It's a cat & mouse game with YouTube & browsers because they & most streamers don't want you to download anything except through a premium or pay service. So we're constantly switching browsers, extensions (add-ons), & tricks to work around the game. Whatever works today may not work tomorrow.
The ones I mention above seem to work best for me with Waterfox. I probably use the 4K Video Downloader the most when I can get a link to the actual video rather than just a link of the page where the video is located. I'm also using an old version of Downloadhelper to avoid their watermarks & other marking nonsense.
If all else fails, you can use a screen recorder program & just record the screen while the video is playing in full screen. I use free OBS Studio. You better have a robust dual core or better machine or recording screens in full screen & motion will drop a lot of frames & bog down the system.
360-480p doesn't look bad if it's good quality. I see a lot of crappy 720p that looks worse than quality 360p. I've also seen quality 480p look better than some 1080p. A lot of people & services streaming or posting 720-1080p deliberately dull the video, & compress the crap out of it so the actual quality & detail it resolves can be achieved with just 360-480p.
Big numbers sell so they put out 720-1080p. But to save on space, load times, & bandwidth, the image has been dulled (sometimes darkened too), & compressed so it's worse than quality 480p.
When you figure many line scalers built into decent TVs, or graphics hardware, don't just double the existing pixels to fit small video the screen, they actually add pixels that are the average of the pixel before & after it. So a good 480p video can really look like 720p, if everything else in the system is good quality too.
Maybe for July, I'll make another star video in high quality 480p only rather than just quality 720p, to show there's very little difference if it's done right. The 720p video there that is shrunk to 480 or 360p is done by google automation, & it's sucks. So if you look at 720p in 480p mode on YouTube, it is not good quality 480p.
Not only that, but to save on bandwidth & upload times on my slow DSL connection, I've already custom compressed my videos as far as it can go without losing too much quality. But google re-compresses what I already compressed to the limit, so they really muck up the video a lot.
Topic: Pluto, space, & beyond. (Read 46576 times)
