zlacker

YouTube's bitrates are atrocious. I don't understand why they can't at least offer a higher bitrate to their paying Premium customers.

> Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.

According to Wikipedia, a DVB-C stream can be between 6-65 Mb/s [1], certainly higher than YouTube's 3-9 Mb/s (assuming 1080p video). The situation for resolutions above 1080p seems to be a bit better [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-C

[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-youtube-...

>>Tijdre+(OP)
I'm not sure about Europe, but in the US it's very rare to see bitrates even a large fraction of that. (I don't see a minimum bitrate on the ATSC Wikipedia page, and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that it's often lower than 6 Mbps.) Worse still, in a bunch of places the cable companies still deliver MPEG-2 video, which is going to look pretty atrocious at anything other than an extremely high bitrate. It's a big disadvantage compared to Youtube. Plus a whole bunch of programs are in 60 fps, which need a higher bitrate anyway.

I plugged in my cable box for the first time in months to watch the Super Bowl, and was shocked at how terrible the video was. I could see obvious artifacts without glasses on, and I can't even tell 720p from 1080p at that distance. Some of my relatives have those MPEG-2 channels, and I remember them being significantly worse.

Not trying to say that cable TV can never be better than Youtube's quality, of course, just trying to give a general impression of my experience with various American cable companies.

>>bscphi+U01
Ah yes, I forgot that there are different standards depending on the country. To be quite honest, I haven't sat down and watched linear TV in years, but from what I can tell at relatives' homes the quality here is not bad.

Actually, out of curiosity I just looked up the bitrates for my local cable company. The quality seems to differ a lot: on average between 3 Mb/s MPEG-2 [1] and 12 Mb/s MPEG-4 [2]. So I guess my previous statement isn't really accurate and it depends on the channel.

That website appears to be quite interesting btw; it also tracks YouTube bitrates for live and non-live video and in different encodings! [3]

[1] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=C049&pid=19126&li...

[2] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=C049&pid=19130&li...

[3] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=...

>>Tijdre+Nv2
Nice I'll check that out.

12 Mbps MPEG-4 should be quite good, for the stations that support it.