YouTube uses lower quality options on browsers running on Arm-based systems — misreporting as an x86 CPU appears to be a widespread browser fix

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 587 points –
YouTube uses lower quality options on browsers running on Arm-based systems — misreporting as an x86 CPU appears to be a widespread browser fix
tomshardware.com
51

What the heck...? My CPU is none of their business.

Google chooses codecs based on what it guesses your hardware will decode. (iPhones get HEVC, Android gets VP9, etc) They just didn’t put much thought into arm based home devices outside of a specific few like the shield.

Why wouldn't it be my browser asking for the codecs it prefers instead of the website trying to guess my computer's hardware ?

Lots of hardware lies about its useful capabilities.

Can you run 4k? Of course. But can you run more than 4 frames a second?

The browser can lie all they want, at the end of the day the user has the final word if they want to change things.

My by now rather ancient rk3399 board can hardware-decode both at 4k 60Hz. Which has nothing to do with the fact that it's aarch64, but that Rockchip included a beast of a VPU (it was originally designed for set-top boxes).

How about, dunno, asking the browser what kind of media it would prefer?

this prolly wasnt a bad decision early on... why push something to a population who cant utilize it... but shit changes fast, google.

It seems somewhat damning that Google’s own browser had a workaround for this, though

was it ignorance or malicious intent?

if it was a person, i would try and assume ignorance.. im not sure google the company deserves such respect

Or it's a company so fuckoff huge that one department (Chrome on Android) couldn't get a bug report escalated in another department (YouTube). Eventually they just put in a UA workaround while the bug rots in a backlog somewhere. Common enterprise bullshit.

Or the Chrome on Android team didn't even bother reporting the issue to YouTube and just threw in a cheap workaround. Also common enterprise bullshit.

Bingo. When I was a Chrome developer working on video stuff, we mostly treated YouTube like a separate company. Getting our stuff to work with theirs was a priority, but no more than, say, Netflix. We pretty much treated them as a black box that consumed the same API we provided for everyone.

YouTube is having a lot of totally not anticompetitive "bugs" in these past couple of weeks

UA sniffing again? What was it with feature detection and whatnot?

Does this include Apple Silicon Macs? That would be a bold move.

This issue was detected when running Firefox on Linux on Apple silicon. Firefox on Mac just identifies as x64.

It's probably not on purpose by YouTube. It's stupid they put restrictions on some heuristics to begin with but maybe because otherwise people would think YouTube is not loading properly while it's the software decoding on the not capable arm PC that can't handle the resolution.

Repeat after me kids. It's not an "oversight", or "mistake", or "bug", or "misunderstanding"...

IF

IT

KEEPS

HAPPENING

Seems like my Samsung TV app is being hit by stuff too, I had 5 unskippable ads and can't seem to get stable 1080p at 60fps any more despite gigabit fibre and cat6. Meanwhile getting 4k on my YouTube app on Android on WiFi.

Go figure.

YouTube is so desperate to fight this war that they're harming legitimate watchers meanwhile my rockpi running Android TV seems to keep running sTube just fine.

The nic on TVs tend to be awful. I can barely break 100mbps on my lg wired or wireless.

100mbps should be enough for a few 4K streams, and I imagine you’re not streaming more than one thing to your TV at any given time.

4k yes, 4k hdr is where it becomes limiting...from what I've read.

Perhaps, and I’ll readily admit my ignorance on this.

That said, I doubt the HDR overhead would be any larger than the equivalent baseline SDR content.

If my intuition is right, depending on other factors like compression you could still fit at least 2 streams on that bandwidth.

Does this apply to Windows on ARM as well, or is it just Linux specifically for some reason?

It's a processor variable, not OS

That's what I figured, but every article I've seen on this calls out Linux specifically. I'll have to give it a try from my Surface Pro X when I get home and test.

Sounds like a raspberry thing

Use piped

They still have no app. Viewing anything on that site through your mobile browser sucks ass.

NewPipe for android

Tried that, the interface wasn't any better. Also, you couldn't log into an account and get recommendations. I use Revanced extended.

Libretube

Just tried it. Tried playing several videos, and the app just crashed every time. Plus, again, there is no youtube account sign in and a bad UI.

Not being identifiable is kinda the point of Piped, so an official YT login will never be a thing, I'd assume

Piped is based on NewPipe's extractor.
If you want an app it's available on f-droid or with sponsor block on Izzy's repo.

Grayjay

no.

Grayjay is proprietary. Use Newpipe, which is what Piped's extractor is based on.

Thank God someone finally said something! There was probably a Lemmy user somewhere who hadn't heard of it yet.