YouTube videos have limited resolutions on Vivaldi 64bits
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I opened a YouTube video on Vivaldi 64bits and the only resolution available was 360p. I tried reloading but it was still the only one available so I loaded the same video on Firefox and sure enough, resolutions up to 1080p were available.
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I just tried it with x64 version (under W8.1) and it works fine. 720p video plays 720p… (HTML5, VP9 used for playing)
Do you use flash player or HTML5 for playing the video? If flash player, flash player update does not help?
(I would say that flash player should be disabled in general but that just my opinion. The true is that sometimes flash is still needed...) -
I've never been able to update Flash Player on Windows 8 or 8.1, the Installer just shows a dark grey screen and then deletes itself. Deinstalling and reinstalling doesn't work either. It being outdated and broken never prevented me from watching videos though, it works perfectly on Firefox.
UPDATE: So I looked some more and apparently, it's only the 60FPS videos that causes this issue; 30FPS videos have their resolutions working fine.
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Bump.
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That's most likely not 60 fps videos only problem, as well as it's most likely not exclusive to 64bit.
AFAIK the most likely reason for this is that the videos in question are h264 encoded, not vp9 encoded. YouTube defaults to HTML5 player on most modern browsers, which needs Media Source Extensions support on the side of the browser. Most browsers do support MSE with VP9 videos, so there's no problem and all resolutions and features are available. However, when it comes to h264 videos, pretty much the only browsers offering flawless MSE & h264 playback on Windows out-of-the-box are Chrome (not Chromium and it's derivates, mind you) and IE11 (but only in Windows 8+). Other browsers have miscellaneous issues with MSE & h264, and when YouTube detects the browser doesn't correctly support MSE with h264, it only offers the fallback 360p quality.
Vivaldi (neither 32bit nor 64bit version) currently doesn't support MSE with h264 videos, but defaults to HTML5 player on YouTube, so if you encounter such video, you can only play it at 360p.
Note that encountering h264 encoded videos on YouTube seems to be less and less frequent these days than it was a few months ago when YouTube made the switch to HTML player as default, as it seems YouTube finally started automatically convert all uploaded videos to vp9.
I do encounter h264 videos pretty rarely these days, though - basically only when I try to watch a very recently uploaded (and published without the uploader waiting for it to fully process) video that hasn't finished processing fully. It takes quite some time for YouTube to process the uploaded videos and even more so with 60fps videos (can be hours, even days), and if the video was encoded and uploaded as h264 (which it most likely was, most of them are), it seems like YouTube first processes the video to create all of the available resolutions as h264, so even with h264 support you might only have lower resolutions available if you're watchig a very recent video, and only when these are finished, it proceeds to create the VP9 versions, so the VP9 versions take the most time to process - and as long as they're not available, you're only going to see the 360p version in Vivaldi (and many other browsers).
It's one big mess, but, as I've said, it's still much better than what it was a few months back.
Edit: Oh, and if you force Flash player, you should be able to play the h264 30fps videos fine, as Flash doesn't use MSE. But 60 fps playback on YouTube is now exclusive to HTML player, so you won't be able to play 60 fps content on YouTube anyway.
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Wow, I had no idea about all of that. Thanks for the info, Case!
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Yeah, like I said, it's a big mess and YouTube has a part in it, it's not just on browser. When they decided to force most of the modern browsers to HTML5 player without an easy way to switch to Flash player some time back, it was quite annoying - VP9 videos were not that widespread on YouTube, so perhaps half of the videos I've encountered on YouTube at that time only offered 360p, even though they would've played e.g. in 1080p with Flash player. People were not happy, to say the least… It's really much better now.
BTW, for example this video only played as 360p in Vivaldi when I wrote the post above:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDz1y1mXU8w
It was uploaded a few hours before I made that post (which I knew and therefore was checking on it when writing it), and while it had HD version available at the time of writing, it was still h264 only and so it only offered the 360p version in Vivaldi. I had to use Firefox to play it at higher resolutions, since my FF has the experimental MSE & h264 options enabled. As you can hopefully see now, it's been meanwhile fully processed to VP9 and can now be played at 720p 60 fps even in Vivaldi (well, at least in the 32bit version, but I'm guessing it should be the same in the 64bit one).
Edit: Oh, the forum embedded the video...yeah, that's one thing to add to the overall confusion. See, embedded YouTube videos ALWAYS use Flash player So a video can offer you different resolutions and options when playing embedded and when directly on YouTube (in this case, the embedded version won't offer you the 60 fps version, since YouTube Flash player can't do 60 fps now - but could before...) Again, a mess.
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Edit: Oh, the forum embedded the video…yeah, that's one thing to add to the overall confusion. See, embedded YouTube videos ALWAYS use Flash player So a video can offer you different resolutions and options when playing embedded and when directly on YouTube (in this case, the embedded version won't offer you the 60 fps version, since YouTube Flash player can't do 60 fps now - but could before...) Again, a mess.
Not ALWAYS, there are ways to embed HTML5 video from youtube, also, they announced recently that they'll stop serving Flash embedded videos.
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There is an extension to force YouTube to the flash player:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-youtube-html5-pla/enmofgaijnbjpblfljopnpdogpldapoc
It's also the only way to make use of H.264 hardware acceleration (Intel, nVidia) via DXVA, as VP9 will be decoded on the CPU only. Especially for 1080p60 this takes to much CPU power on low-end systems, forcing them to lower resolutions in the HTML5 player.
I also noticed that click to play plugins are not the default in Vivaldi. That's an insecure default.
It can be changed via vivaldi://chrome/settings/content -
Not ALWAYS, there are ways to embed HTML5 video from youtube, also, they announced recently that they'll stop serving Flash embedded videos.
Ah, okay, must've missed that announcement. And I didn't really mean there's no way to embed HTML5 video from YouTube, just that currently, by default, it is Flash. But thanks for the corrections.
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I also noticed that click to play plugins are not the default in Vivaldi. That's an insecure default.
It can be changed via vivaldi://chrome/settings/contentGreat find, jtsn !!!
How did you come up with that? (It's not listed in vivaldi://vivaldi-urls and as far as I can tell, your mention is the first in the whole Vivaldi forum.)
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