so annoying having to export every 1080p video in 4K, just to have decent 1080p quality when its online...

I couldn't believe my eyes when I once saw a 720P video, with stupidly high bitrate, it actually looked as good as a blu-ray to my eyes. Bitrate is king.

I don't know what data it was based off of, but the dev notes you referenced said there was no drop in "perceived" image quality. So, I'm guessing they used some data that suggests people didn't notice the quality difference (most likely measured in an indirect and dubious fashion). The image quality was almost certainly objectively worse, but they had information to suggest that it wasn't consequential (at least that's my read of it)

For the bit that you don't understand, here's my take. I'm still fairly confused on it, but I have the very prestigious label of "has used FFmpeg" so I gave it some thinking: Take a look at figure 4's probabilities superimposed against the quality/bitrate graph. Reasonably, they play the highest video resolution that can be supported for that connection. But notice how flat the curve is within that region. They have a lot of wiggle room before the operating point before the quality begins to drop off drastically. So, they don't start showing you that resolution once you hit the operating point for it; rather, the operating point is the place where they upgrade you to the next highest resolution. For example, when you hit the operating point for 360p, they switch your stream to 480p at the lower bitrate. There's still the point that you brought up in the beginning about 1000Kbps 1080p being worse than 1000Kbps 720p. But, notice that the article treats 1080p as the absolute highest, not the "normal" resolution. They seem to care more for this in the lower resolution/bitrate space, where the data pipeline is smaller. I did some encoding testing with 360p and 480p at low bitrates for Beat Saber videos (a surprisingly bitrate-sensitive game) and found that ~600Kbps was where 480p started to look better than 360p at the same bitrate. At 800Kbps, the 480p stream was significantly better, so we could maybe call that the operating point. 480p still has a while to go before it gets to diminished returns (the operating point that would send you to 720p), but why stay on 360p when 480p is marginally better for the same cost? The idea is that they upgrade the stream to a higher resolution before they even approach the point of diminished returns, since the higher resolution has already started to look better. --- As an aside, I hope AV1 takes off. Haven't been able to play with it myself because I lack the hardware (and AV1 CPU encode is mega slow, if it even works right), but it looks really promising. Great for details in black areas, which is a massive problem for x264 and even NVENC.

Wow, I have to say thank you for mentioning the blog. It was a great read and super interesting!

The blog post is basically saying that the bitrates in which a video is encoded are based partly on the expected audience. So if a video's expected audience is in a region where bandwidth is more limited, then all of the resolution options will have lower bitrates, allowing more people to watch at higher resolutions than they otherwise would. This also reduces loading time and buffering events. I imagine they also use different encoding algorithms based on the types of devices in a regional video's audience, because some are more CPU intensive to decode than others (so if they know most people in a region are using slow phones, they can compensate for that, which improves the overall experience).

A long time ago I saw an article (couldn't find it now) which explored how the same JPEG image looked when downscaled vs. the quality slider on JPEG moved to make the file size lower than the downscaled version. Almost universally, the lower bitrate higher pixel count versions looked better. So I think this is what the UKposts document means. Seems like something you can explore in a video as well :)

Maybe you should try testing the video quality at fixed bitrates for different codecs. There are a lot of settings and you can keep testing forever. But in the testing I made my self, I was very impressed with AV1 at super low bit rates. VP9 is still quite good, and AVC1/H.264/H.265 are lacking behind. I have yet to try to find settings where the encoding takes the same amount of time (I have only tried CPU encoding) for a test video, and see witch are better. Cause AV1 and VP9 takes a lot longer than h.264, when optimizing for quality at a fixed bitrate. The settings are nearly endless. 🙂

I always love your background music, gives a sense of nostalgia somehow

About time, I've been asking for this for years.

