How to know if YouTube videos are played at the highest quality

Sometimes YouTube is forced to reduce the resolution of your videos so as not to saturate the servers of Internet providers.

This, in addition to the difficulties of the providers themselves in offering good bandwidth to all users, can mean that YouTube videos are not always viewed at their maximum resolution.

So that this does not happen to you again, in this guide we explain you step by step how you can make sure youtube videos play at the highest quality on your Android.

Make sure you watch YouTube videos in the highest quality possible

Turn on YouTube advanced stats

The first step in ensuring the highest quality of YouTube videos is to enable advanced statistics, a series of data that expand the information we know about the video we're looking at.

This data is available to all users, but it is needed first activate the advanced statistics option to access.

Among the details these statistics offer are resolution, bandwidth or dropped frames, which help you to understand why you are not watching videos like you should.

enable advanced statistics, perform the following steps on your Android.

1. Apri l’ app YouTube.
2. Click your account profile photo in the top right corner.
3. Scroll down and click "Settings".
4. Log in to "General".
5. Go to the bottom of the page and slide the button "Enable advanced statistics" to the right to enable them in your account.

Here's how to turn on advanced stats on YouTube

Play a video and open stats for nerds

Once the advanced stats are activated, it's time to render them useful when watching a YouTube video.

As we have already said, by analyzing this data you will be able to see if your bandwidth is correct, how many frames are lost when playing the video e what is the resolution you're watching it with.

open stats for nerds while watching a video, follow these steps.

1. Open the video you want to see at the highest possible quality.
2. Click the button with three vertical dots in the upper right corner.
3. In the options menu, click on "Stats for nerds".

YouTube's advanced stats expand the technical information of a video

As you can see in the previous screenshots, when you turn on stats for nerds, will a list with a series of data on the left side of the video. The information is as follows:

• Device: the name of your device.
• CPN- Used by the developer to identify and correct problems.
• ID video- identity that Google assigns to a video.
• Format video: video playback codec, resolution and frame rate.
• Audio format: codecs for audio playback.
• Volume / Normalized: the first digit represents the volume of multimedia contents on the mobile. The second refers to the normalized adaptation of the app. Therefore, the volume is controlled during video playback.
• Bandwitdh: the bandwidth of the Internet connection.
• Readahead: How the app read the data so that it is available as soon as possible.
• view port - Playback area on the phone.
• Lost frames: Lost frames during video playback.
• Mysterious text - A code representing the current state during video playback.

Analyze this data to know at what resolution you are watching the video, if a lot of frames are dropped or if your bandwidth is low.

In case this is the case, the internet connection is not fast and the dropped frames are high, the fault will certainly be your provider or your connection.

If the data shown by the statistics for nerds is normal, it is possible that YouTube has restricted the resolution in all of its contents for some reason.

Manually change the video resolution

If the quality with which you are watching YouTube videos is not enough for you, you can always change it manually.

The process for change the video resolution and this:

1. Open the movie.
2. Click the button with three vertical dots in the upper right corner.
3. click on "Quality".
4. Select the resolution a you want to edit the video. In our case, as you can see in the screenshots, we have selected "720p50".

Change the quality of YouTube videos to the maximum available

If the limitation in the resolution is by the platform, as in the case of YouTube, it is possible that this change for the better in the resolution doesn't help at all.

On the other hand, if you do not see the desired option in the list of options under "Quality", it is possible that your device or bandwidth are not enough for this.

In short, with the advanced statistics you can know if the resolution is too low and, if so, change it manually later.

That way, you can make sure to always watch YouTube videos at the highest possible quality, including those from Conectando, our Android podcast in Spanish.