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yellowscreen

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 11, 2015
206
87
how come there's no 4k or 1440p 60fps option for me on youtube? do you guys have it?
 

fluamsler

macrumors member
Mar 5, 2016
96
32
near Basel, Switzerland
Same here. 1440p ist the highest available resolution on Safari. On Mozilla Firefox I can play Videos up to 2160p (4k), but the fan are reving up. Looks like a bug in Safari. Using a MacBook Pro Retina Mid-2015 on macOS Sierra 10.12.2
 

yellowscreen

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 11, 2015
206
87
Same here. 1440p ist the highest available resolution on Safari. On Mozilla Firefox I can play Videos up to 2160p (4k), but the fan are reving up. Looks like a bug in Safari. Using a MacBook Pro Retina Mid-2015 on macOS Sierra 10.12.2
Do you have the option to play 1440p at 60fps?
 

yellowscreen

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 11, 2015
206
87
A live stream like this
was able to play 1440p at 60fps. But a recorded vid like this
I was only able to play 1080p at 60fps. Strange thing...
it just shows 1080p 60fp for both of these for me. what could the problem be?
 

Mr Dobey

macrumors 6502
Aug 8, 2008
345
108
how come there's no 4k or 1440p 60fps option for me on youtube? do you guys have it?

any resolution/framerate above 1440p/30 in Safari is all but gone due to the browser's lack of VP9 codec support.

Considering VP9 is a free open source competitor to the recently adopted H.265 HEVC codec (which has royalties), I don't see Google jumping ship anytime soon.
 

Anonymous Freak

macrumors 603
Dec 12, 2002
5,561
1,252
Cascadia
any resolution/framerate above 1440p/30 in Safari is all but gone due to the browser's lack of VP9 codec support.

Considering VP9 is a free open source competitor to the recently adopted H.265 HEVC codec (which has royalties), I don't see Google jumping ship anytime soon.

Late reply, but almost certainly the answer.

To expand: Early 4K YouTube videos were encoded in AVC / H.264. Safari can play those. Later videos, YouTube only makes higher-than-1440p or 60fps available in their VP9 codec, not in AVC/H.264. Safari / QuickTime doesn't know how to deal with VP9. So for recent videos, if you're running Safari, you're limited to 1440p and 30 fps.

The same videos should play just fine in Chrome.

Note that one big problem is that as far as I know, there is no hardware decode support for VP9 in basically any CPU or GPU older than a couple years ago. So if you have an older system 4K 60 fps may not play smoothly in Chrome, even while an AVC 4k/60 video will play perfectly smooth. That's the annoying part to me - my (Windows) work laptop can play 4K/60 AVC videos perfectly fine; but YouTube 4k/60 VP9 videos are a slideshow. (It's the only system I have that can run my 4K display at 60 Hz. Both of my Macs are limited to 30 Hz. Ironic, since both Macs are capable of decoding it without losing frames. Although all are too old for VP9 hardware decode, the Macs are both quad-core, so can just barely handle it CPU-only; my work laptop is dual-core.)
 
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