Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: YouTube audio quality (Stats for Nerds) (Read 6361 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

YouTube audio quality (Stats for Nerds)

If I use JDownloader2 (Beta) to download a YT video, I can "Set Variant" to download various-quality files (files segregated as, e.g, "Best audio available", "256 M4A", "256 AAC", "96 mp3," etc ). JD2 will allow audio-only downloads and I assume (but don't know for sure) that lower-quality selections are on-the-fly transcodes (down'd from best avail.)

"Set Variant" is also used (independently) for video to select various quality types.

When watching YouTube live (streaming) -- using Chrome in Win 7 -- I can't seem to find/display audio stats ... i.e., in the Stats for Nerds feature in the default embedded "YouTube HTML5 Video Player" / Flash Player.

Any plug-in avail to reveal YouTube's streaming audio stats for a particular video upload?

YouTube audio quality (Stats for Nerds)

Reply #1 –
It's not a plug-in, but youtube-dl [1] - a python based downloader, has a '-F' option that shows all avalable formats (both audio with bitrate and video with resolution and fileype). It defaults to 'best' but allows the user to select any available combination of audio, video or both. Very flexible when used in conjunction with ffmpeg.

It's free, open-source, cross-platform,  lightweight, works with many video sites, and is in active development.
I have no affilliation beyond being a happy user. It's not quite what you were hoping for, but I think it'll meet your needs.

[1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

YouTube audio quality (Stats for Nerds)

Reply #2 –
The Wiki page for YouTube has some info, but seems to dated (not surprising given the rapid rate at which YT/Google upgrades/updates).
E.g., I'm seeing several 360p files now offer as much as 256k audio.
Google/YT plays its cards carefully ... like Goldilocks ... offer too much rez and media companies stop advertising 'cause folks think YT is good 'nough ... compromise on rez and audience (mass mkt) may think the orig. source/production is sucky so why get the CD or buy off iTunes? And the media companies might think ... YT/Google underdressed our product ... bad Google .... bad YouTube.
Hello Vimeo??????????????????????

YouTube audio quality (Stats for Nerds)

Reply #3 –
Is that legal...downloading youtube videos?

YouTube audio quality (Stats for Nerds)

Reply #4 –
lozenge, that youtube-dl program works quite well, but is there quality loss? I always thought youtube clips were in flv format, and youtube-dl saves them as mp4. That means conversion, and thus (some) loss of quality? 

YouTube audio quality (Stats for Nerds)

Reply #5 –
No, once you upload a video to YouTube it gets converted to multiple formats. So there will only be quality loss on those initial conversions.

YouTube audio quality (Stats for Nerds)

Reply #6 –
Quote from: nastea on
That means conversion, and thus (some) loss of quality? 

Not neccesarily. If only the container changes without touching the actual audio and video streams, there is no quality loss. This procedure (changing container without re-encoding) is not too hard with the help of MEncoder or FFmpeg.

Furthermore, YouTube has used MP4 (and not FLV) for many years as it's main format. With the advance of HTML5, they're using more different formats, but AFAIK FLV hasn't been used in years.
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.

YouTube audio quality (Stats for Nerds)

Reply #7 –
@ lozenge: I hadn't heared of youtube-dl before, but it looks really promissing. Especially because it supports A LOT more websites than only Youtube. Thanks for mentioning.

YouTube audio quality (Stats for Nerds)

Reply #8 –
Glad to have helped some of you out 

It's really handy here in the Himalays where quite often even the 3G isn't adequate to stream sensible resolutions without buffering.

As for audio quality, the '-x' option (to extract audio)  used to be limited to only 64kbps, so seems it was transcoding, but this seems to have been fixed a few months back... That was fine for talks & lectures but for good audio I used to use ffmpeg to copy out the original audio from the best video available. Moral of the story: run 'youtube-dl -U' to update regularly!

What I would like to know is which version of what AAC encoder YouTube use to encode AAC in the first place. I read some time back that ffmpeg features heavily (makes sense), but I've no idea if they just stuck to the defaults of whatever version was used. I'm really hoping some kind geek there might have rolled out libfdk-aac.

Does anyone know if or how to check which enoder created an AAC file?

cheers