How to make YouTube videos look better and use less bandwidth

As long ago as April 2015, YouTube introduced a serious change to the way it encoded its videos.

VP9 is an open-source codec that brings HD and even 4K (2160p) quality at half the bandwidth used by other known codecs.

In Google’s own words, the codec is a near perfect replacement to traditional H.264 encoding:

“This new format bumps everybody one notch closer to our goal of instant, high-quality, buffer-free videos.”

“That means that if your Internet connection used to only play up to 480p without buffering on YouTube, it can now play silky smooth 720p with VP9.”

“VP9 also has benefits for people with limited bandwidth or expensive data plans.”

“By cutting bitrates in as much as half, it dramatically increases the set of users that can watch 360p quality video without increased rebuffering or cost.”

The problem is that now, over a year and a half later, the codec still isn’t widely publicised or used.

Part of the reasoning behind this is that not every video can be watched in VP9 – it’s typically been reserved for videos with several thousand viewers.

It’s also still not available to everyone – according to YouTube the VP9 extension is still technically only available in the Chrome web browser, Android devices like the Samsung Galaxy S6, and some TVs and consoles.

So provided the video falls into this group and you have the correct device, you should automatically be watching videos in the new codec.

Alternatively you can enable the codec manually in your browser, by following these steps:

Load about:config in the browser’s address bar and search for the term “media.mediasource.enabled” there.
Double-click the preference to set it to true if it is not set to true already.
Then, search for “media.mediasource.webm.enabled” afterwards and make sure it is set to true as well. If it is not, double-click on it to switch its value to true.
When you go back to YouTube’s HMTL5 page afterwards, you will notice that only MSE & H.264 is listed as unsupported while all remaining options are supported.

You can check out the differences for yourself below:

H.264 Encoding