[ProAudio] Lossless audio on YouTube

Dan Lavry dan at lavryengineering.com
Fri Apr 23 21:44:44 PDT 2021


You seem to know a lot about it. I have no reason to doubt you. It is not surprising that financial considerations of some people in powerfully positions get priority...It would be great to have wonderfull audio and video one day. My son showed me some of the new virtual reality stuff. One can say the glass is half full, or half empty. I see a lot of progress, and at the same time there is a lot of room for further improvement.For now, it would be nice to reduce the data by a factor of 2, which lossless compression does. In other words, one is using half the capability, and there is still the other half. We can use that to pack more bits, raise the sample rate or both. I am all for it, but I can't change it...RegardsDan LavrySent from Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: cheater cheater via ProAudio <proaudio at bach.pgm.com> Date: 4/23/21  9:10 PM  (GMT-08:00) To: chris at chriscaudle.org, Chris Caudle <6807.chris at pop.powweb.com>, proaudio at bach.pgm.com Subject: Re: [ProAudio] Lossless audio on YouTube Not having soap (or toilets or running water for that matter) neverdrove away eatery patrons before those became common. Do you thinkthey became common because someone made a business proposal? Did thepatrons protest in outrage at a lack of Dove Coconut Cream? Ithappened because someone up top decided that's what is supposed tohappen. 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 afraction of a percent of what they use total. In 2012 they paidroughly 1 cent per GB uploaded. Prices have improved dramatically, sothose ten million GB are going to be only tens of thousands ofdollars, if not less. There are streamers on YouTube who earn more perday. 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 onepercent. For a comparison, a senior google engineer's salary couldcover that yearly bill and top it off. Maybe two on a rainy day. Theconsideration that this could hurt their bottom line in any way simplydoes 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> _______________________________________________> ProAudio mailing list> ProAudio at bach.pgm.com> http://bach.pgm.com/mailman/listinfo/proaudio_______________________________________________ProAudio mailing listProAudio at bach.pgm.comhttp://bach.pgm.com/mailman/listinfo/proaudio
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