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points by amiga386 2 days ago | 0 comments
It used to be but not now. Your browser is served little slices of the video and audio, and the player adapts in realtime, giving you lower or higher bitrate, depending on your network congestion.

yt-dlp, as far as I know, always asks for the same consistent quality/bitrate of your choosing (and saves them to disk and joins the segments and muxes the video and audio into one stream)

[–] asdff 2 days ago
Bitrate is irrelevant. It’s a download either way. Serving little slices is downloading.
[–] amiga386 2 days ago
My point it that it's not the same slices firstly, and secondly the muxing of the slices and streams is an extra operation that the browser cannot do.