Choosing YouTube quality over CLI

[Setiawan]

I'm using VLC through its CLI on a Raspberry Pi 4 (no GUI OS installed).

If I open a YT video, say by entering

Code: Select all

vlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcJtL7QggTI

, some videos will stream at a lower quality than what is available through the same video in a browser, and a lower quality than what my display can handle.

That particular video isn't a good example, as it displays at 720p (there are higher resolutions available, but my system resolution is 640x480). Some videos will have 1080p available however, and only stream the 640x360 version for example.

Is there some way to choose the quality of the video that is streamed? I've tried researching this and some people mention being able to add a query to the end of the url (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcJtL7QggTI&hd=1), but none of those solutions seemed to have worked.

So, does anyone know how to choose the resolution when streaming YT in VLC using the command line?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

There is --preferred-resolution, but only audio+video formats can be selected.

[Setiawan]

Thanks Remi, are you able to give me example valid values? All I've found in regarding to --preferred-resolution arg is a stackoverflow thread, which says that you can pass in values like '240', '360', '480', '1080', or '-1' for best available resolution. However none of these values affect the stream quality for me.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Probably there is no better quality available (with audio).