Comment by jiggawatts
2 years ago
Oh, and they also falsely show "4K" in the video quality icon, but "accidentally" play a 720p or even worse quality stream. If you manually select the 4K stream quality, then and only then will YouTube deign to show 4K to you.
Something related to this which I find extremely frustrating is that I'm capable of watching a 4k video in my browser just fine. So if I decide to buy or rent a movie on youtube, they can only be played back at 420p.
Apparently this is due to DRM restrictions, but the frustrating part is that you can pay extra money for the HD version and there's nothing telling you about this not being supported in your browser until you've made the purchase (by just allowing 420p and needing to search for why it's broken)
see https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/pm0eqh/why_are_my_...
This sort of behavior should be an open-and-shut case of false advertising. You were told that the video would be a certain resolution. You gave money as a result of that statement. You received an inferior product to the one that was described.
Isn't that fraudulent? Its amazing how an individual can commit fraud one time and its FRAUD! But a company can do the exact same thing en masse as like a business model over and over and its only ever a misunderstanding that they get a chance to correct and a gentleman's handshake. aAnd even if they didn't, it seems impossible to adjust the dial from civil to criminal as its often left in the consumers hands. Its not like there are attorneys that, like, represent the State that could exercise their legal authority to protect consumers.
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Buy a movie on YT or DVD, and then... watch a torrented version? This isn't the future we were promised, but it sure is the future we have.
Not youtube specifically, but I wanted to watch the wheel of time series on my ipad and:
#1 You cannot stream in a browser on iPadOS anymore. Amazon won't let you, you must use their app.
#2 They don't seem to give a fuck about making sure you're getting a quality stream in their app. Full of artifiacts and horrible compression way more often than is warranted on my symmetric gigabit connection.
So I added it to my Sonarr instance (pirated it legally) and watched it in a browser from there with perfect quality and no pre-stream ads.
Once again: A paid service so bad that it couldn't compete with the pirate experience even if it was free.
Which once again confirms Gabe Newell's statement to be true: "piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue"
> Buy a movie on YT or DVD, and then... watch a torrented version?
in which case, why buy it at all? A torrent isn't going to load as fast as what you paid YT for.
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Netflix does the same thing. Actually, speaking of infuriating corporate bullshit, allow me to go on a rant about Netflix and subtitles.
They give you the option to choose between like four, maybe five languages. That's it!
If you want subtitles in any of the other hundred or so languages that they have available, well... no. Just no. Learn one of the four they've picked for you.
If you call their support, they'll gaslight you and mumble something about "copyright", which is patent nonsense. Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing more translations for their own content that they made themselves. They own the copyright on it, which means, literally, that they have the right to do whatever they please with the copy. Including showing the associated subtitles to you.
You see, what actually happened, is that some too-smart UX guy at Netflix couldn't make a language picker look nice for that many options so he asked a too-smart data science (lol) guy to figure out the most common languages for each region.
Here in Australia they picked English, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese because we have a lot of immigrants from those countries. I'm sure they used very clever algorithms on big data clusters to figure that out. Good job, well done.
Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this out. Netflix and their $500K total comp Stanford or wherever graduates couldn't. So they instructed their call centre staff to lie to their customers.
Then they had someone write this idiocy: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/101798
"If subtitles for a title are offered in a language but do not display on your device, try another device."
Oh, oh, I'll go do that right now! Let me try my PC... nope four languages. On the TV? Four languages. Actually, I have a phone... and... oh... four languages.
PS: Thai (only!) subtitles are "special" and use eye-searing HDR maximum white. Like 1,600 nits white that literally leaves green after-images etched into my retina. They have a support page and a pre-prepared set of lies for the support staff to read for that piece of shoddy engineering also.
A common thing where I live is for local companies to buy streaming rights for Netflix-created media, and then we can't watch Netflix-created media on Netflix because local-company bought streaming/playback rights. Netflix doesn't care about the customer. They care about money, and that won't change. They'll max out the bullshit until customers push back, leave it there for a bit, wait for customers to get used to the new-bullshit, then add more bullshit and repeat.
> Never mind that every other streaming app vendor figured this out
Did they? Both Prime Video and Disney+ have very very narrow subtitle and audio language choices.
