OK, I've got to chime in here. There's a lot of info about YouTube's video formats and qulity in these two Doom9 threads, mainly in the first link but some of the 2nd thread as well starting half-way down page 26: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=170682 http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=165839&page=26 tl;dr version: VP9/WebM is the best quality not quite at tl;dr version: - WebM, the container for VP9/Vorbis, is really just an MKV with fewer feature requirements - the according audio format for VP9 is supposed to be vorbis, not AAC - VP9 has the best quality on YouTube, particularly with motion resolution - for 720p 30fps, the second best quality behind VP9 is fmt22, a legacy non-dash h.264 format (meaning no 1080p nor 60fps) - beware of the video quality for fmt43 - it uses the older VP8, which is worse quality than even h.264. - for audio quality, the DASH vorbis audio for WebM is theoretically the best quality even though the bitrate is less than DASH AAC due to YouTube using ffmpeg for encoding (ffmpeg's AAC encoder isn't that great)
In this case, it does not need that much of data comparisons. WebM is WebM. When you downloaded it, it says that it is WebM format, not MKV. And it is limited to only 360p. From what I know, the best video quality you can download natively from YT is MP4 720p.
I'm the same "Nintendo Maniac 64" from the Doom9 link posted above. As I do from time to time, I was googling for the forum thread URL to see if I could find discussion and/or oppinions that are outside of videophile circles. Needless to say, I think this place counts. So, allow me to explain a few things. This is not true, WebM is a direct subset of MKV to the point that even MKVtoolix can create compliant WebM files: Because WebM, like matroska is just a container, it can contain different codecs. This mean that, like an MKV, one cannot tell just from the file extension whether it contains a higher quality codec (VP9 for example) or a worse quality codec (VP8 for example): That's is WebM without DASH, which uses the older and lower-quality VP8 codec as well. Your image of downloadable formats does not include the newer DASH formats. Here is a screenshot I posted back on Doom9 showing most of the formats available on a 1080p 60fps video:
Honestly this has become more complicated that what it should be... I was talking about downloading the video directly from YT's website, in which the file properties registered it as WebM. Yes, and...? I do admit that I'm not familiar with Matroska containers, and the fact that I'm an MP4 fanboy does not make it any better. But I am aware that YT does not provide downloads (actually they never provide any downloads whatsoever to begin with lol) to MKV format out of the box. That's what the OP asked, he was asking if there is quality difference between MP4 and MKV format when he downloaded YT videos with his downloader software. Then I said, as far as I can see, there's no way an MKV format is provided for downloading YT videos natively. So I suspected that the downloader software re-encoded the source material to MKV, degrading the quality even more. Yes, yes... the fancy world of DASH, 1440p, 60fps and all those stuff are unfortunately none of my interest and, from the looks of it, is also not necessary for this thread. I'm also having some hard times to find such materials.
If you took a look at my image, you would see that the DASH VP9 encodes exist for every single resolution with smaller filesize and higher quality than comparable AVC formats. Here is the image again: http://i4.minus.com/izF95htkdU5Iv.png Oh, and since I didn't mention it, here's another Firefox extension that also provides all the available formats. I don't like its GUI as much and it's currently not Pale Moon compatible, but it's updated more frequently: https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/youtube-video-and-audio-dow/ Fun fact: Because WebM is a subset of MKV, MPC-HC can support playing back WebM video with external audio files. This means that you can play back WebM video file with audioeven while they're still downloading. Alternatively you could try SVPtube, but some say it's buggy (it's meant for use with SVP, but SVP isn't required): http://svp-team.com/wiki/SVPtube My point is that, what JohnnyTrevor said about "VP9/WebM is the best quality" is not wrong - he is right on the mark. I linked to one already...but for the last two weeks something has been going weird with YouTube's VP9 encodings. Since Monday of last week, no new encodings have appeared, and in fact I just found out today that some older VP9 encodings have disappeared. For your convenience, here are a few videos that still have VP9 encodings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLxHjixnf3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q1fFGDSpG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I-nQtsJuhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEo1D2Y57_U (hide the kiddies, on-screen f-bomb at the end) Forgive my use of nothing but F-Zero GX videos, but they are a great source for stressing video encoders. EDIT: Looking around more, it seems like every single video uploaded in the last 30 days have had their VP9 encodes removed, no matter who it was uploaded by.
Yes and I wasn't challenging his statement. I was just saying that the information is a bit not relating to OP's question. And the screenshots have no MKV anywhere, so that also verifies my statement that said there is no way MKV format is provided out of the box for YT video downloading with the video is in native quality.
But WebM pretty much is MKV. I mean, if you download the raw WebM audio stream without putting it into a container, you can just rename the file extension to .MKA and it'll work perfectly in foobar2000 (a program that doesn't like it when the format and the extension doesn't match up - for example, an MP4 renamed to .MKA doesn't work in foobar2000, nor does a raw WebM audio stream renamed to .OGG work either). Well, for one thing, what do you mean by "native quality"? Do you mean the quality of the original video file that was uploaded by the video uploader? FYi, YouTube re-encodes everything, so... you know...
Well fair enough if it's the case, but my experience is different. These downloaders usually re-encode the videos just to put it in MKV format. Heck, they even re-encode 480p videos just to download them. Oh I know YT re-encode all of the videos uploaded to save their bandwidth and storage space (and of course, for the sake of the users themselves), thank you very much. What I meant, is to get the videos with the best quality as we possibly can without any more encoding stage. The videos had been encoded at least twice (by the user and by Google/YT), we don't need the third one. Some of these downloader software just loves to re-encode the videos and simply say "Hey download your videos in MKV it is the best quality!". It is not that simple.
Well I can confirm that the two Firefox extensions I mentioned don't do this. You can tell because they use the built-in download manager in Firefox which allows you to see and copy the direct video/audio stream URL, which normally should be located at "googlevideo.com". You can then open that URL separately in a media player or browser for playback or manual saving. YouTube actually accepts lossless formats, so if you're OCD and have time to burn, you can make it so that only one lossy encoding occurs - the one YouTube does.
OCD? Well most people won't go uploading videos in a lossless format, even if they live in South Korea. It is of course a good thing if the video is only encoded once. But in most cases, the file has passed through two encoding stages, three even if the recording software the user used also encoded the video file when recording, for example. Since none of us downloads our own videos (I mean come on, why would you do that anyway?) the next best thing we can do is to avoid any more unnecessary encoding on our own end, which is what I suggested. I do appreciate your suggestions above though, thank you.
