2016-08-20 Summer Sonic Tokyo

[TheBang]

Originally Posted by TheBang

OK, I've researched this quite a bit, and I don't think it's possible. While 256 Kbps AAC streaming is available to YouTube Music subscribers with Premium, it is only available on the YouTube Music mobile app, where it is encrypted and they can control access to the platform. I haven't seen anyone's that's been able to access that stream. On the web client, the highest quality is limited to 128 Kbps AAC (or Opus, but Opus doesn't have the universal support that AAC does).

Just to close the loop on this, I did a trial of YouTube Premium, and looked into the 256 Kbps AAC streams. They are designated as format 141 by YouTube, and you can see if they're being streamed to you by enabling Stats for Nerds in the mobile app (or whatever YouTube client you're using). Using the YouTube Music app, I was able to determine that format 141 is only being served up for stuff that's licensed as Music to YouTube, i.e. through the major labels (like YouTube Topic channels for artists, if you know what that means).


For regular videos that are coming from www.youtube.com and mirrored in YouTube Music (music.youtube.com), they still only serve those in format 140 (128 Kbps AAC). Even videos that I know have previously been available in format 141 (like some that I downloaded back in late 2013 when there was a brief window when 141 was being served generally through the YouTube website), are still only available in 140, even through the YouTube Music app.