I’d like to watch YouTube videos in 4K when they’re available. However the YouTube add-on appears to have an upper limit of “1080p Live/720p” in the settings. 720p looks bloody awful on a 75" 4K TV. It even looks like it’s low bitrate 720p.
Is 4K YouTube possible on the Vero 4K+? If so, how is everyone doing it?
I don’t think you’ll get it working with 4k but doesn’t hurt to try
Last I heard, the inputstream.adaptive add-on was not capable of accessing VP9 streams (which would be needed for 4K YouTube) - and that’s outside the control of the OSMC guys. You could try bugging the authors of the add-on, maybe.
It’s something we can look in to when we get more time.
I’ll give this a shot. Even if it doesn’t give 4K, running the Min.Bandwidth way up should help with the quality of the lower resolutions.
Thanks!
Hey Sam! I figured this was a limitation of some kind of copy protection imposed by Google. Take all the time you need. I know you’ve got a lot on your plate!
Eric
OK quick update. Changed the Min.Bitrate to 10,000,000 Bit/s (same as 10Mbit/s) and altered Max resolution as directed. Left everything else alone. Immediately got 1080p streams! Yay! So that worked. Quality is vastly improved as well. Less block noise and banding.
Next I upped the Min.Bitrate to 20,000,000 (same as 20Mbit/s) just to see if it would choke or stutter (I have 1Gbit/s Internet so 20Mbit/s shouldn’t stutter due to that being a bottleneck). Works good so far. Can’t say the quality is noticeably better than 10Mbit/s but I haven’t watched that many videos yet. Could be the limiting factor is the source material, I dunno.
Sam, as you can see above I got 1080p streams working. I know the YouTube add-on isn’t your product. However, is there a way to have OSMC automatically set InputStream Adaptive to max resolution and/or higher bitrates? I guess the ideal thing would be to ship OSMC with the YouTube add-on already installed and configured but you may not be able to do that due to license restrictions.
Can you confirm that the video you are trying to play is in fact available in 4k ? You should be able to on pc but I think you only get the option in the player if a 4k screen is detected
The problem is also that the YouTube addon itself doesn’t mention 4k anywhere just 720/1080p
Well the particular video I tested it with was the new Avengers Endgame trailer, which I oddly can’t seem to find in 4K just yet. Still looking. However I can confirm the trailer is 1080p as shown in the YouTube add-on video info. Prior to modifying the YouTube add-on settings, was being displayed in horrifically blocky 720p. My Samsung Q8 TV shows the display resolution is 4K but that’s either the Vero 4K+ or my Marantz AVR upscaling it I’m sure.
I’ll try some of the test 4K videos on YouTube in a bit. Kids are watching Christmas movies right now and aren’t in the mood for me to be fiddling with stuff LOL.
The issue is actually caused by the fact that 4K content on YouTube is encoded in VP9.
Vero 4K + supports this; but other devices don’t. The inputstream add-on currently doesn’t request VP9 streams.
You can let the maintainer’s know here that you’re interested in 4K support: Kodi Community Forum. I’ll look in to this when I get a chance.
Sam
I actually got 4K streams working by selecting “Ignore Display Resolution” in the InputStream Adaptive settings.
I now get VP9 streams, no VP9.2 (HDR) though.
This is on a Vero 4K.
After some juggling of settings, I’m seeing the same - 4K, but not 4K HDR.
The “Settings” section within the YouTube add-on strongly implies that HDR stuff should be available. Anyone found a way to enable it?
Sweet! Thanks, man! 
No HDR here but UHD is a first step.
Can anyone please summarize what I need to do to get 4k on YouTube?
Ok. To answer my own question, I set everything back to default, then I only did the ff:
For some reason these settings don’t work on my end.
I’ll keep experimenting some.
Weird. Please let me know what settings you did when you’re successful
@eagerbeaver and @Numiah, here are my settings. 4K works, but HDR doesn’t - As I understand it, that’s a problem which is not specific to YouTube, it’s an issue with VP9 playback generally. Sam said once that he would take a look at this after the v4.9 kernel was up and running. (But that was quite a long time ago).
