Did YouTube bump down the quality recently?

[GEOLINK]

So I noticed this recently after downloading a couple of videos from YouTube. I thought I was seeing things but I really noticed when I downloaded the same video I did a couple of days ago and compared them:

Before:



After:



Some other video bitrates even go below 900kbps where as before it would be around the 1500kbps mark.

I'm downloading via IDM.

[DB83]

But is it the exact same video ie from the same channel/uploader or some upload from another account ?

[butterw]

There are always multiple formats of the same 1080p video available (typ. using different codecs)

- Check whether the original video format is still present in the list with youtube-dl -F url
- and/or if the two videos use the same codec with mediainfo

Youtube affects more bitrate to VP9, AV1 than h264...

[nimrahwt]

It's not recently, its the same process since forever

Youtube compresses the videos after a while, popular videos faster (sometimes within 1h) so its best to download new videos asap

In a livestream the quality is usually lower than the later archived version
sometimes it also happens that a video gets bigger, like a few days ago; first it was like 430MB and a day later it was 7xxMB (1080p avc DASH137) but its usually getting smaller after a while

And a month later it usually will be recompressed again

[GEOLINK]

But is it the exact same video ie from the same channel/uploader or some upload from another account ?

The same channel/uploader.