InformAction Forums

^ You are right, the old flv encodes had more bitrate and quality than the mp4 versions even though they were both encoded using h264.

I just checked a few videos I had saved in the past. The new dash encodes appear to be lower quality and bitrate than the old 1080p (and 720p) mp4 encodes as well. It's sad that not only is Google trying to stop us from downloading the videos, they are also lowering the quality of the videos as well.

Oh, is that so. My guess is that maybe YT has reached a tipping point where there are just so many videos with many different formats and resolutions that Google's servers can't afford to handle them anymore(or unwilling to accomodate them), so now they're putting up measures trying to save some bandwith and conserve storage of what little they have.

I'm just grateful that user managed to make 480p options available again. Who knows how long it'll stay that way, though. Here's hoping Google won't mess around with them anymore.

user wrote:Before I used a loophole, now they fixed it, so no flv. And what's wrong with 480p mp4?

How do you get 480p mp4? Medium mp4 that's still available, is 360p, no?

I think these are the mappings:

144p - 3gp (h264, aac) - reduced frame-rate
180p - 3gp (h264, aac)
240p - small - flv (vp6 or flv1, mp3)
360p - medium - mp4 (h264, aac), webm (vp(8|9), vorbis)
480p - large - flv (h264, aac)

It would be better if the format labels in FG showed the the resolution (e.g. 240p) not the label (small), or in addition to the label.

@al_9x

Yes, that's right. But we're talking about user's latest update to FG, which you can download and manually install from here. This latest unofficial build can detect both 1080p and 480p options again. In order to play them properly, you need to mux(combine) the 2 resulting seperate tracks.

I agree with you regarding format labels, they can be confusing sometimes. I don't even know there's actually 2 different ultra small resolutions. o.0

Set flashgot.media.YouTube.remap_stream_quality=true to use the "XXXp" notation. The problem is, since I used the same notation for audio streams ("large" for 250k, etc.), they will be remapped as well, e.g. "large" -> "480p", which makes no sense.
Set media.YouTube.remap_stream_type=true to use shortened type notation for video streams: "mp4" instead of "video/mp4", etc.

user wrote:Set flashgot.media.YouTube.remap_stream_type=true

Fixed.

Fixed type remapping bug and added quality remapping for audio streams: "large" <-> "256k" (250k mp4, 209k webm), "medium" <-> "128k" (125k mp4, 138k webm), "small" <-> "48k" (48k mp4).

> am I right in this case in assuming 480p flv is superior to mp4

I would say not.

Thinking the differences you're seeing are related to the packing, the container, flv vs mp4, & the reporting by MediaInfo.

If you pull the actual stream from the container, then may not be bit for bit identical, but on inspection, playback, close enough where which one you choose is immaterial. And for that reason I always go with mp4 as it is smaller.

Now I suspect there may have been times, or possibly even now, where at a particular time there may only have been flv, & then sometime later they also added mp4, so in that respect there could be greater differences.

If sizes for the same "quality" file were different enough, between containers (flv & mp4, I'd never bother with anything else), then I'd be more apt to take note of playback differences.

@user - which formats have demuxed streams, all of them or just 1080p?

Thanks a lot for your work on this user.
Google should just stop with this hypocrisy and release an official way to download the videos.

Does this mean that we now have to use video editing software everytime we download 1080p or 480p video to merge sound and video together? Man if so that's going to suck.

FLV large and MP4-Large and WEBM-Large not available
By 1.5.5.94rc2 and v 1.5.5.94 , FF24
only Small and Medium available

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efnIWguS ... FFycyBcCC0

gast wrote:FLV large and MP4-Large and WEBM-Large not available
By 1.5.5.94rc2 and v 1.5.5.94 , FF24
only Small and Medium available

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efnIWguS ... FFycyBcCC0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUxa0ILm ... FFycyBcCC0

Take some time to read the previous page for an overview of current situation with YT and FG.

Please check latest development build 1.5.5.95rc1, thanks.

P.S.: I'm really investigating the option to download/install a ffmpeg static build on demand and use it to mux the downloaded streams in a future version...