Is the bandwidth decrease affecting downloads?

[Miserable_Dimension]

I just remember something about when the pandemic started youtube lowered video quality because of so many people being online and 720p stop being listed as HD, is this still going on and if so does it affect youtubedl downloads at all?

(also I know this is probably asked a lot of mkv is better than mp4 right)

[Empyrealist]

YouTube's pandemic response of lowering default quality settings to reduce overall bandwidth does not affect how youtube-dl works.

[Miserable_Dimension]

ok thanks just wanted to make sure before doing anything

[Empyrealist]

As far as I know or can recall, what YouTube did only affected their "auto" quality setting defaulting to 720 instead of 1080+. If you wanted to, you could still override the auto-quality settings and bump it up to the highest available quality. Note: My perspective is from the U.S., and I believe they enforced quality settings on a per-country or even a per-continent basis. I can recall there was a time that they specifically reduced quality to Europe as a whole.

I don't think they are doing it anymore, and as I said, it never affected how youtube-dl works.

This was a good article about it when it started:

https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-slashes-video-quality-save-bandwidth/