YouTube Format IDs

kksec about 4 hours ago 34 commentsRead Article on gist.github.com

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Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

throw0101d•about 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.)

pxoe•2 minutes 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.

randomblock1•about 2 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.

mrob•about 2 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 2 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.

mrob•about 1 hour 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

OGWhales•about 1 hour 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.

HPsquared•about 2 hours ago

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

ErroneousBosh•about 1 hour 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".

noir_lord•about 3 hours ago

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

quirino•about 1 hour 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•43 minutes 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.

throw0101d•about 3 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 2 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.

dylan604•about 3 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.

Balooga•about 2 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 1 hour 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•41 minutes ago

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

echoangle•about 1 hour 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 1 hour 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

dopa42365•about 2 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 2 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 1 hour ago

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

ErroneousBosh•about 1 hour ago

> monthly (mobile) data caps

Are we back in the early 2000s or something?

RankingMember•about 3 hours ago

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

floam•about 3 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 3 hours ago

"4320p"? Huh:

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

dylan604•about 3 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 2 hours ago

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

Dylan16807•16 minutes 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.