For the bit you don't understand, looks like what they do is adjust the parameters of the video encoder to tweak specific areas of video quality that are least affected on the most devices. Assuming most people watch on their phones, I would bet this would look something like maintaining colour accuracy for everything but blacks, or focusing on maintaining the quality of small text at the cost of other small details - essentially "improving" the quality on these devices at a lower cost.

i have noticed that quite often when i watch a video from a small channel in the 1000 ish subs range or so i often can't watch in 1440p and 1080p is also a struggle sometimes but watching Linus Tech Tips at 4k a moment later is no problem. Now quality is difficult because not all are using the same software to record and edit or setting in that software. But if i were to pay for better quality i would expect a video to look 99% like it did before uploading it to youtube, no blurry dark scenes and so on

just saw it on a video, this is the only place I could find covering it. yes, clicking the option takes you to the "premium sign up" page

Regarding the multiple UKposts Premiums issue, you can get a family subscription for a small additional premium (hah) over the normal price, which allows you to share it with up to 6 accounts in your household. That's what I've ended up doing since I want to make different accounts for different purposes (like work and language learning) but I've become too accustomed to the lack of ads, mobile background play, and the general sense of superiority I get from knowing that I'm providing support to my favourite UKpostsrs regardless of whether their content gets demonetised or not to go back to the free experience.

0:20 to be clear, encoders don't "drop the resolution". They simply encode in blocks and average out colors. Flatter colors are going to be averaged more, saving more space. It's why a flat color PNG is significantly smaller than a really complicated PNG.

youtube premium has a family plan that lets you add up to five accounts to the plan. It's cheaper than paying for each account individually and I give the extra seats to my family.

A while ago i found a youtube test channel with 100 subs by chance, over the past few months they kept uploading videos with titles talking about "premium exempt bits" or something like that, now i finally understand what that was referencing to

UKposts is already using AV1 for many of the videos, and the answer to the question you posed in that part of the video is this: they just use it reduce filesize. AV1 will look better than other codecs on some youtube videos, and it will look worse on others, but overall, AV1 videos on youtube have the same quality problems as other codecs (H.264 and VP9).

As someone with a 1080p display on my PC, I have indeed used the 4K option every time when applicable

Interesting. I'll check it out when it comes. I rarely care past 480p though unless I'm watching something cinematic.

I was thinking to myself "ah that makes sense" and then you started talking and I realised I thought I understood it because I didn't and you thought you didn't because you did. I was listening to how they said it rather than actually considering the words offered

I think what youtube would bene fit from is if they would partner with phone manufacturers and large software companioes for video editing, game recording etc. Because many people upload videos without thinking about their bitrate, file size and quality too much. If they desire a good quality, they upload it as large as possible. Videos made by smartphones are absolutely massive, a minute can easily be more than a GB. If all recording and editing software would have a partnership with youtube, they could make easy to use presets that record and export videos with the best possible settinggs and efficiency. Because most people don't want to deal with codecs, bitrates etc. UKposts could save a ton of storage space, computational power and bandwith, if the originals they have to store would be more efficient, wouldn't have to be reencoded after uploading to youtube and would be more efficient in bandwith/resolution to begin with. Most editing software has presets for youtube. But honestly, I haven't seen a single preset in a software that isn't absolutely terrible and wrong configured for this purpose.

am i the only person to remember the "original" quality option we had a few years ago for free? i remember using it to check the battlefield 3 gameplay before i had a good gpu to run the game, it was mind blowing how amazing the quality was

Since you mentioned having multiple UKposts accounts and therefore needing multiple Premium subscriptions, I just want to point out that a single Premium subscription will cover all of your channels ("brand accounts") as long as they belong to the same Google account.

If I had to guess (About 2:08) they wither cut(interpolate) some pixels off the horizontal resolution of 480p (because you know its has two values depending on the aspect ratio e.g 720*480) which will decrease the quality but still be much better than 360p or they simply compress it some more but still leave "original" pixels that are more than what 360p has.

I wonder how audio quality potentially fits in to this, I seem to recall the steelbook Bluray of Akira had a booklet which said when they showed test audiences versions of the movie at the same resolution (bitrate not mentioned) but different audio quality, people percieved the version with higher audio quality as also having better video quality. UKposts's 1080p bitrate is pretty bad, not sure if it's just switching to an oled that made it more noticeable though - I also noticed a lot more signal noise from my Mega Drive through an OSSC when switching from an old 4K tv to an oled using the same mega drive, scart cable and PSU - I had to spend £30 on a better scart cable, I was actually kind of dismayed with the improvement, I'd always sort of hoped high priced scart cables were a bit of a rip-off.

