Ability to choose (video & audio) download quality

[vertigo220]

What would you like to see added?

I have no idea if, when I download something, I'm getting the best quality, the worst, or somewhere in between, for both video and audio. It would be preferable to be able to choose, so I don't get low-quality when I want high and so I can choose low-quality when I just want something fast and small size.

[PGAxis]

Actually, you can already do that in settings, just turn the "Enable quick download" off and you will be able to choose. I will add descriptions to the individual settings too, so everyone knows what they do. Does that sound good?

[vertigo220]

Yeah, that should work. I thought about that, was wondering what exactly was "quick" about it, but didn't have a chance to try it yet.

[PGAxis]

I mean it is quick in the sense that you don't have to go through the hasssle of selecting a quality of the thing you want to download. You just click the download button and it downloads the highest available quality.

[vertigo220]

Some thoughts after trying some more:

1. It's not that much quicker, as with that enabled, you have to choose between mp4/mp3, and with it disabled, you also have to choose the quality, but that's it.
2. I'm not even sure why mp3 is a choice, since AFAIK YT typically uses AAC/Opus/m4a, and mp3 is the lowest quality of all the audio codecs it uses and the lowest efficiency of the compressed ones. I'm also not sure why it defaults to that instead of mp4, as I'd imagine the vast majority of people downloading want video, not just audio. And it keeps defaulting to it, even if you change it to mp4 then hit the "Load metadata" button which resets everything, so you select what you want, then hit that button so it shows the download button (and not every time, as at least once in limited testing it still just showed the load metadata button and I had to hit it again before I got the download button), but that reverts the settings you selected so you have to reselect them. In fact, from what I can tell, this constant resetting of the options and having to continually reselect them is the only thing that makes this slower vs the quick download mode. I think what would be better is to replace that mode with defaults that can be set in the settings, and then always show the dropdowns to change things but if you want to do a quick download you just leave them at the defaults, which are at whatever you set them to, so highest quality or a specific quality. This simplifies things by not having that added mode, allows more flexibility vs having the quick download mode only download the highest quality (which many people probably wouldn't want, especially since they're downloading and, therefore likely watching, on their phone and don't necessarily need high quality), and it allows for either a quick download or tweaking it, so best of both worlds.
3. You can choose the video resolution, but not the container, which also influences the quality, and you can choose the audio bitrate, but, as mentioned above, not the container/codec.

Essentially, it's very limited compared to something like Tartube. Perhaps I just shouldn't expect that level of flexibility in an Android app, but it would be nice.

[PGAxis]

OK, so... as for the quick download mode, sure, some renaming should probably happen. As for the rest...

I'm not even sure why mp3 is a choice, since AFAIK YT typically uses AAC/Opus/m4a, and mp3 is the lowest quality of all the audio codecs it uses and the lowest efficiency of the compressed ones.

While it is possibly the lowest quality of them all, as far as I've looked, it is the one with most compatibility across devices and android versions. So it will definitely stay, at least as the default.

and you can choose the audio bitrate, but, as mentioned above, not the container/codec

Yeah, so, that. I don't entirely know how I'd do that, since the screen is already kinda full, especially on smaller devices. I guess it could be just a switch/toggle/picker in settings, if that sounds OK.

And it keeps defaulting to it, even if you change it to mp4 then hit the "Load metadata" button which resets everything

I am aware of that, I personally was mainly using it for music, so I guess that's why I decided to default to MP3s, but sure, it can also be a toggle in settings.

You can choose the video resolution, but not the container, which also influences the quality

And again, similar to the audio this will probably have to be a setting rather than a UI element.

So, check how that sounds and tell me if you'd be OK with this version, or if you have some better ideas

[vertigo220]

it is the one with most compatibility across devices and android versions

I won't say I know this for sure, but I'm 99.9% certain that AAC (and, therefore, m4a) at the very least, which is superior to MP3, is just as compatible, and Opus is probably nearly as compatible and, again, is superior to MP3. AAC especially, but also Opus, have been around for many years, and have been considered superior to, and therefore preferred to, MP3, for most of that time, certainly several years now. That's not to say MP3 is bad by any means, but they are better, meaning you can get better quality at the same bitrate or similar quality at lower bitrate/file size. And because of this, they have very high compatibility. Again, I'm fairly certain most YT videos use AAC/m4a by default (which also means that downloading in MP3 means a conversion, so more quality loss), and they play on everything, so the compatibility shows there.

Across multiple devices, I haven't had any of these fail to play due to compatibility. Whether devices have hardware acceleration for them (frankly unlikely for audio but definitely occurs for video) or they use software codecs (which use more processor power, but this is miniscule for audio), they are able to play any format. Audio codec compatibility just isn't an issue these days, and hasn't been for at least the past decade.

