Extract High Quality vs Original quality audio from YouTube?

Question

The name of the program being used is 4K Video Downloader.

Question is, if for example, the Original Quality says it's 128k, is it really going to get any better if I try to extract it with High Quality, be it 256 or 320k?

Solution

After reading a lot on this, it seems that the reason why these downloaders offer such "higher quality" settings is because they are actually re-encoding the YouTube file to a higher bitrate (e.g. 320 Kbps) so to give you the impression that you will get a higher quality media file. But when you re-encode a file, quality can never get better than what it was on the original file (which was already encoded by YouTube BTW!), and because of the higher bitrate in those "high quality" settings, the file size will inevitably get bigger.

So, I think fair advice would be to stick with the "original quality" setting, hoping that the software will not re-encode the file anyway only for purposes of letting you choose a different format, which would still compromise the quality as well as being useless, because today all music players also read AAC (.m4a). YouTube downloaders though, for marketing reasons, will still show an MP3 option, because people still go with "hey, I want the MP3!", not understanding that this will cause a re-encoding and consequently a quality loss at any bitrate they choose.

That said, a better approach would be to try using open-source downloaders that do not obsess about "letting people see what they want to see" but will show exactly what the available original streams are and let you choose which one of them you want to download. Among those open-source apps, the most popular are youtube-dl (or youtube-dl-gui for a GUI version) and JDownloader.

Also, check Best method to extract highest quality mp3 from YouTube? -- Video Help Forum as reference.

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I know this is an answer and as such it should provide the most accurate response, but I have to stress that all the info I could find on this were very fragmented. So, please take it with a grain of salt and hopefully it can be good ground for someone else to build upon.

Comments

[ron]

youtube-dl-gui and click on the settings cog wheel top right - options - formats - audio quality = high. Get between 234 -275 kbps quality from downloaded.