UKposts premium is tied to the email, not the channel. So if the multiple accounts are brand channels, you can just give access to those channels to any other gmail (or apps account) that subscribes to Premium. Then as long as you're signed in to the subscribed account you're able to pick which UKposts channel you use UKposts as. Premium works just fine because you're still signed in to the subscribed email, just using UKposts as a owner/manager/whatever of the brand account. Been using it like that for years with multiple channels, even as the non-primary subscriber for a UKposts Premium family plan.

Thats a very interesting idea. Perhaps, using Jdownloader, you could investigate in further detail, what UKposts is now supplying us. I'd like to see some actual measured bitrates on video and audio. Currently upscaling my entire collection of Tintin from 576i to 1152p- I'm glad I can play Half Life 1 and RTCW in VR on my Quest 2 without needing my desktop, cause it looks like it'll be buggered for a few days haha

What are the chances that I was watching a Skyrim video when I saw the enhanced youtube premium option and became curious which lead me to this video.

UKposts always downscales the bitrate of videos you upload (to squeeze data saving), so your 1080p video in UKposts is not the same quality as the original 1080p video in your local storage. i think the premium 1080p just means that, that 1080p premium version is just the original video quality without the reduced bitrate, which means bigger file size and that's why they hid it behind a paywall.

UKposts justifying this measures by hosting prices, and yet, their profits are booming

I’m scared of UKposts’s new ceo if this already appears right after he took office

what is the best bitrate quality order? 4k vs 1080p premium vs 1440p

This would explain why auto-1080p is different from manual-1080p.

5:45 I don't think You need to buy several subscriptions. The premium status is linked to your Google account. Unless you have various accounts to manage your different channels, all get premium. At least that's how it works for me. I agree with your opinion, Premium should add benefits and not take them away from free users. I subscribed when I worked in the navy and wanted to save videos and music while in harbour to play offline later. Sure, I could've pirated the music and downloaded the videos, but it was just more convenient at the time. We'll see what UKposts does, but I'm sure they have the viewers and creator's best interest at heart, as they usually do. Right?

You're one of the few UKposts creators that got it. So many others didn't upscale to 4k before uploading for far too long.

5:09 HOLY CRAP THAT'S A GREAT POINT! We always complained that we had to upscale with nearest neighbor or Lanczos to force UKposts to give us VP9/AV1 or 1440p for higher bitrates. The 1080p Premium finally gives us what we've always asked for. Good quality without having to upscale/re-render a video, and the bitrate isn't an absurd 20mbps version of the original 8mbps video. However, UKposts knows this and is trying to profit over a feature we value so highly... It's a perfect system-pay up for if you're willing to see 1080p only videos in original quality.

5:35 "My main issue is that someone with multiple UKposts accounts that I'm regularly switching between, I'd need to buy multiple UKposts Premiums, and that's just going too far" Depends, are the UKposts accounts on different emails, or are they accounts tied to the same email? From my experience with Premium, it's tied to the underlying Google account rather than the individual UKposts channels/accounts.

Does this mean UKposts's past "4K only in Premium" was not a joke. Will they actually lock 1440p and 4K too when they do this? (haha this is discussed at 3:45) Because with some videos 1440p on a 1080p monitor is significantly better thanks to the increased bitrate. (this is also discussed at 5:00)

They might roll it out to free users as they were talking about getting rid of 4k for free users the other day, but 1080p premium will probably be a noticeable jump over regular 1080 while preventing free users destroying their costly bandwitdh at 4k for premium only? Edit: 3:47 Linus from LTT said they basilcaly held off on that because of backlash but this may be their solution. The small number of 4k users accounted for something insane like 70% of the total websites bandwidth despite being only a few % of actual users.

Good evening Philip. I've been enjoying your videos since 2015, where I started with 3kliksphilip before then discovering kliksphilip and 2kliksphilip (especially after losing interest in CSGO). One of my comments (from my old account - it was so poorly written) even got featured in one of your videos. Maybe its parasocial and weird for you, but I wanted to thank you for sharing your thoughts, creative endeavors (the game making journey series is a work of art) and life with us. The night walks, Scafell Pike climb and "special walk" videos in particular are super relatable for me (bet you've heard that a million times). A lot of your older videos hold a special place in my heart too, the deus ex human revolution review got me to play it, and don't get me started on your unreal tournament 1999 video. My life has rapidly changed over the past 8 years (finishing school, 6th form, university, starting my dream job, getting engaged), and many of your videos evoke strong feelings of nostalgia so I need to thank you for that. Anyway, best wishes from a long time fan.

