YouTube Format IDs
gist.github.com58 points by ksec 3 hours ago
58 points by ksec 3 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.)
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.
Gaming footage/videos, some games are so fast they are noticeably better to play at (and watch at) 60fps over 30fps.
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.
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.
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.
At that, captured video of these things can be a total pain in the hoop to edit because OBS, Gamebar et al will write them as variable framerate files, only writing a frame with a suitably distant presentation timestamp when something changes.
And this will make most NLE software shit its legs off.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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".
Same vibe as preferring black-and-white cinema, or analogue (and/or mono) audio.
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?
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
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.
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.
> monthly (mobile) data caps
Are we back in the early 2000s or something?
>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.
> 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.
If you don’t even see the difference between 1080p and 720p, there’s something else going on.
"4320p"? Huh:
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.
Is this in anyway related to the 403 issue with yt-dlp that's been happening for at least a week?
I feel like I'm missing some context. Cool that there's someone cataloging this though.
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