> If you call their support, they'll gaslight you and mumble something about "copyright", which is patent nonsense. Copyright doesn't restrict Netflix from showing more translations for their own content that they made themselves. They own the copyright on it, which means, literally, that they have the right to do whatever they please with the copy. Including showing the associated subtitles to you.
Maybe they mean the subtitles' copyright?
As someone who speaks multiple languages, and has the habit of watching with subtitles in the original language of the content if I speak it; otherwise default to English subtitles with original audio... none of the streaming companies have managed to handle that properly. Way too often the audio is only dubbed (often badly), or only my subtitles in my local language (French) are available, regardless of the original language of the content. I'd rather watch British movies with subtitles in English, not French, thank you very much.
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I have to add two adjacent subtitle-related stupidities on Netflix:
1. Closed captions (CC). Okay, I'm willing to accept they improve the experience of a show / movie for a non-zero number of people. What I absolutely don't accept is CC being the ONLY VERSION OF ENGLISH SUBTITLES available. Either CC or nothing. I can't be the only one who prefers English subtitles for English-spoken media, while NOT needing every single sound described as [wet squelching] or [quirky synth music].
(Bonus points for everyone who recognizes those specific examples ↑)
2. Subtitles in all-caps. For the entire movie. Just why? If I'm able to read the text in time at all (it is widely known that words and sentences in all-caps are slower to read), then I'll just feel everyone's screaming all the time, even if they aren't. Whose idea was this? And also here, to my knowledge it only affects English. (I believe all Nolan movies got this "treatment" for example.)
There have been several occasions where even though it was readily available for me to stream from Netflix, I pirated a show or movie anyway, specifically to avoid one or both of these issues.
> Netflix couldn't make a language picker look nice for that many options so he asked a too-smart data science guy to figure out the most common languages for each region.
Odd they couldn't ask your preferred language(s) in your profile, then include it whenever available with the regional list.
I don't know about browser options, but on the android app I can choose between 7 different audio languages and 29 subtitles. Looked it up just for you with an episode of "The good Doctor", which is not a netflix original. I live in Germany. Definitely not an UI issue.
Seems like they'd want people to, idk pick up to 4 languages themselves in settings if they are really attached to their picker. Which makes more sense to me.
is it still a thing that you have to use Edge on windows to get 4k HDR, but you can't on Chrome?
I love this rant with a passion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs
By the way, it is 480p. 420 is for something else :)
You guys are getting 480p? I'm only getting 240p!
That has irked me for quite some time. I always manually select 1080p, because sometimes YT claims it's already playing 1080p, but it's obviously not and the video starts buffering anew when I select 1080p manually. Quite annoying
Roughly around the same time as the anti-adblocking effort, youtube started just not playing the video stream for me much of the time. I say play a video, it will start playing the audio, and the video will just be a frozen image.
In unrelated news, my youtube-dl usage is way, way up.
Get the "Enhancer for Youtube" extension, among many adjustments, it does this clicking for you.
I also had this issue, videos would frequently wobble down to like 240p or whatever, on a stable, high speed wired connection.
It's not an internet problem since I never have to buffer when using this forced setting, so it's probably YT trying to save a few bandwidth bucks when they think people aren't looking.
Enhancer for Youtube allows you to select a min quality, also great for blocking shorts.
I haven't see this other than for brief periods during quality switching (it seems to play out the current buffer in lower quality but new chunks are downloaded at the displayed target quality). However for some reason it does often just load at a very low (sub-720p) resolution and I need to manually up the quality or it will never get to the highest quality (I'm watching on a 4k monitor with great internet and hardware decoding, 4k has never stuttered for me).
I remember them starting to do automatic lower-quality streams when this came out[0], but I'm not sure if this is still the cause for the situation. It could be a general "we see this ISP/ASN failing more often with x many concurrent 4k streams, let's throw some people on 720p and see if it helps".
0: https://www.pcworld.com/article/398929/youtube-defaults-to-l...
I have personally noticed this many times. I’d blink and wonder if it was just my eyes going bad but nope, soon as I select HD quality manually I can read text again.
Yeah, this has bothered me for a while. Switching to alternative youtube interfaces solved that problem :)
It doesn't help that 720p quality seems subpar (to me) compared to some years ago.
Wait, that's a Firefox-only issue ?!
No, it does it on Chrome too.