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A comment on YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022).

Re:YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022) by xyst on Saturday February 01, 2025 @08:35PM (#42904697)
Billions of dollars at their disposal. A near monopsony or just massive buyer of infrastructure, and some of the smartest people in the space. Yet the best they could do in 2022 is lossy codec at 120-190 bit rate?

I got better audio quality ripping songs from limewire or Napster in the 2000s.

Why do we settle with this substandard quality? Oh wait, YT barely has any competition and subsidized by G. No need for competition. Just shove ads down users throats and sell of their usage data.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022) by edflsafoiewq on Saturday February 01, 2025 @09:11PM (#42904952)
Lossy codecs at 120-190k in 2022 are probably transparent.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022) by out_of_protocol on Sunday February 02, 2025 @01:35PM (#42910623)
Opus _IS_ transparent at 128 kbps, big IF - encoded properly. YouTube does some weird shit instead of just reencoding
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022) by udev4096 on Sunday February 02, 2025 @04:48AM (#42907548)
Most people don't have a standard of listening to higher audio quality and youtube has taken advantage of it. Those who do, naturally self host. Plus, if they started serving FLAC, it would be bandwidth intensive
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022) by ZoomZoomZoom on Sunday February 02, 2025 @06:40AM (#42908030)
> I got better audio quality ripping songs from limewire or Napster in the 2000s.

Nah, you didn't, at least not reliably. Half of that were recodes and upcodes that used Blade, FhG or Xing.

Only with torrent technology and community-driven trackers we got reliable distribution that surpassed the official non-physical channels.

[ Parent | on HN ]