YouTube Format IDs

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kksec about 18 hours ago 73 commentsRead Article on gist.github.com

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Analyzed from 1686 words in the discussion.

Discussion (73 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

throw0101d•about 17 hours ago

> HFR stands for "High Framerate", which means up to 60 FPS, whereas non-HFR is limited to 30 FPS

Personally I find most ((almost?) all?) >30fps generally unnecessary and just chews through bandwidth, monthly (mobile) data caps, and processing/batteries.

Are there specific cases where "HFR" videos are really improving the viewing experience of particular (types of) content?

(Note: in the table it's about support for HFR content, and does not necessarily mean that content is HFR.)

randomblock1•about 16 hours ago

Anything with motion. Sports, games, vlogs, and so on experience immense improvements. And it's not like it takes 2x the bandwidth, because inter-frame compression can be smarter about it. It's like 30-50% more bandwidth.

noir_lord•about 17 hours ago

Gaming footage/videos, some games are so fast they are noticeably better to play at (and watch at) 60fps over 30fps.

zahlman•about 10 hours ago

Especially retro console games, where sprites might flicker at 60Hz (either to create an illusion of translucency or because of hardware limits on simultaneous sprites displayed); viewing footage at 30fps can end up catching all the "off" frames and make screen elements disappear completely.

account42•about 3 hours ago

Yes, or in general everything that was originally 30 FPS interlaced should be de-interlaced to 60 FPS progressive video and not 30 FPS.

quirino•about 15 hours ago

I think many people would consider 60fps to be a minimum and 30fps to be almost disorienting, even for casual games.

Gamers often go for 120-240Hz monitors even.

dietr1ch•about 15 hours ago

Last time I went to the movies I didn't have a good time watching "motion" at 24Hz on a large screen while used to watch motion at 240Hz on a small screen.

I felt I was looking at a powerpoint presentation or an animation made at the edge of a (paper) notebook.

pxoe•about 14 hours ago

40 fps could be a much more workable minimum, it looks quite smooth, wish it was more commonplace of a target instead of 30.

bigstrat2003•about 10 hours ago

No, not very many people would say that. Console games for many years were 30 FPS tops, and people were just fine with it. It's only a small but vocal minority that insists on 60 FPS as some kind of minimum.

throw0101d•about 17 hours ago

I don't watch too many of those, and those few that I do are more 4X (Civ, Stellaris, etc), so that maybe that's why I don't notice it as an advantage for most of the content I see.

HPsquared•about 16 hours ago

If there isn't much movement, it's probably a modest increase in bitrate anyway as the codec will see that most frames aren't changing.

basilikum•about 13 hours ago

Playing at low framrates is a lot worse than just watching though.

mrob•about 16 hours ago

I'd personally rather watch 480p60 than 1080p30. There's a lot of material in which spatial resolution is mostly irrelevant (e.g. presentations, which involve people talking and slides designed to be legible from a distance), but low framerate always looks unnatural and distracting, even after speeding it up by 1.75x or 2x. 60fps should be considered a bare minimum, not "high framerate".

kccqzy•about 16 hours ago

I’m the opposite. I take videos with 24fps, the standard for film. Lower frame rate gives me that film-like look which suggests sophistication, but 60fps feels like unedited screen grab or raw footage from a camcorder. I can’t explain it: it could be a case of acquired taste.

OGWhales•about 15 hours ago

Movies are made by professional videographers that take care to limit the downsides of low fps, such as stuttering (still, sometimes movies will pan too fast and the stuttering makes it painful for me to watch). YouTube is very different, there are lots of amateurs and many of the videos don't need to make people feel like it's a movie. It doesn't seem the soap opera effect really applies when it's just a guy showing actual real life (and there's no interlacing like with old soap operas). For this reason, I've always found 60fps better on YouTube. Lower fps doesn't look more sophisticated imo, it usually looks worse unless it happens to be done by a good videographer that wants it to look like a movie. It's especially terrible for things like action content (mountain biking, karting) or things like fps games, where the higher frame rate helps a ton with all the fast motion. This happens to be a lot of what I watch on YouTube.

