2016-08-20 Summer Sonic Tokyo

[TheBang]

Thanks for that info. I’ll take a look at Premium and see if I can figure out what’s what.

Oh, also, are a Premium subscriber, btw?

[iamneorev]

Originally Posted by TheBang

Thanks for that info. I’ll take a look at Premium and see if I can figure out what’s what.

Oh, also, are a Premium subscriber, btw?

Not currently, but thought maybe possibly they found a way to tap into that, if at all possible. Or could just really be 128kbps in the end. I tried using 4K Video Downloader and got 128kbps.

[TheBang]

OK, I've researched this quite a bit, and I don't think it's possible. While 256 Kbps AAC streaming is available to YouTube Music subscribers with Premium, it is only available on the YouTube Music mobile app, where it is encrypted and they can control access to the platform. I haven't seen anyone's that's been able to access that stream. On the web client, the highest quality is limited to 128 Kbps AAC (or Opus, but Opus doesn't have the universal support that AAC does).

As for Easy YouTube Video Downloader, if it's this one:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...ideo-download/
https://www.yourvideofile.org/

I call bullshit on that. There's so much that is misleading or untrue on the plug-in and their website, all geared towards directing you to "donate" to get the Pro version. Did you pay to get the Pro version? Because I don't see any way to get the 1080p video on that plug-in without paying. To be fair, this is a limitation of all browser plug-ins. They simply don't have enough filesystem permissions to do all the required post-processing manipulation of the separately MPEG-DASH-delivered video and audio streams from YouTube all within the browser. Standalone programs (like 4K Video Downloader or youtube-dl) don't have those limitations.

The audio only download options you mentioned are 128 Kbps MP3 and 256 Kbps MP3, right? Even that's misleading, because both of those are transcodes. YouTube doesn't serve any audio in MP3; they only use AAC and Opus. So, 128 Kbps MP3 would be a bad transcode, and 256 Kbps MP3 would be a slightly less bad transcode.

[ultradave]

FYI, I use this app ClipGrab for YouTube if anyone is interested. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

https://clipgrab.org

Cheers!

[TheBang]

Originally Posted by TheBang

OK, I've researched this quite a bit, and I don't think it's possible. While 256 Kbps AAC streaming is available to YouTube Music subscribers with Premium, it is only available on the YouTube Music mobile app, where it is encrypted and they can control access to the platform. I haven't seen anyone's that's been able to access that stream. On the web client, the highest quality is limited to 128 Kbps AAC (or Opus, but Opus doesn't have the universal support that AAC does).

Just to close the loop on this, I did a trial of YouTube Premium, and looked into the 256 Kbps AAC streams. They are designated as format 141 by YouTube, and you can see if they're being streamed to you by enabling Stats for Nerds in the mobile app (or whatever YouTube client you're using). Using the YouTube Music app, I was able to determine that format 141 is only being served up for stuff that's licensed as Music to YouTube, i.e. through the major labels (like YouTube Topic channels for artists, if you know what that means).


For regular videos that are coming from www.youtube.com and mirrored in YouTube Music (music.youtube.com), they still only serve those in format 140 (128 Kbps AAC). Even videos that I know have previously been available in format 141 (like some that I downloaded back in late 2013 when there was a brief window when 141 was being served generally through the YouTube website), are still only available in 140, even through the YouTube Music app.