VLC playing 1080 HD YouTube videos at 640

[NileQT87]

YouTube has recently undergone a lot of redesign craziness, which means I'm looking for a new way to access my playlists.

Several have thousands of vids, which are impossible to load with the new laggy, oversized design that causes Firefox to send up constant pop-up messages about browser slowdown that never occurred with the old, compact design. Load More All has also depreciated. I happen to have backups of all my playlists from when you could still get the old style to load without giving you a json.txt. And worse, if you try to Save Page As on the new design, you only get to save the first 100 videos, even if you saved it with everything (very slowly) loaded.

Enter VLC's lua plugin for playlists. Which is working fine and dandy to give me a quick-loading, up-to-date list of all my vids.

However, VLC has a big problem right now with YouTube and it's 1080 HD. I've played videos I know for a fact are 1080 (ones I've made myself, even) and they're a blurry mess of 640.

In Tools > Media Information > Codec, you can see what VLC is identifying the video as. I've already changed the VLC settings to play at 1080. I've also attempted highest. I've even attempted 720 just to see if I can get 1080 videos to stop playing at 640. I've just looked at a real 720 video and VLC is able to play it at full quality.

Is this related to the separate audio stream needing to be muxed into 1080 vids that caused a lot of downloaders to stop offering the feature (Youtube-DLG is capable of muxing it)? Did VLC stop offering the ability to play 1080 because of the audio muxing or is it a situation with the update?

If it's an update situation, YouTube playlist refugees who know about VLC's hidden capabilities really would appreciate the 1080 fix. It's worth the effort and very much needed now.

[Hitchhiker]

Do you have the 1080 setting shown in the screenshot enabled?


(click to enlarge)

[NileQT87]

First thing I did. It's not working.

I can try reverting back to the non-nightly VLC, if that might help.

[NileQT87]

I upgraded to the latest nightly. It's now playing 720. Still not 1080, but it's miles better than a 1080 video playing at 640.

And without changing a single setting after having it play 720 for a while, it suddenly has dropped to 640 again after pausing a video. Tried a restart and a different video (didn't work immediately with the paused one even after a restart) and it's back to 720.

Maybe it's just a bit unstable?

And definitely never seeing 1080.

[Lotesdelere]

AFAIK this is still valid:
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=127921

[Hitchhiker]

Yep. Just tried it by setting this Parasites trailer to HD: https://youtu.be/5xH0HfJHsaY
But defaults to 1280 x 720 when streamed in vlc.

[Hitchhiker]

Just to muddy the waters a little I was helping a user with a live stream issue yesterday and noticed that playback reolution was 1920 x 1080. Here's a pix.


(click to enlarge)

This is the link to the video which is a live stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAQUGsUzWbE

[phaolo]

Sadly, VLC never managed to play the DASH streams.
I had to change to MPC-BE to get the full HD quality from Youtube (plus subtitles).

[Lotesdelere]

It should be fixed in VLC 3.0.12.

[phaolo]

It should be fixed in VLC 3.0.12.

Umm, it doesn't seems so, I'm still getting the usual 720p avc non-dash files.

[mederi]

Live streams are different from non-live ones. Currently VLC supports only stream formats containing both audio&video (fmt 18/22 for 360p/720p) in non-live YouTube videos. VLC could use "input-slave" to stitch separate audio and video streams together, but I think there are some synchronisation/seeking issues.

[mederi]

You can use youtube-dl to check available formats and play them in VLC: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... 80#p495612
VLC 4 already has built-in youtube-dl plugin.

[mederi]

input-slave works very well for avc1 video only format+audio only format (Example format: 137+140). vp9 does not work well.
Updated youtube-dl.bat batch script for youtube-dl.exe (https://youtube-dl.org/):

Code: Select all

@echo off set VLC="C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" set /p yturl=Youtube URL (right-click): youtube-dl.exe -F %yturl:&=^&% set /p ytdlfmt=Format: youtube-dl.exe -g -f %ytdlfmt% %yturl:&=^&% > yt-dl.m3u echo VLC... rem %VLC% --meta-title=youtube-dl yt-dl.m3u setlocal enabledelayedexpansion for /f "delims=" %%x in (yt-dl.m3u) do set "xx=!xx! :input-slave=%%x" %VLC% --meta-title=youtube-dl !xx:~14!

[referi]

Nothing works. It always stuck to 720 while 1080 and 4k is available. mpv and smplayer play video from youtube easy in best quality and smooth.

[Lotesdelere]

I don't know about SMplayer but MPV relies on Youtube-dl. Since Youtube-dl seems not to be updated anymore, you may want to use YT-dlp instead. But the script remains the same.
AFAIK there is no other way because there are no other streams above 720 containing both video and audio streams together.