Youtube doesn't offer a "no video" option for free because the ToS for the free service says you are not allowed to separate the video and audio streams. This is to prevent free streaming on devices like Sonos since it's harder (if possible at all) to monetize those videos. It's also why when using the free service the app doesn't allow streaming with the screen off.

A 0 pixel video would defeat this by being in effect an audio stream separated from the video. I always wondered why manufacturers don't just resize the video stream to 1 pixel and use any of the device LEDs to "display" the video thus bypassing this part of the ToS.

> Youtube doesn't offer a "no video" option for free because the ToS for the free service says you are not allowed to separate the video and audio streams.

Isn't this backwards? It seems more likely that the TOS follows the business decision here. I believe old versions of the official mobile apps continued to play the video with the phone screen off.

I imagine the ToS were written as such in order to make sure some features can be monetized (like offline or screen-off playback). But this just means they would not offer any feature for free that undermines this decision. A "0px" video would effectively turn it into an audio-only stream and be an "official" way for others to bypass some of those restrictions. It would make streaming to all devices that now require a Premium/Music membership, or stream ripping (something they don't actually sue for but insist it's illegal) fair game.

> resize the video stream to 1 pixel and use any of the device LEDs to "display" the video thus bypassing this part of the ToS

Hilarious hack, love this idea

> since it's harder (if possible at all) to monetize those videos

it's not like we don't have ads on radio

I think this is a safe assumption, there should be no difference between each frames thus nothing should be sent.

Videos usually have key frames (full pictures) after ever interval of x seconds/frames. So new data will be sent occasionally even with no changes.

Yeah, I've downloaded this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwHpDOWhkGk

youtube-dl -k gave me two files, one webm/opus audio file and one mp4/av1 video file.

The files had roughly same sizes, the audio being 9728k large, the video 9476k.

The video had 127 keyframes, out of 17030 frames total, distributed over 567 seconds of video (one keyframe every 4.5 seconds). I don't have a method at hand to measure the encoded size of the keyframes but if I extract the first 90k of the file using dd (bs=90k count=1), I get 21 frames, so that's a lower bound for the size that's actually needed to encode one single keyframe, more shouldn't actually be neccessary.

So of the 9.4M video file, > 99% is waste. Quite literally as 1% of 9476k is 95k. With the addition of audio, the amount of waste has to be adjusted to roughly half of the total audio+video data. Still a large amount of data that can be saved, especially at youtube scale where reductions of traffic in the sub-percent range are material for promotions.

This could also be solved by youtube detecting these situations and simply spacing keyframes farther apart or using duplicate frame decimation/vfr encoding. Seeking would still be fast since it could just fetch and skip a huge bunch of empty P-frames.

For static image videos YouTube's H.264 version of the video is generally significantly smaller than either the VP9 or AV1 versions. Either YouTube's detection and modification of the encoder settings for this type of video or something intrinsic to the x264 encoder delivers better results from their H.264 encoding pipeline.

The 480p video-only file sizes for this video as reported by youtube-dl have VP9 at 9.70MiB, AV1 at 9.25MiB, and H.264 at 3.55MiB.

So we give them something 13 kb-ish[0] and they compress it to 4.16 MB. I'm sure I'm already not putting it kind enough. Combined with the tiny battery in my phone I really feel like people are pulling a prank on me. I'm a behavioral experiment now! I think my roomba just looked at me.

[0] http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/DwHpDOWhkGk/hqdefault.jpg

YouTube's a video encoding site. The original video that was given to YouTube will have been substantially larger than 13 kb-ish.

If your content is audio only then use an audio encoding site like SoundCloud. Or, if you really want to use YouTube, then you need to get them to develop an audio specific option.

I think we already have tons of brilliant people developing video codec. I'm sure they are all well aware there isn't a way to define part(s) of a video a slide show. What is missing is people pointing out how silly this is. The keyframes also define the seek points. Its a mess.

Yes, the formats and players should be changed to also allow more seek points than the key frames, exactly for these "picture not changing" scenarios but with the audio content we want to seek and consume.

And then additionally, there should be better recognition of the "picture not changing" conditions, to allow better use of such a feature.

I moan about this a lot with codec ppl. I think they are just building on top of what they have?

I was trying to distribute a 3 hour lecture with a single slide. I suppose seeing the speaker for a few seconds would be nice too. haha, I'm asking a lot? The slide had a lot of detail so the video uhhh I mean the jpg got enormous and few keyframes so no seeking? No thanks, ill do the "compression" in javascript. (eeewww!)

If it's a solid color or simple enough for the static image compression algorithms in play to optimize away, even those keyframes would be tiny. Some codecs will just optimize those keyframes away entirely.

oh okay, TIL :)

I just wonder why wouldn't they put the lyrics into the subtitles channel.

The 'they' part is critical. YouTube relies on users to provide actual content. Digitalized music is uploaded by people with vast differences in tech abilities, access to tools, and even personal tastes. Some get creative and want to have HD city time-lapse as background and power point animation of lyrics. What do you do with those?

It is not impossible to go over all music videos, automatically fetch lyrics and replace video with static album cover or something, but who would do it? If YouTube does this then they are responsible for any copyright infringement, and they become huge competition to user-created content on their own platform.