About lower bandwidth with same quality: You can achieve that by using more processing power to encode the video. So it's just that UKposts just reprocessed the videos when lowering the bitrates with a probably more modern software on a probably much faster computer system, but likely needing the same time to process. Thus you can have same quality at lower bitrates.

Hopefully replacing 1440p with this option will make the importance of bitrate more obvious to the general public. And since the UKposts 1440p option is just 1080p with additional bitrate, the company would be more honest about it, too.

I do pay for premium so I can't wait to just switch between the modes to see if there is a difference. Very Surprised Philip doesn't have it. I have multiple subscriptions to services, and I have been canceling to save money. Disney is gone, Amazon gone, Paramount gone, next on my list is Netflix. I just have not even considered UKposts premium, it is the one I use most often by a magnitude.

As for the blog, maybe they are using slower compression settings, or maybe they are talking about av1? In any case it is possible to lower the bitrate at the same perceived quality by increasing the complexity/encode time. (Still wouldn’t put it past them though, UKposts’s Av1 doesn’t usually look very good.) The blog is a bit of a contradiction though, right? It’s like they are admitting that it DOES affect the quality, so you should pay up.

Just a heads up YTP offers a family plan, that could work for your multiple accounts. It's what we use in our household. If I'm not mistaken it comes with like 6 or so slots. Thanks for the dive into this, interesting stuff.

It’s 2 am kliks what the

I’ve been paying for UKposts premium for about 2 years now and I can’t imagine going back to free. Any time I’m on a TV and for whatever reason I’m not signed in, the ads are so incredibly jarring it’s actually painful.

If you right click on the video you can and select statistics, you can see the codec of the video. Funny thing is, the "better" premium version (1080p) with higher bitrate is just the older less efficient VP9 codec and the "free" normal 1080p has the newer more efficient AV1 codec. So in the end, they are optically/technically the same.

I just wanted a side by side comparison lol

I will never give UKposts or Google a single cent if they continue to behave in the manner that they have been. What a joke to treat their viewers and creators so poorly and then expect people to want to pay for "premium" features.

You'd hope UKposts makes it so the logged in account can watch their own videos in highest quality at least lol

You can upload 2048x1280 which will show up as the "1080p" option. But the assigned bitrate is almost 2x higher than with 1920x1080. A quirk of the assigned bitrate formula. This also forces VP9 instead of H264 which boosts quality even higher.

they lowered the normal 1080p bitrate it got blurry on many video's

yt premium is nice. i find it worth it. It also supports my creators without watching the ads.

:)

2:38 I think it uses less data because for most people, this means watching at the same quality with a lower bitrate. I'm guessing for the few people that can now increase their resolution, they'll be using more data

The music made me think that my computer was about to explode until I paused the video + is there any noticeable differrence between 1080p Premium and normal 1080p?

Laughing at the twitter users because this video has nothing to do with the drama invovled. Love you Philip please don't let these people ruin your career and keep up the good work

I subbed to Premium a few months ago. I've now grown fond of the YT Music offering, screen off playing (now that devanced is dead), and never seeing or hearing ads is fantastic. Is it worth the 12$ per month I pay? Well, YT is where I spend much of my time if I'm not streaming a movie or reading a book, so... Yes. I think so. I do worry that google is going to further monetize YT and inevitably raise Premiums price. We'll see, I guess.

Okay, I am watching a video that has the 1080p Premium without premium and the entire thing looks Really blurry. I would have to check on other videos with the options but it is really weird, and it is not the UKpostsr not focusing the camera because it cuts several times and all of them look REALLY blurry, none of the other 3 videos I have open look that blurry. I have no idea if it is the compression or the video but I am suspicious it is the compression.

i love watvhing the video that discusses about watching youtube at 1080p or 4k at 360p bc my internet is bad about the bitrate, it would be better if all qualities had higher bitrates. when i sometimes watch GTA V races i can really see the struggle when the a pipe section of the race comes lol (mostly because i watch them at 240p or 360p)

I already pay for YTP so it's all a win for me. I can't believe I get to comfortably download videos AND to stream music on the same service. It's also nice knowing that my views give content creators more money too.

