cut video quality

Nobody likes opening YouTube on their iPhone and watching a 15-second ad (or two) and then a minute-long video. But things are like that. Youtube Premium, formerly called Youtube Red, He has been trying to bring users into his ranks for some time. They first tried to limit the quality and reserve the 4K resolution exclusively for customers. It went wrong and they soon backtracked. The new move is more subtle: offering “premium” quality to those who pay. According to reports from The Verge, this option does not suggest a higher resolution, but rather a selective bitrate. That means if you’re premium, you’ll have access to a higher bitrate.

1080p Premium for Youtube Premium users

“A 1080p bitrate enhanced version that delivers more information per pixel, resulting in a higher quality viewing experience.” These are the words of Paul Pennington, Youtube spokesman. This new functionality is called Improved bit rate and at the moment it is in testing phase.

For comparison, a 1080p resolution Blu-ray streams at a stable bitrate of 25-30 Mbps, although it can reach a limit of 40 Mbps. The Youtube standard rarely exceeds 8Mbps. The new proposal would increase that rate to 13 Mbps and theoretically it would guarantee higher display quality by increasing the amount of information sent per second.

There are currently two payment methods: YouTube Premium Lite for 6.99 euros per month and without advertising and YouTube Premium for e.g 11.99 euros per month and a series of attached services such as the possibility of downloading content, background playback and full access to YouTube Music Premium. And by comparison, YouTube’s music catalog is actually the largest of them all.

Bandwidth prioritization for those users paying for the service is common on other platforms. This is something that Discord already uses and that we can also find in services of the likes of Nvidia GeForce.

Nvidia already has a workaround

Speaking of Nvidia, while Youtube is working on methods to limit quality, the great producer of tech and graphics cards just launched RTX VSR (Video Super Resolution). This is currently an exclusive feature for PCs with a GeForce RTX 30 or 40 series graphics card. It is unknown if it will ever be available for Apple’s Intel PCs or any of the Mac Pros with Intel Xeon W to scale low-resolution videos and adjust them to the native resolution of the monitor we’re viewing them on.

The feature is able to improve the quality of streaming videos without additional bandwidth costs. In other words, it doesn’t consume more resources from your network and in return you can play the same video in 4K quality from a Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge browser. For this it is important to have NVIDIA driver in its version 110.0.1587.56 or higher and access the Nvidia Control Panel settings to enable the “Super Resolution” feature in the “Video Image Configuration” section.