Issue with Youtube quality.

[RDK91]

I recently started using Vivaldi browser and so far i am very pleased.

However one thing keeps bothering me, whenever i am watching a video on Youtube the browser often automatically changes the video quality to a lower resolution, even when the video has been playing for some time i often notice the quality changing all of a sudden to a lower resolution.

I never experienced this with any other browser i have used and i really would like to get this resolved?

The internet connection is not the issue since other browsers are not doing it and i checked the connection and speed multiple times.

[iAN CooG]

Only happened to me in rare occasions when the bandwidth was saturated, for example while also downloading a large file. But normally I watch YT videos at Auto 720@60 when available and usually stays there for hours if I don't do anything else.
Do you watch YT with an account logged in or without an account? With an account you can check your playback settings to always have best resolution.
Do you also have Hardware Acceleration enabled?

[Hadden89]

@iAN-CooG My auto is set at 480p which is probably fine as google knows that I browse YT mostly on windowed mode/PIP/quarter of screen and I prefer speed instead of quality.

[iAN CooG]

@Hadden89 I watch only full screen videos in theater mode, no point in watching some stamp sized videos for me

[Hadden89]

@iAN-CooG By the way, I don't see the setting in the account to "prefer higher resolution" but I knew it was there.

[iAN CooG]

@Hadden89 Now I noticed the settings are gone, Google want to spare bandwidth by forcing lower res videos by default. I can live with it until 720p is served to me, but if it changes, extensions like Enhancer for Youtube can be used, to set a preferred res and other changes on YT.

[aqm]

I use an extension for YouTube quality too but the one I use doesn't work if there's an ad before the video.

[FatProtea]

A couple of days ago I upgraded from (I think) version 3.3.2022.17 to version 3.4.2066.94 and instantly found problems with YouTube. Video playback quickly becomes slightly jagged as though it's skipping every other frame, and this effect gets worse over time, with some videos ending up with a person's lips moving out-of-synch with the sound. Also the fan on my PC keeps kicking in at full speed. Another thing is that I'm sure the rendered image quality of videos when the jaggedness starts is not quite as good as it should be, even when I increase the YouTube video quality to 720p/60fps. I set the default YouTube video quality to just "360" so this behaviour is not a problem with bandwidth and shouldn't be a problem with my hardware.

As I say, this behaviour only started when I upgraded a couple of days ago. I did start getting an unrelated video problem with the BBC iPlayer when I upgraded to version 3.3, but it's not reliably reproducible and I haven't had time to test it in V3.4, so I'll save that for another thread.

My PC runs Windows 8.1 and has 8GB RAM and an AMD Athlon A10 with integrated graphics.

[Hadden89]

@FatProtea said in Issue with Youtube quality.:

A10

Which GPU do you have? (vivaldi://gpu). Could be a recent chromium blacklist.
Try disable HW acceleration in settings or enable vivaldi://flags/#ignore-gpu-blacklist.

[FatProtea]

@Hadden89 Thanks for your reply. The A10 has integrated Radeon HD 7660D graphics.

I watched another YouTube video at 360 quality and then enabled the "Stats for nerds" option on the video. It was showing that 29% of frames were being dropped. Disabling Vivaldi's hardware acceleration setting had no effect, but overriding the blocklist fixed the problem - no more judder and 0 frames dropped in the stats.

Given that I can't see any negative side effect of leaving this override on, and there was no problem before Vivaldi 3.4, what might be the reason Chromium has blocked this particular GPU?

[Hadden89]

@FatProtea Because they removed the HD A8/A10 patches/acceleration on the engine. Sometimes the override works, but often cause issues in webpages. They just consider such chip "legacy" or prone to issues. But several A8/A10 chips works fine.

[FatProtea]

@Hadden89 Ah, many thanks. I assume this is just because they consider the A10 obsolete, which is a shame. My 7-year-old PC still has plenty of power to play YouTube videos in full 1080p@60, let alone 360p.