Can't play YouTube videos in greater than 360p?

VincentMeier

Basically have the same problem as OP.

Anyone have any Idea how I could force youtube to give me the flash player, instead of html5?

All the info out there I could find only helps with forcing the flash player on chrome.

Daring

My hardware is fine. I built my PC a few months ago with 1080p/60FPS gaming in mind and it handles that very well. 1080p/60FPS video works fine on YouTube in Chrome, but yet in Vivaldi I can't select anything higher than 360p on YouTube. That is my problem.

ultraviolet

just wait for extensions to become available in vivaldi and get the: 'Disable Youtube HTML5 Player' extension

ultraviolet

so the link i posted above you couldn't view in vivaldi at 1080p60 ?

Daring

Yeah.

ultraviolet

i could

Daring

Wait, no, I misread what you said. I can watch it in 1080p/60FPS.

Case

@kudo:

60FPS only seems to work properly in Chrome at the moment with HTML5 player, I'm sure Vivaldi will support it once it goes Stable.

Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, sadly. You can also play all of the 60fps videos perfectly fine in Internet Explorer 11 (but only on Win 8.x, as strange as it might seem, not on Win 7), in Firefox beta, developer and nightly (across systems), in Opera Blink (but only on Linux) and in up-to-date Safari on OS X Yosemite.

It does need HTML5 player, though, 60fps doesn't work with Flash at all (well, at least it didn't the last time I checked). With Flash player, even the videos available in 60fps still only play at 30fps (the quality indicator says just "720p HD" instead of "720p60 HD").

However, there's the issue that the 60fps videos can either be encoded in VP9 and in H264. The VP9 ones (like the one linked do usually work fine in most browsers, as long as they have support for HTML5 video. So you might be able to get them play back even on browsers/systems not mentioned above. This currently seems to be the case for any Blink-based browser on Windows, including Vivaldi (and Blink Opera).

For the 60fps support to be complete, though, you need one of the browser and system combinations mentioned above.

Note that some videos (like the Mario one linked here) do actually offer both options. Most videos are uploaded in H264, and most of them (all of them?) are then later transcoded by YouTube to VP9 as well. There's no way to tell when (and most likely not even IF) YouTube will offer any given video in VP9, as far as I am aware. (Please note that this transcoding H264 videos to VP9 has nothing to do with the initial processing YouTube does when you upload your video - we're talking two separate things here.)

The issue with YouTube only offering 360p quality with HTML5 player is AFAIK related to this - the browser needs to support Media Source Extension and DASH (YouTube playback technology) for other resolutions to be available through the HTML5 player. If the support is not there, you'll only get 360p quality, nothing higher. Vivaldi, as of now, only supports MSE and DASH with the VP9 encoded videos. So if you're forcing HTML5 player and try to play back a VP9 encoded video, you should be able to select HD quality when available. However, if you're forcing HTML5 player and the video is NOT available in VP9, you only get 360p option, since DASH is not available, and your best option at that point is to just use Flash Player, which does not use DASH at all.

azuli

@VincentMeier:

Basically have the same problem as OP.

Anyone have any Idea how I could force youtube to give me the flash player, instead of html5?

All the info out there I could find only helps with forcing the flash player on chrome.

with this extension ''YouTube Flash-HTML5''

tchncs

Man, still a problem - i will not use flash.
I think a modern browser have to support this.
Fun fact: it doesn't affect all videos - it is a random problem - kinda.

It is very sad that Vivaldi is the only browser i've every seen with this kind of trouble.

iAN CooG

I'm watching 720@60fps YT videos in Vivaldi everyday, no problem. OK, apart that I have to stay in full screen, while in windowed mode it drops lots of frames

tchncs

@iAN-CooG maybe you have luck with the youtubers?
As mentioned, it feels quite random.
I was trying to give you an example but now, it magicly works on the videos in my abobox where it didn't worked before.
But since it also happens to quite old videos randomly, it is hard to reproduce and hard to say where it could happen,
where not... . It pretty much feels like a very annoying bug.

iAN CooG

Do you use any YT related plugin? Sometimes YouTube Center Developer Build bugs and while it automatically and correctly selects 720p resolution, as I set it to do so, often other resolutions apart 360p are not available, until I disable and re-enable it, then it shows all possible video resolutions.

tchncs

@iAN-CooG no, honestly my current setup is quite fresh because i forgot to copy the config files from Vivaldi to the new SSD. So - just uBlockOrigin here.