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Ask HN: Has YouTube been defaulting every video to 360p for you?

2 points by SUPERCILEX ↗ HN
I pay for YouTube Premium, so it's been quite frustrating to always have to increase the resolution of every single video for the past few months. Bandwidth is most certainly not an issue as I have gigabit and can stream 8K no problem once I select that. It also seems (based on a bit of searching) that no one really cares or has noticed. Is this happening to anyone else?

9 comments

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14
I just checked out a bunch of videos to test it and it seems like a mixed bag of results. Some played on 480, then had a bunch in a row go to 1080, then back down to 720. Seems pretty annoying they don't all match my tv at 1080 since the videos that used lower quality did have a 1080 option. Not sure if there is a way to automate it for you.
rmbyrro
It did for a few days. I relentlessly always increased quality. After a while, they stopped. I guess I was too stubborn for their bot.
tlack
I've noticed this quite often w/ YTPremium over the past few months and it's pretty annoying. For a while I thought it was an issue with my internet connection that they were successfully profiling, but I never had issues playing the higher qualities. Doesn't seem too bad lately though..
sylware
I use yt-dlp since youtube broke noscript/basic (x)html browser support.
dyingkneepad
As soon as I click on a video it usually loads in a low resolution and then maybe auto switches to a higher resolution after a while. Very noticeable in video gaming stuff, since the blurry text really gets hard to read in 360p.
tintedfireglass
I shifted to newpipe(+sponsorblock) over a year ago and no regrets ;)
SUPERCILEX
That looks cool (especially sponsorblock), thanks for the tip!
navjack27
Nope. Everything is loading at it's full resolution on my 4k TV connected M1 Mac Mini in Edge with gigabit download and YT Premium.
SUPERCILEX
Ok, based on this response and others it seems like this might be something on my end... I'll look into getting a bug report to support.