The missing phrase in the post is "hardware acceleration", which is is completely broken for VP8/9(In Firefox & Chrome, IE&Safari doesn't support either).<p>I'm using an extension[0] to force youtube to serve me with h264 in order to be able to watch 4K videos & maintain reasonable battery life.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify</a>
I'm not sure how YouTube estimates the proper video quality for your internet connection, but they're definitely doing it wrong. I have a 150 Mbps connection and I can watch Full HD videos without buffering. This was already the case on my old 16k connection but in both cases YouTube defaults to 480p. This is really annoying and I always end up setting it to the highest quality.<p>Another problem seems to be YouTube's player that just sometimes stops to play although the video is completely loaded, or you try to skip or go back a few seconds and it just stucks completely.<p>Luckily I found this Firefox extension that just uses the native player and allows me to use high quality by default:<p><a href="https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere</a>
Too bad they can't get rid of DASH, because DASH is the real problem behind buffering, jerky playback and other nonsense. I really strongly dislike how bad the video playback experience is and has been for quite some time on YouTube.
If it interests anyone here, I have written a Firefox extension that forces YouTube videos to play in an external video player (mpv in my case). You can get it here (only for Linux):<p><a href="https://github.com/SirCmpwn/ExternalPlayer" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SirCmpwn/ExternalPlayer</a><p>I got fed up with the YouTube player and wrote this in an afternoon instead.
Watching YouTube using Chrome on Windows is the double battery killer. Chrome doesn't let Windows go into low power states and YouTube is serving up video that can't be hardware decoded.
I am pretty sure that Firefox 28 added VP9. It just seems odd that in the "Where can I use VP9?" section, that Firefox and Opera where not mentioned.<p>Edit: I just noticed that Firefox is currently using Flash on Youtube for video playback. The video referenced in the article: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc</a>
This still doesn't do anything about YouTube's horrible bitrate settings and "resolution is everything" attitude. 4K videos play better on my 1080p screen than 1080p videos, which should absolutely not be the case with reasonable, non-skimpy bitrate settings.
Since so much of youtube consumption is audio-only, why not have a codec optimized to show nothing, or a still picture? Here at work we used to remote into a machine just to play youtube songs over the speakers. No video needed.
It would be nice if they had an actual video comparison; I can make either of two codecs that are even close in performance look way better with single frame-grabs.
I am curious: is YouTube going to re-encode all existing content with VP9? If so, I am wondering if they do anything special to preserve as much quality as possible. Are there any techniques to do that? (For example, certain JPEG transforms such as rotation can be applied with zero quality loss.)
Gotta love google, yet another unaccelerated codec shoved down my core2 laptops throat to stutter at 10fps while mplayer plays 1080 h264 version just fine.