News YouTube uses lower quality options on browsers with 'aarch64' Arm-based systems — reporting 'x86_64' appears to be a widespread browser fix

[Admin]

A developer found YouTube changes the quality and resolution options for 'aarch64' Arm-based systems under Linux, and changing the user agent string to indicate an underlying Intel CPU delivered better video quality defaults and unlocked 4K playback on Apple systems with Arm-based architectures.

YouTube uses lower quality options on browsers with 'aarch64' Arm-based systems — reporting 'x86_64' appears to be a widespread browser fix : Read more

 

[Amdlova]

On the s23 and A54 use the brave for see youtube for a long time. but can't do full screen on videos.
kinda of bugged. Because google try'n force you to use own application.

 

[Co BIY]

I also can't get oil filters at Walmart for my 1988 Yugo.

This is what happens when you are very outside the mainstream.

You get to feel unique and cool but there are costs.

 

[digitalgriffin]

Arm architectures are usually reserved for low power devices like tablets and phones, where battery life is sensitive. There are so many ARM based chips, it's hard to say if certain combo is ( chip is particularly power efficient at 4k av1. Heck,early rasp pis had poor fp performance and horrid java support. So I could understand it taking the safe route if it's not known the particular architecture (hardware and software) supports it.

 

[thestryker]

It's one thing for the default settings to be different, but arbitrarily locking out settings entirely seems dumb.

 

[drajitsh]

How do you change the user agent on Firefox on Android?

 

[NinoPino]

I also can't get oil filters at Walmart for my 1988 Yugo.

This is what happens when you are very outside the mainstream.

You get to feel unique and cool but there are costs.

But modern Macs are not like a '88 Yugo.

 

[Darkoverlordofdata]

Where are all these Arm's that are so powerful? I tried this trick on both my Lenovo Chromebook and my rpi4. Both Suck, and had to revert. More B.S. from Tom's Hardware.

 

[HaninTH]

ARM is trash for a lot of things, but video playback isn't one of them. Defaulting options is one thing, but not allowing any other choice is ridiculous. To then have the trigger for this lock being something that is easily countered is proof this move is short sighted.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Note that the developer on Mastodon believes this issue only occurs if you're using software decoding.

It does seem plausible that this was just some lazy heuristic implemented years ago. Which would have made some sense at the time, as most ARM chips were relatively slow and probably would have performed poorly trying to decode high res video in SW. As that changed over the years, everyone else just worked around it (by spoofing UA or whatever), and that increasingly obsolete heuristic never got updated. The fact that higher resolutions were blocked altogether, rather than simply not being the default, is suspicious though.

It seems unlikely that Asahi linux was specifically targeted. Some of the commenters on Hacker News mention then Asahi devs have a reputation for being... dramatic.

 

[DingusDog]

Meanwhile I'm over here YouTubin' on Chrome with RTX Video Super Resolution.