I just got a M1 MBA a few days ago (yes I've posted a lot about M1 MBP, I actually returned it). When viewing Youtube videos on Safari, it keeps downgrading my quality automatically. If I start at 4K after a while it'll go to 1440p or starting at 1440p will cause it to go to 1080p. This happens most often when scrolling through comments. This never happens with Chrome. Now, I never updated the MBP to 11.1 before returning to compare. Anyone having this issue with Big Sur 11.1 with Safari?
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M1 MBA Safari Youtube Quality
- Thread starter lethal753
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I have watched quite a lot of 4k videos from YouTube in Safari in my MBA and haven't had this issue.
Are you sure YouTube for some reason changing the resolution thinking its something to do with your Internet?
Are you sure YouTube for some reason changing the resolution thinking its something to do with your Internet?
I was thinking that as from experience it only supposed to happen when your connection is bad. However, all website never slow down and on Chrome it stays at 4K all the time. I'm on 5G Wifi 6/802.11ax gigabit internet.
I am. It always downgrade to 480p. This is what stopped me from switching to safari actually recently.
Search brought me here... I keep having to change the quality back to what I want, despite my M1 Air being perfectly capable of hardware-decoding 4K, and being on an AT&T Fiber 1000 connection. Pretty awesome w/ all of the other Big Tech censorship and crap going on that YouTube is also being shady by changing the "Auto" resolution behavior behind the scenes w/o a way to set it back how we want (except for manually on each and every video).
My experience with Safari is about the same. It's drastically subpar compared to Firefox or Chrome. Safari consistently struggles to display complex websites in a smooth manner, is always scaling back video streaming quality and sometimes outright freezes on certain pages built on a particular forum software.
I've done all the cleanings and resets one can possibly do with no improvement.
Firefox has exactly none of these problems and runs easily three times faster for me. So long, Safari.
I've done all the cleanings and resets one can possibly do with no improvement.
Firefox has exactly none of these problems and runs easily three times faster for me. So long, Safari.
Safari did the same to me on the very first video I watched (new machine) and I just switched it back to the highest available resolution. It reverted and played normally and continues to be fine so far. It hasn't done it again since.
I can reproduce this. I can play a YouTube video in 4k as long as I actually watch it. As soon as I switch to another Safari tab, another App or scroll down so the video is not visible anymore, it will switch to 1080p. Appears to be some kind of energy saving feature.
Ive noticed this. Doesn't bother me but I have noticed it. It sometimes comes back, other times you have to increase it manually. I think its managing Ram and battery power.
You can use custom user-script to force targeted quality so that you don't have to choose it by yourself every time.
Install Userscripts extension if you don't have it yet, (tampermonkey for safari can also work), then create a new remote script, input this url: https://greasyfork.org/scripts/23661-youtube-hd/code/Youtube HD.user.js
go to line 31 and 32, change
Please be aware that Safari can only play Youtube Videos (without problems) up to 4K, so I recommend set it to
Install Userscripts extension if you don't have it yet, (tampermonkey for safari can also work), then create a new remote script, input this url: https://greasyfork.org/scripts/23661-youtube-hd/code/Youtube HD.user.js
go to line 31 and 32, change
"hd1080" to the quality you want. If the quality you specified is not available, the script will choose next best quality available.Please be aware that Safari can only play Youtube Videos (without problems) up to 4K, so I recommend set it to
"hd2160" like below:
JavaScript:
const changeResolution = true;
const targetRes = "hd2160";I have this YouTube issue on my base MBA and it is beginning to annoy the heck out of me.
The picture quality remains as it should when the video is actually on screen & visible......but as soon as I start scrolling down read the comments the picture quality goes down gradually...1 setting at a time....the more I read down the comments then more the quality goes down.....by the time I have read as much of the comments I want to, then go back to the video it will be on 360p or lower.
Is there any fix for this other than installing scripts?
The picture quality remains as it should when the video is actually on screen & visible......but as soon as I start scrolling down read the comments the picture quality goes down gradually...1 setting at a time....the more I read down the comments then more the quality goes down.....by the time I have read as much of the comments I want to, then go back to the video it will be on 360p or lower.
Is there any fix for this other than installing scripts?
YouTube in Safari has always done this on both my MacBook and Mac Pro. I’ve pretty much given up on Safari at this point and am making the switch to Firefox.
Thank you so much it worked!!! Did you write this your self? I've been having this issue ever since I got my M1 out of the box and was wondering why no one talked about it. I use it docked most of the time, so a video playing at 480p is not going to look good on a large monitor. Thanks again!!!
I'm attempting to do this, but I keep getting an error code "failed to download" every time I input that URL into the New Remote field. Any ideas on what I can be doing wrong or how I can get it to work? Thank!
Edit: Never-mind, successfully got this to work. Thank you!
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