The way I see it, unless you are specifically going for the "movie" look and take care to work around low fps like videographers do for movies, then higher fps is probably better.

mrob•about 15 hours ago

24fps is the worst part of film for me. I've watched a lot of films, and I made an effort to watch important and critically acclaimed ones. While I enjoyed a lot of it at the time, I don't really have any desire to watch any more, or to re-watch things I've already seen. The low framerate always drags me out of the story. Perhaps the only exceptions are the films of Yasujirō Ozu, which use so little motion that it's hard to see the low framerate.

I have a similar reaction to music from the early 70s and earlier. But if the sound quality is good, I still enjoy listening to new music and re-listening to things I've already heard. I think I'd still be interested in film if they'd actually taken advantage of improved technology like the musicians did.

The most enjoyable film-watching experience in my life was watching 60fps Showscan shorts at Futuroscope in France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuroscope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showscan

HPsquared•about 15 hours ago

Same vibe as preferring black-and-white cinema, or analogue (and/or mono) audio.

r_lee•about 13 hours ago

yeah

strangely 50-60fps feels "unnatural" In a way? like uncanny valley sometimes?

ErroneousBosh•about 15 hours ago

The neat thing is that 25fps content played out at 50fps doesn't use a lot more bandwidth than 25fps played out at 25fps because it only has to update every second frame, assuming identical noise between frames.

And then you can go to field-per-frame 50fps footage when you need to say "camcorder".

dylan604•about 17 hours ago

Sports is a good use of HFR. Sadly, when HD broadcast came out, most broadcasters choose 1080i59.4 to remain compatible with the interlaced HD CRTs that were around. One of them chose 720p60 for sports. As cool as HD was, it still had interlacing as a boat anchor chained to it. 4K finally saw the elimination of interlacing, but that's veering way off topic.

For talking head/creator type of stuff, 24fps is probably wasted and could be just fine at 12/15fps.

pxoe•about 13 hours ago

12/15 fps is actually insane, thankfully nobody saying that is gonna be in a position to make those kinds of decisions. (and there are some things that do stream in 15 fps, like 1seg ... which broadcasts tv on a mobile phone screen, and not a smartphone, a tinier flip phone, like 3-4 inches. and it's really more of a technical limitation for a technology and phones from 20 years ago. and youtube can serve 12 fps ...at 144p.) Even for literally just watching someone sit and move lips, 24/30 is gonna look much more natural and believable, and not be jarring unlike going down to that low fps. Like, have you actually watched any 12/15 fps footage of people talking recently? Cause it's not gonna be giving what you think it's giving. It's not gonna look "fine" even at crystal clear 1080, making it feel like a shitty zoom call that might as well be in 240p. Unfortunately there is a reason why it's not a cool and totally useable life hack to just crank it down to 12, because it just looks bad. Some people in these comments really seem to be just saying things before they even try and see them with their own eyes.

dylan604•about 13 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49455895

Balooga•about 16 hours ago

Fox Sports was 720p.

Back then, all broadcasters had to conform to ATSC 1.0 MPEG2 transport and MPEG2 encoding due to terrestrial broadcasts. The choices were 480i/p, 720p, or 1080i/p.

LocalH•about 15 hours ago

12/15fps is way too low even for talking heads. 20fps would be the minimum for me, and 24fps fits better with the standards (30fps fits better with most displays).

dylan604•about 15 hours ago

yeah, it was more of a way of showing my disdain for said content and wasting of electrons pushing bandwidth

Telaneo•about 13 hours ago

I'll take 60 over 30 any day of the week, assuming the original was mastered that way (interpolation is fake and bad). Even for just talking head videos, 60 looks better to my eyes. The lower frame rate of films and most other content looking better seems to be nothing but a (sub)conscious 'that's the way it should look' attitude to me.

pxoe•about 14 hours ago

Oftentimes it's not that big of a difference in size, especially with modern video encoding like av1. There are many cases where higher frame rate improves viewing experience, like smooth motion (smooth movements of something, like people or things, panning, etc), heavy motion (when it's just more intense), giving the eye a little bit more to hang onto.

