Youtube | Shorts Shows In Low Quality

[Holly]

Youtube Shorts extremely low quality, User agent string masking?

This is probably not really Linux specific but idk where else to post.

For a while now - a couple of weeks or something - when I browse shorts on Youtube in stable Vivaldi, the quality is extremely poor.

Today I checked the same shorts with Ungoogled Chromium and found that they're fine there.

Is anyone having a similar experience?
Do you think it could actually be Google trying to have users of browsers that aren't Chrome have a worse experience?

I looked into masking the user agent string to be identical with Ungoogled Chromium, but haven't found a built-in option for that.

For reference:

---

Ungoogled Chromium

User agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
sec-ch-ua header:
"Chromium";v="131", "Not_A Brand";v="24"

---

Vivaldi

User agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
sec-ch-ua header:
"Chromium";v="130","Google Chrome";v="130","Not?A_Brand";v="99"

---

So pretty much the only difference appears to be version 130 VS. 131.

I did find the user agent brand masking section in Vivaldi settings, but it looks like those options are too restrictive. By setting "Report browser brand as" to "custom" and then
Custom Brand: Google Chrome
Custom Version: 131
it generated this sec-ch-ua header:
"Chromium";v="130","Google Chrome";v="131","Not?A_Brand";v="99"

but that's still not identical to the one from Ungoogled Chromium and has no effect on Youtube Shorts viewing experience.

Any ideas?

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ModEdit: Title

[mib2berlin]

@Holly
Hi, I cant see any difference in quality, this is a random short:

Can you check chrome://gpu in both?

[Holly]

@mib2berlin oh, that seems interesting, doesn't it?

left is Vivaldi, right the Chromium:

then perhaps it is connected to a GPU upgrade I did recently.

Vivaldi is installed from a deb.

here's an example of the video stats btw:
Vivaldi

Chromium

do you have any pointers as to why the hardware acceleration is disabled for me?

GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT

[mib2berlin]

@Holly
Hm, first I would check if it is still enabled in Settings > Webpages.
Some if not all users report issues with HW acceleration in Vivaldi and Wayland.
I still use X, to many issues with other software for me with Wayland too.
You can try the flag chrome://flags/#ignore-gpu-blocklist, it is normally for older GPU but easy to check.

[Holly]

@mib2berlin interesting, I wasn't even aware that there's a setting like that, and indeed it was disabled. after a recent Ubuntu upgrade, Wayland was enabled by default, but I've switched back to X11 as well.

now chrome://gpu under Vivaldi reports the same status as under Chromium, unfortunately however, Youtube shorts video quality is still very poor. I'm not sure if it's down to the resolution, but the compression artifacts are extreme and I've never had that in the past.

to be sure we are on the same page, here's another example:

Vivaldi to the left, Chromium to the right

I hope the difference is quite apparent...

and here's the URL of that short:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qNEZxXfNikI

would you be able to confirm that this short shows up for you in Vivaldi with a quality closer to the right screenshot?

[mib2berlin]

@Holly
Hm, no artifacts even in full screen mode (F).
I am on my laptop with Intel UHD 620 but I can check on my AMD system in a bit.
Is it possible YT remember your on low hardware and send lower resolution?
Try this in the Guest Profile.

[Holly]

@mib2berlin issue persists with both guest profile and vivaldi --disable-extensions

but I have good news!
I installed the extension "Enhancer for YouTube" and changed the quality setting for "Pop-up player and embedded videos". so far this looks like it fixes my problem.

still strange, but your guess with the low hardware profile that for some reason Youtube persisted on seems the most likely to me, too. In conclusion, probably a Youtube issue and not a browser/Vivaldi issue.

thank you for troubleshooting with me!

[Zalex108]

@Holly

Hi,
You can check this too
https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/765735