| Ah that makes sense - the first video was only uploaded 3 weeks ago. It's known that, on youtube, formats become available in increasing resolution after upload as they finish encoding. Your experience now shows that the higher-res streams are encoded in a rush at first and later replaced with better compressed versions. . I've never seen such a long format list in youtube-dl before. Are 6xx new? Apparently,[1] they were introduced together with that 'premium 1080p' this April. Comparing older 4k videos to your video: this one[2] now has 6xx, and 4xx are gone, and curiously the reported bitrates of all streams have since changed (reencoded?). 137 stayed about the same this time, but 18 dropped from 730k to 493k. For this video[3] 4xx are still available. . 616 is not the actual premium 1080p as the posters at [4] think, is it? Currently youtube.com chooses 248 when playing [2], but yt-dlp can list and download 614 and 616 without any account cookies. Rather, 6xx seem to comprise (of) vp9 spanning a medium, high, and sometimes low bitrate in all resolutions. Is yt considering replacing the older formats with these? I just hope the original 18 and 22 remain for older videos, where any difference in quality also matters the most. When still available, in most cases the H.264 streams with creation_time prior to ~2013 are dramatically clearer than any more recent formats. [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q=605+604+603+sort%3... [2] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/1863#issue-106877303... [3] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/389#issuecomment-103... [4] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/6770 lets not discuss how often the h264 streams for new videos are higher quality than the vp9 |