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Ask HN: Yt-Dlp Reduced Quality?

4 points by ramtatatam ↗ HN
Hi HN!

I maintain a playlist of youtube clips for offline use in case I run out of internet, and recently I noticed something strange.

I was listening to this clip on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry4TqqM5TGs , I then downloaded it with `yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry4TqqM5TGs` and listened locally with intention to loop until end of my day. And I noticed when I play this clip on youtube the sound is much more vibrant and the clip sounds much better than the downloaded version.

Is there any magic switch I'm missing? I already tried `-f bestvideo+bestaudio`

3 comments

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qbrass
It might be pulling an audio format that either youtube resampled, or that ffmpeg had to resample when merging the video because it's not compatible with the video format.

There's a way to pick preferred audio and video formats it will choose over what's simply the best bitrate, but you'll have to look in the manual for more details.

ramtatatam
Hmm... I listed available presets with `-F` option, and then downloaded various different presets (actually, examples have this nice option to download and merge all available audio presets `yt-dlp -f 'bv*+mergeall[vcodec=none]' --audio-multistreams `). All of them sound like from within a cartboard box when played in vlc, much worse than when I play it on youtube... This is very notable around 00:00:50 of the clip.

Maybe I misinterpret logs but I checked and I can't see anything that would suggest the audio is resampled

---edit---

Silly me. I had VLC audio effects enabled and that was resulting in song sounding different than on youtube. Sorry!