[ProAudio] Lossless audio on YouTube

[cheater cheater]

Not having soap (or toilets or running water for that matter) never
drove away eatery patrons before those became common. Do you think
they became common because someone made a business proposal? Did the
patrons protest in outrage at a lack of Dove Coconut Cream? It
happened because someone up top decided that's what is supposed to
happen. This is the only way lossless audio will happen, as well.

10 million GB per day seems like a lot until you realize it's a
fraction of a percent of what they use total. In 2012 they paid
roughly 1 cent per GB uploaded. Prices have improved dramatically, so
those ten million GB are going to be only tens of thousands of
dollars, if not less. There are streamers on YouTube who earn more per
day. That extra upload bill is going to be 300-600k USD per year.
That's literally nothing at their scale. Google earned 134.81 Billion
$ from advertising in 2019. Even $10m is less than one percent of one
percent. For a comparison, a senior google engineer's salary could
cover that yearly bill and top it off. Maybe two on a rainy day. The
consideration that this could hurt their bottom line in any way simply
does not exist.


On Sat, Apr 24, 2021 at 1:01 AM Chris Caudle via ProAudio
<proaudio at bach.pgm.com> wrote:
>
> On 2021-04-22 22:14, cheater cheater via ProAudio wrote:
> > The trend of only ever releasing lossy audio to the general
> > public
>
> I think it would be more accurate to say only releasing lossy audio
> along with video on free streaming sites.
> For most music specific releases you can usually still buy the CD, or
> download high quality files.
> For video you can get BluRay which has lossless audio.
>
> > But you can't look up the differences between
> > guitar string gauges. Music and music education are being left behind
> > in a world where everything else is allowed to flourish on the new
> > medium.
>
> I think you are exaggerating how bad the audio quality is.  I checked a
> video from a music analysis/commentary/education channel I'm familiar
> with, and these are the audio formats available (you should usually get
> the best quality your connection rate can support):
> opus @ 53k (48000Hz), 8.05MiB
> opus @ 70k (48000Hz), 10.59MiB
> mp4a.40.2 at 129k (44100Hz), 19.38MiB
> opus @137k (48000Hz), 20.65MiB
>
> I checked a couple of music only videos (the previous had a lot of
> dialog, I'm not sure if the bit rate is varied based on whether the
> video has primarily dialog or music) and those seem common:
> opus @ 45k (48000Hz), 1.60MiB
> opus @ 59k (48000Hz), 2.12MiB
> opus @120k (48000Hz), 4.24MiB
> mp4a.40.2 at 129k (44100Hz), 4.58MiB
>
> opus @ 50k (48000Hz), 2.06MiB
> opus @ 65k (48000Hz), 2.70MiB
> opus @127k (48000Hz), 5.23MiB
> mp4a.40.2 at 129k (44100Hz), 5.31MiB
>
> 127kb/s obviously isn't 256kb/s, but it's better than radio or analog TV
> broadcast.
>
> > Are there any plans known? Any lossless web codecs being planned or
> > released by Google or Mozilla?
>
> I think if there was a big demand for higher quality audio the first and
> easiest thing would be to just use 256kb/s opus and AAC.  That would not
> require any changes to the existing software, and results in
> imperceptible differences to the original for almost all listeners.
>
> > Is anyone trying to reach out to video hosting sites to make them
> > aware of the issue with lossy audio for music?
>
> I don't think you have defined "the issue" well enough to begin with.
> If your argument is that the compressed audio sounds different than the
> original source material, I think you would need to be able to make some
> kind of argument that the differences are objectionable, and
> objectionable enough that it is driving away viewers.
> YouTube isn't making all those videos available because they are
> charitable to you, they do it to sell advertising, so anything that
> drives up the cost would need to be justified in some way by driving
> more revenue.  You can be sure that if YouTube thought increase the
> audio bit rate from 129kb/s to 160kb/s or 256kb/s would bring  in more
> views they would do it.
>
> On 2021-04-23 16:08, Dan Lavry via ProAudio wrote:
> > YouTube channel accommodates 44.1K 16 bits.
>
> All of the files have lossy compression I believe, so I'm not sure what
> "16 bits" means in that context, you can't really make an apples to
> apples comparison  between uncompressed PCM bit depth and lossy
> compressed files.
>
> > Download speed is still an issue, especially for slow internet.
>
> It is not just download speed, it is cost of transit for that much data.
>   I have seen various numbers from 1 billion to 5+ billion videos
> streamed per day from YouTube.
> That could be on the order of 10 million GB per day of data they have to
> move.  I have not looked into wholesale Internet data transit rates in a
> long time, but that has to be a lot of money no matter how much of a
> bulk discount you get.
>
> --
> Chris Caudle
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