From The Verge: Considering how much it costs, YouTube TV is sometimes knocked by customers for offering only so-so picture quality. This can vary depending on your location or the specific feed that YouTube TV is serving you, but if you scan the YouTube TV subreddit, you’ll see picture quality as a common grievance. It wasn’t always this way. Now, the company is doing something about it — for certain content, at least.
In a post to the aforementioned Reddit community yesterday, YouTube TV shared details on recent (and upcoming) enhancements to the app. The change that easily received the most attention was this one:
Picture quality experiments: We’re testing transcoding changes, including a bitrate increase for live 1080p content over the next several weeks. These will target devices that support the VP9 codec with high-speed internet connections. If these go well, we plan to make them permanent by this summer. More info to come!
The majority of YouTube TV’s cable channels are delivered to the service by networks in 720p, so that’s the best that customers get. But certain channels including TBS and TNT provide a 1080i feed that YouTube TV deinterlaces to 1080p. However, when it comes to streaming, bitrate is really the critical element for making the image look good and reducing compression artifacts, pixelation, blocking, etc. — especially in dark scenes. Increasing the bitrate can lead to a substantially better picture.
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