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Description of the issue:
Viewing Youtube on my iPad with Brave, it almost always selects too high a video quality, almost always the video doesn’t play well and the browser window becomes unusable. I have to manually select 720p to get a reasonable viewing experience, and this can be quite difficult because the browser window is so slow to react. I have to do this almost every time I view a video.
If I use Chrome on the iPad, it normally selects a 720p video and works.
If I use my PC browser (Vivaldi) it normally selects 720p and works.
@andyd not quite sure is there is a way then. I had thought I remembered a toggle in YouTube settings but when I recently went looking, can’t find it. I think in general it tries to play the best it can based on how the video was uploaded, our device, and the browser. Usually the complaints have been the opposite of what you’re mentioning, which is people are seeing lower quality by default.
Let me tag in @Mattches in case he has any ideas. But I don’t think there’s anything other than that one setting that would control the default video quality for iOS.
I figured that would be the case.
This would make sense to me, given that Youtube actually dictates most of this and at this time (at least on mobile) there does not appear to be a way to disable the “Auto quality” selection for Youtube.
Basically what is happening is that the site is detecting the connection speed and setting the playback quality appropriately to match what your connection can handle. I imagine that like most people these days, you have a pretty solid internet connection so the site thinks you’ll likely want to see the highest quality picture available.
That said, I’m unclear as to why you’re not seeing the exact same behavior in Chrome as well. If you were to do this in Safari or Firefox or some other browser, do the quality settings work the way you’re expecting there as well?
Only Brave on my iPad insists on selecting the highest quality video that it can.
I just tried all the browsers that I currently have on my iPad and Laptop. All use the same Wifi connection. Brave selects 2160p, the rest select 720p, or 420p in a couple of cases.
All using the same video: (for some reason this video shows as unavailable in the forum)
iPad
Brave Auto 2160p60
Chrome Auto 720p
Safari Auto 480p
Firefox Auto 720p60
Laptop
Vivaldi Auto 720p60
Chrome Auto 720p60
Edge Auto 480p
I no longer seem to be having this problem as of today. Videos that previously played in higher quality now seem to be playing in 720p Auto.
The only thing that has changed recently is that I turned Block Fingerprinting off (Settings - Shields - Block Fingerprinting) because I was getting logged out of YouTube and found a report saying that Block Fingerprinting may have been causing the logout.
I tried turning Block Fingerprinting back on to see if I could reproduce the problem, but I couldn’t reproduce it. Videos still played in 720p Auto.
I’ll add another note if the problem comes back or I find a way to reproduce it.
Thank you for the update. We did push some fixes for iOS over the last four or five days — none of which were intended to resolve that specific issue but may have done so inadvertently.
I’ll leave this thread open for now — please let me know if this issue occurs again.
