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YePpHa / YouTubeCenter

YouTube Center is a userscript designed to expand the functionality of YouTube. It includes the ability to download the video you're watching, auto selecting your preferred video quality and much more.
MIT License
2.89k stars 520 forks source link

Feature Request : Ability to force h.264 insted of vp9 on HTML5 videos. #1627

Open Hotcooler opened 9 years ago

Hotcooler commented 9 years ago

Currently VP9 videos stutter and/or freeze for me on all my machines (using Waterfox). So it would be really nice to have functionality of https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify built into this addon, should probably be helpful for bunch of other people too.

Yonezpt commented 9 years ago

Afaik waterfox is offered mp4 by default if it is following the current Firefox progress. You will only be offered vp9 (webm format) if you have the last field marked in blue here: https://www.youtube.com/html5

If you do have it in blue then try disabling webm via the about:config page (hopefully it is the same as with Firefox) and look for media.mediasource.webm.enabled, change the value to false.

raszpl commented 9 years ago

is google really serving VP9? I tried youtube-dl on couple of videos and almost everywhere it looks like this:

140 m4a audio only DASH audio 130k , m4a_dash 141 m4a audio only DASH audio 256k , m4a_dash 160 mp4 256x144 DASH video 114k , 15fps, vi 133 mp4 426x240 DASH video 276k , 30fps, vi 134 mp4 640x360 DASH video 619k , 30fps, vi 135 mp4 854x480 DASH video 1114k , 30fps, vi 136 mp4 1280x720 DASH video 2224k , 30fps, vi 137 mp4 1920x1080 DASH video 4623k , 30fps, vi 17 3gp 176x144 36 3gp 320x240 5 flv 400x240 43 webm 640x360 18 mp4 640x360 22 mp4 1280x720 (best)

only mp4 for hires versions. Is there some secret handshake only Chrome is able to do to force VP9?

Zarggg commented 9 years ago

VP9-encoded videos are a fairly new feature on YouTube. It's very possible that only a small handful of new uploads take advantage of it.

Reference: http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/2015/04/vp9-faster-better-buffer-free-youtube.html Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmsyXRw3KuI

raszpl commented 9 years ago

Thank you. I manually downloaded vp9 and h264 versions and compared couple of frames. Sure file size is 33% better, but quality suffers :/, and still no combined video+audio 1080 vp9 link. Back to streaming 720p h264 for me :/

raszpl commented 9 years ago

wait a minute - how does HTML5 player fetch video stream? does it use separate video and audio streams and muxes them on the client side? or is there another list of streams not exposed in dash?

Yonezpt commented 9 years ago

@raszpl It uses individual audio and video streams which play at the same time via the MSE specification. You can say that they "mux" it on the client side, but it's more like they synch together inside a common interface which can contain multiple sources.

Zarggg commented 9 years ago

Based on what I've seen, the new WebM/VP9 streams are handled with DASH.

Hotcooler commented 9 years ago

@Yonezpt media.mediasource.webm.enabled worked like a charm, though I would probably still prefer to have a check box in addon setting, just in case. V37 had everything in Blue there.

Google does not seem to serve VP9 on all videos, might be related to who had 60fps beta and who got it on rollout. As an example DF was in the beta : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adUqCT08Yq8 This has VP9. As for LC I have no clue about the beta status, but there are no VP9 for me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Far891oj5u0

Also I'd say quality of VP9 aint up to snuff (at least for non filmed content), at least at the bitrate Youtube uses for 1080p. Also while VP9 might be hardware accelerated on a lot of things in theory, it's not on my work Nvidia GTX 750 machine and home Haswell notebook (looking at CPU usage compared to h.264).

I've only checked 1080p 60fps videos, since they are the main interest of moving fully to HTML5 (part from flash freezing from time to time). They sort of freeze video while audio plays on both machines. While h.264 is flawless.

P.S AFAIK all 1080p is DASH only nowdays. P.P.S. I guess VP9 is really rather new on Youtube since according to wiki :

On April 3, 2015, Google released libvpx 1.4.0 which adds support for 10-bit and 12-bit bit depth, 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, and VP9 multithreaded decoding/encoding.

I cant imagine youtube using it in any capacity without multithreading.

allbetsareoff29 commented 9 years ago

any news on this? I'd be curious to see the answer myself

Lucatir commented 9 years ago

@allbetsareoff29 It hasn't even been a full day since this request was made. Please be more patient.

allbetsareoff29 commented 9 years ago 
                                                                                  My apologies. I didn't check the time stamp of your post. Please let me know if I can help in any way. I'll gladly test any solutions that you guys come up with                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Sent from my smartphone. Please excuse any typos                                                                                                                                                                                                                From: ErdeFBSent: Wednesday, April 8, 2015 2:20 AMTo: YePpHa/YouTubeCenterReply To: YePpHa/YouTubeCenterCc: allbetsareoff29Subject: Re: [YouTubeCenter] Feature Request : Ability to force h.264 insted of vp9 on HTML5 videos. (#1627)@allbetsareoff29 It hasn't even been a full day since this request was made. Please be more patient.

—Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

Hotcooler commented 9 years ago

Just to update, have seen some similar questions on reddit, so I would imagine percentage of people that know of media.mediasource.webm.enabled is relatively small. So I'd still say having this as an option in the addon is great. And the help link that you access with ? can describe that you can do the after-mentioned tweak, so awareness would be tiny bit better with time.