Does anyone know how to upload it to set to "1080p premium"? Can I upload it only if I pay for UKposts premium? Or if it's a 1080p under 30frame video, will the "1080p premium" be uploaded as a set video?

What I noticed is that some videos I downloaded from UKposts years ago are now in much lower quality there.

I like the idea of it. I think it's based on the data they have. Most pc users have a 1080p screen. And I'm guessing most users like myself opt for 4k quality to have the higher bitrate. This feels like a good compromise

It simply means that you would get more better pixels than normal hd and more clear video in moving picture

TotalBiscuit asked for this feature 5+ years ago and we're finally getting it now

2:38 I'm sure they're just referring to users in general using less bandwidth than before regardless of resolution because of these lower bitrate changes, and not referring to users who can now jump up in resolution.

Not quite on topic of thje video, but are you going to look into the Half-Life raytracing mod?

Isn‘t that part 2:00 talking about using AV1 encoding/decoding ?

You can add different accounts into a UKposts family group, as long as they are in the same country. And use one UKposts premium subscription for this group.

Reminds me of that time a guy did a review of an illuminated keyboard and never showed us the illuminated keyboard

I had no idea youtube did that sneaky low res thing you're talking about at first. Is there some way I can do that with my downloaded videos to reduce file sizes?

Did you make a reference to "Everything everywhere all at once"?

when i go back and try to watch older youtube videos that were only in 480p you cant even read a lot of the text anymore. that is a major issue.

There is an enhanced bitrate option for some shows, but when I look at bitrate, it says AV1 2500kps for regular and vp9 2500kps for enhanced bitrated and av1 is supposed to be the better codec. So is there something wrong?

The benefits of modern technology will take a while for it to be beneficial for UKposts. I think in many countries where they have less access to technology. It will take a while for the masses to have devices with AV1 support. For example I have relatives in a less economically developed country and they have "hand me down" devices but with 1080P screens. H.264 has been around for ages so chipset manufacturers can do that well and H.264 will perform well on those old devices. The same cannot be said for AV1 just yet, but it will definitely get there eventually

could it be audio and not loading captions automatically that drops bitrate of the video? maybe video doesnt mean the actual visual file but the entire link to the youtube video.

I was unable to run 1080p60 without dropping frames on an old Samsung Galaxy Note Tablet from 2014, be it on Vanced, on the browser or any 3rd party app. Even the official app maxed out at 720p60, and that was also dropping frames. When I installed a more updated custom ROM, I was able to download the official app and 1080p60 was unlocked. I don't recall what codec is being used, but I could play 1080p60 without dropped frames on it, while all the other 3rd party apps and browsers choked. That's when I realised there might be different versions of 1080p streams.

Ive been on Premium ever since they went crazy with the number of unskippable ads in videos, so it will be nice to get more benefits

I upload my videos at 1440p to get around the awful bitrate of 1080p on youtube (extremely noticeable a 60fps in videos with a lot of foliage or many small moving objects.. be they particle effects or leaves). While 1440p is less than 50% better resolution, youtube allocates double the bitrate for 1440p videos vs 1080p. It's even worth just upscaling a 1080p video to 1440p before uploading just to ensure you get a better bitrate on youtube and most modern editing tools can do this in a mere few minutes now.

I just export 1080p videos to 4k and then it works around the low bit rate issue if you have the bandwidth to run the video at 1440p or 4k on UKposts

actually the 1080p hasn't gotten any lower in bitrate now UKposts stores the source video files uploaded to the website so the enhanced video option means you can watch it in higher bitrate and in less compression from the source video and btw i have downloaded a lot of videos from UKposts in the past (probably 10 years ago) in 1080p I replaced the same videos with the new common UKposts 1080p and its much better than the 1080p at that time so the enhanced version based on the quality of the source video might be a lot better or not that different at all

I've have to set it to 4k. Anything on my phone with data like this video I need to run in 1080 or above or can't read the writing on my phone. I've had UKposts premium for years I've already been paying for it for music.... I've had it since Google Play days

So on this point of uploading 1080p videos as 4k to be able to use that bitrate, how would one go about doing that? Asking for a friend obviously