Summary
YouTube is the largest source of steaming video on the web, but with that quantity comes a lack of image quality. YouTube videos are often criticized for poor visuals and nasty compression, but withYouTube Enhanced Bitratethings clear up.
What Is Enhanced Bitrate?
YouTube Enhanced Bitrateis a special quality tier for (as of this writing)1080pvideos offered as a premium paid feature.Thebitrateof a videois (as the name suggests) the number of bits that are available per second to store the frames that make up a moving image. All the digital footage you watch, whether streamed or from an optical disc, is compressed in some way. Just likea JPEG imageis compressed compared to a Bitmap image, for a much smaller file that maintains most of the detail of the original.
If you have two copies of a video at the same resolution using the same compression algorithm, the one with the lower bitrate will have worse image quality. This is because it has to apply a more aggressive level of compression and throw away more image detail in the process. Common artifacts of lower bitrate include:
These aren’t the only side effects of having low bitrate, but once you’ve seen the difference between a high and low bitrate video you’ll have a good intuitive idea of the impact it has in general. It’s thanks to high bitrates that 1080p Blu-ray movies canlook betterthan their 4K streaming versions.
How to Get Enhanced Bitrate
For the mobile app, this means going to the settings cog and to Quality > Advanced, and in a web browser just click on the cog icon and choose your quality level.
When to Enable Enhanced Bitrate
In truth, the vast majority of YouTube videos don’t really benefit from having a better bitrate. It really only matters when the nature of a video means that its image quality is important. So, for example, if you’re watching fast-action film, or videos about the visual arts, you’ll want to enable Enhanced Bitrate to get the best colors and highest level of fine detail in motion and in static images.
However, a higher bitrate comes with significantlymore data usage. So, if you’re on a slow connection or on a limited data plan, you may want to think twice about turning on this fancier, premium version of YouTube’s video stream.
Is Enhanced Bitrate Worth It?
As I mentioned above, the benefits of a better bitrate really depend on the type of content you’re watching, but where it is available and it makes sense for you to enable it, the difference in quality is definitely worth turning the feature on. With YouTube now playing host to content made with bigger budgets and better production values, it’s often worth it, especially on larger format screens.