IMO, it should default to whatever container/codec the video uses, i.e. whatever one YT has it encoded in, to prevent reencoding into another format, resulting in lower quality. But always using any, especially MP3, is doing the downloader a disservice by giving them a lower-quality audio than what's available, sometimes at a larger size, whether because it's defaulting to a higher bitrate than the audio provided or even the same bitrate but you could have achieved a similar quality at a lower bitrate using a better codec. Even choosing the bitrate, if choosing one not natively available, will mean a reencode, so e.g. if it is available in MP3 (which, again, I question that and suspect any MP3 download will be a reencode, but I could very well be wrong), YT may only have it in certain bitrates, so if it only has 128/192 and you select 160, it's going to be reencoded (hopefully at least from the 192 and not the 128, but who knows), which will result in lower quality, and you may have been better off with 128, and certainly with AAC/Opus 128.

the screen is already kinda full, especially on smaller devices

Well, my device has a 6.7" screen size, which is a tad big for my preferences, and maybe a bit above average, but the current layout only uses about half my screen space, and it could be made more efficient to use even less. Also, adding additional configuration doesn't need to take any more space, it just needs more options in the already available dropdowns. For example, in Tartube there are only two dropdowns:

There are, of course, other ways these could be designed, e.g. instead of "Video:" and "Audio:" headers each line could be e.g. "Video: mp4"

Granted, Tartube doesn't even have the ability AFAIK to choose audio bitrate, and this would require a third dropdown, but, as I said, there's plenty of room for that on the main screen. And I definitely think it's better to keep all this in the main interface vs having to go into settings every time the user wants to do a different format or quality.

Hopefully that all makes sense. I'm not an expert on any of this, so I could be wrong on some things, but I do know a fair bit about codecs between reading over the years and personal experience, so I'm pretty confident on that stuff. I'm far less sure about how YT stores things, but again, from using Tartube and other, similar programs and browser extensions and from a bit of reading, I don't think I'm far off. After all, as you can see in the above screenshot, Tartube has a dropdown for converting to the selected format vs downloading in the format, the latter of which will only work if you happen to select a format available, otherwise it will fail, and if you want the selected format, you have to choose the convert option, which will download in a different format and repackage (and reencode if necessary, which always results in quality loss) into the selected one. Obviously YT isn't storing every video in every format and every resolution and bitrate, so anything else is going to be a conversion and a loss in quality. That's not always bad, e.g. converting AAC 192 to Opus or even AAC 128 will be much smaller and likely not be noticeable for most, but converting AAC 128 to MP3 128 very well might and is resulting in lower quality for no space savings. Obviously the same goes for video, but with bigger potential space savings and much more noticeable quality drops.

[PGAxis]

Alright, so, you were correct in a couple of things. Yes, YouTube does store AAC and Opus by default. I just had it on MP3, because at the time I read somewhere, that it is the most supported format. It may have been wrong or outdated, I don't know. However, YouTube does in fact store every video in most of the formats below and every resolution up to (and including) the original resolution. Though it is, as you correctly pointed out, lossy, just not on my part but on YouTube's.

Anyway, the format dropdown now gives the user the option to download in AAC, Opus, MP3 (converted), MP4 (native on most videos, otherwise converted) and WebM.

So just tell me if that sounds good. If you want, I could attach the apk for testing and you could tell me if you want anything else.

[vertigo220]

That sounds good. Happy to test or can just wait for release, whichever you prefer.

Interesting that YT stores all resolutions, but makes sense since otherwise they would have to constantly be transcoding. As for mp4 and webm, some limited testing I did maybe a year or two ago actually showed webm to generally be slightly better at, IIRC, roughly the same file size. FWIW.

One thought, if possible, would be to show the file size for each option, at least each resolution, to give the user more info when deciding which to download.

[PGAxis]

One thought, if possible, would be to show the file size for each option, at least each resolution, to give the user more info when deciding which to download.

Yes, I noticed that is exactly what e.g. NewPipe does, but I managed to forget it when I was doing this version, I will add that too.

That sounds good. Happy to test or can just wait for release, whichever you prefer.

As I said, I can send you the apk if you'd like, however it comes with some downsides. The main one (at least for me it would be) is that you'd probably have to uninstall the current version, install the new one, test it, uninstall that one and download the F-Droid (or GitHub) one again. I'm saying probably, because even though it will be signed with the same key, I don't know how the auto updates on both will react to it. The other one is that if you do that, you will loose all of your settings and both search and download history. If you don't mind that, than you can test it now, if you'd rather wait for release, than you can wait.

[vertigo220]

I will have to do that, and yes, it is annoying, but not a huge deal. If it helps you, I can do it. If it's not going to help much, I'll just wait. As I said, whatever works better for you.

[PGAxis]

OK, well, if you don't mind going through the trouble of uninstalling, re-installing and getting your settings back, than I would be really happy if you could test it. Here it is

app-fdroid-release.zip

[vertigo220]

Turns out it did allow me to just update. Unexpected but definitely nice. I assume the mixed stream fallback is where it will keep the streams if it can't mux them? This needs a description. Off-topic, but would be nice if the current download directories were shown to allow verification without having to select them like you're going to change them. I'll update when I'm able to do some testing.

[vertigo220]

Ok, few other things.

1. The load metadata button should be above the choose format box (or better yet that box shouldn't even show yet, since it doesn't do anything until the metadata is loaded. Or it should just load the metadata automatically.
2. Still can't set default download type/format or resolution/bitrate.
3. Can't choose audio bitrate when doing video download.
4. That video shows as 8.33 GB for 1080p, which makes much more sense, so clearly the 3x size use want the issue. The fact it failed saying I was out of space when I had ~200 GB shows there's another issue. My guess is it downloads the streams to a temp location in internal storage then muxes to external (when the download location is set there). This makes sense for speed, as internal is faster and drive to drive is faster than muxing from and to the same drive, but in my case I don't have much internal so that would definitely be a problem. BTW, I know this relates to the other issue, but putting here as it relates to being able to see the size now.

[vertigo220]

Also, regarding selecting the download locations, I'm pretty sure the first one is for audio and the second for video, based in the icons, but I think it should make this more clear by actually saying audio/video. When I was first setting it up, I was a bit confused by it for a minute, and even now looking at it again it takes a bit to make sense of.