One particular great use case is dance choreography, so that's music, music videos, dancing videos, quite a chunk of videos and viewership. Most of music videos are gonna be released in 24 fps (a few 30 fps here and there), but there's a lot of "extra content" (tv shows, performances, live recordings, etc.) released in 60 fps, and there's some demand for higher frame rate like 60 fps (seeing from uploads of interpolated videos). 30 fps can be enough to have some smoothness to it, but at 24 fps it can become more jarring if not just noticeably choppy, sometimes 24 fps video is just not particularly great to look at in terms of literally just seeing and discerning what's going on. Sometimes things can end up looking choppy (like in daylight, at faster shutter speed, etc), or have more pronounced motion blur (which is good and better for motion continuity, but at 24 fps it can be a bit much). Motion continuity is quite important, and sometimes even made up frames from interpolation can improve viewing experience, even at a cost of some interpolation artifacts, when the end result of smoother motion is more pleasant to look at.

Of course, it can be a case of experiencing something better and then seeing things as choppy looking back (and 24 fps can really look choppy in immediate comparison), and it may not make that much of a difference if you've just been mostly seeing 24 fps video and not thinking much of it, or seeing 30 fps which is smooth enough. But in my opinion, even starting at 40-48 fps, that's already gonna feel much easier for the eyes compared to 24 fps. Sometimes there's just a bit much going on in the frame and 24 fps is not enough. Our eyes don't see in 24 fps after all. (also, higher frame rate doesn't preclude from using cinematic techniques, including motion blur and all)

echoangle•about 15 hours ago

How much extra bandwidth does it even take to double the framerate? The frames should be highly correlated and as long as you only add p-frames, the data needed should be pretty small, no?

eviks•about 15 hours ago

Any cases are like that because it looks more natural and fluid, but it's just not for you, though in that case how would cases help change your stylistic preferences?

I mean, even for the obvious highly dynamic videos like some sports and video games it's not like you can't enjoy the bad old 24fps people have been enjoying for decades

ErroneousBosh•about 15 hours ago

> monthly (mobile) data caps

Are we back in the early 2000s or something?

shric•about 11 hours ago

There are only 5-10 countries in the world that I know of that don’t have mobile data caps. The vast majority of the HN demographic do not live in those countries.

The remainder either have an explicit hard cap or some kind of fair use clause that throttles when you reach some undisclosed amount.

dopa42365•about 16 hours ago

>Are there specific cases where "HFR" videos are really improving the viewing experience of particular (types of) content?

Yes. Every single one. It's that simple.

throw0101d•about 16 hours ago

> Yes. Every single one. It's that simple.

I've found that zero of the videos that I've ever seen that were 60fps improved things: certainly if I went full screen I could notice the resolution of 1080@60 versus 720@30, but in a standard browser window it was none.

echoangle•about 15 hours ago

If you don’t even see the difference between 1080p and 720p, there’s something else going on.

bigstrat2003•about 10 hours ago

There is not one single video I've seen where it's better at 60 FPS, so I dispute your assertion. I actually find 60 FPS videos to be kind of bizarre and unpleasant to watch.

gear54rus•about 14 hours ago

Finally found the person who was the target audience for garbage consoles claiming 30fps gaming is the norm. That makes one. :D

RankingMember•about 17 hours ago

I feel like I'm missing some context. Cool that there's someone cataloging this though.

floam•about 17 hours ago

Same id numbers you use when downloading them. While you might know what a particular URL is available in, I’m not sure I’ve seen an encyclopedic enumeration of the possibilities

throw0101d•about 17 hours ago

"4320p"? Huh:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8K_resolution

dylan604•about 16 hours ago

Just think of multiples of 1080p. 4K => 2160p and is 4x larger than HD. 8K => 4230p and is 16x larger than HD.

1080p of course is the height at the proper 16:9 aspect ratio of 1920 wide image. It just moves up from there keeping the same aspect.

bithammerthunde•about 15 hours ago

Is this in anyway related to the 403 issue with yt-dlp that's been happening for at least a week?

dave7•about 10 hours ago

I updated to yt-dlp nightly and that fixed it for me, was a few days back now so idk if there's been further disruption:

yt-dlp --update-to nightly

Dylan16807•about 14 hours ago

Are you asking if youtube having different formats is making yt-dlp break? If that's your question, the answer is no. If you're asking something else, please explain the question better.