View Full Version : 1080p and YouTube - No longer an Option?


Tim Polster
October 1st, 2015, 03:23 PM
Hello,

Just wanted to check with others as I no longer have the option to play files at 1080p resolution on YouTube. I uploaded a 1080p24 file yesterday and when I went to view it today I noticed the highest resolution choice was 720p.

Anybody know what changed?

Unregistered Guest
October 1st, 2015, 03:57 PM
Hmm...maybe I'll hold off on buying that fancy 4K camera then. ;-)

Gary Huff
October 1st, 2015, 04:17 PM
I have been setting YouTube videos at 1080 all day today.

Chris Harding
October 1st, 2015, 05:41 PM
You can go all the way to 2160 actually but if your internet connection is slow then You Tube will automatically try and pick a bitrate that suits the connection speed. At busy times mine drops to 480P quite often!! However 1080P is still there as Gary says ... Blame your ISP for the low speed choice!

Tim Polster
October 1st, 2015, 09:10 PM
I found out the issue is with Internet Explorer. There is a new player design, but if I open the video in Chrome I can click on the resolution and then 1080p is a choice. If I click that same place in Internet Explorer the choices are only 360p and 720p. Lame IE!

So you can keep the 4k cameras!! :) False alarm.

Jack Zhang
October 4th, 2015, 09:06 PM
Yup, it's YouTube forcing you to a modern browser to use their HTML5 player which you have to support their VP9 format to view 1080p. 360p and 720p are legacy formats for older HTML5 standards.

However, if you force Flash on Firefox, (in case you can't update Firefox) you can still go up to 1080p. (although it's incredibly insecure)

YouTube is experimenting with 3840 wide at 60p. You can only get it if your browser supports VP9, and the browsers are in no way optimized to play that. If you upload 4096 material, it gets shrunken to 3840 for 16:9.

Dan Brockett
October 9th, 2015, 09:49 PM
I went through the same thing with Firefox for a few months, it was obnoxious. YouTube is garbage for video, Vimeo is better at least but the compression still leaves a lot to be desired.

Wacharapong Chiowanich
October 10th, 2015, 02:48 AM
On the Mac there is no issue playing back at any level. My Firefox, Safari and Chrome play all of them (not really sure about 1080p60,50 in Safari as I rarely use it to watch YouTube). The only issue is not having enough bandwidth to play the 2160p smoothly.

Ronan Fournier
October 10th, 2015, 04:30 AM
Since Safari 9.0, on Mac OS X, there is the same issue. Firefox and Chrome display 1080p though.