I noticed a youtube change a while ago, like 8 months or so. Suddenly colors had become way more saturated. It's easy to see how youtube is more saturated than most other websites. They are doing something specific with their rendering. My assomption is that highly saturated colors are more addictive to look at and that's why they use it. Especially thumbnails are very eye catching.
You might not notice it if your screen is already highly saturated but on a "normal" one it's very visible.

    Liberator005 just what I said before, but noone believed really. The cause "has to be" to have things much more eye-cathing, to get one gazed on.

    Btw I can feel it on youtube too, just opened some video and in this case it is indeed much more visible as compared to other things, even to other HW, like gaming monitors, or to SW as well, ofc. The ominous effect with very sharp edges of objects and blowing bright colors like some pseudo HDR, making us to have focusing problems, which then over forces the eyes.

    What I still cannot believe however, is that this technique is just spreading widely, seemingly without any consequences.

    You can turn down the saturation of your screen on the video card settings or in the monitor menu if you find colours too rich.

      Sunspark This is a new change. I rewatched videos I have watched before without issue, and now they cause instant and severe BVD symptoms, my vision literally involuntarily crosses. Something YouTube did on their end is doing this, if we could find out what it was, it would be a clue as to the underlying cause of what triggers our condition.

      Unfortunately I am unable to find any sort of official detailed changelog that Youtube publishes that may tell us what changes they made. I guess on the plus side I will save $$ from cancelling y premium subscription since they have just ruined the service for me. Good old Google, living up to their reputation as the most customer unfriendly software shop to ever exist.

        ensete if we could find out what it was

        I wonder if a lossless capture card and VideoDiff could elucidate this? I think research like this is how we get out of this spoonful of shit.

        I wonder if compressing the video or converting it from MP4 to AVI for example would change the strain?

          ryans Well, it would be a software only change, since none of the hardware on my devices changed. It could be PWM, dithering, or something completely unknown.

          Unfortunately I so far have not found any way to use Youtube without using YouTubes player in a web browser. Even if you make your own website, the only way to play a Youtube video on it is to iframe in the entire player. Granted I haven't done a ton of research on it since most of the info for this is on Youtube itself and using Youtube is now a painful experience for me.

          After some more testing it seems they have changed the color gamut for videos. Colors are much deeper and richer than before. YouTube used the bt709 color profile and there is no way to change it. I don't know why they made this change for no reason, but they did

          I still am unable to find any official change log or even any way to contact Google and ask them about this. There doesn't seem to be a single way to contact Google for customer support

          • AGI likes this.

          I found some plug ins that do let you interact with the YouTube video player, here has what I have tried

          Using This plugin: https://improvedtube.com/

          • Switched between the H.264, VP8, VP9, and AV1 codecs
          • Limited FPS to 30 and 60fps
          • Disabled HDR and forced SDR
          • Forced all resolutions from 240 up to 4k
          • Disabled and enabled CPU rendering

          None of those settings made any difference.

          Using Youtube color adjust (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-color-adjust/dlhaiikpkghhgmfedkbiepccgnccdnbh)

          • Adjusted the Brightness down (I hit the Page Down key twice) seemed to have some impact. Not pain free, but a difference
          • tsb replied to this.

            ensete can you try to disable HW acceleration in your browser?

            While some assembly required, you could use a video player like MPC-HC or MPC-BE (both are forks off an ancestor) which will interoperate with yt-dlp to download/stream the videos in the player. Then you could select a renderer that can do gamut conversions, a few to choose from. I use these two players all the time with several renderers so feel free to ask questions if you like.

            Can you give me examples of videos using BT.2020? I checked two new ones and they are still BT.709 but that might be because I have my settings set to choose 1080p and h.264. I tried one with VP9 instead and it didn't change. Maybe you are picking a different resolution and codec like 4K AV1?

              Sunspark I am familiar with MPC offshoots but I don't know what yt-dlp is. Edit: just looked, downloading YouTube videos isn't really useful, it's the browsing and searching to find what I want and then watch it that is useful.

              All the videos I checked were using BT.709 color, no combination of codec or resolution seems to change that. I do not know if that is a new thing or not since I never thought to check before because it wasn't causing an issue.

              Also it seems literally impossible to submit a bug or issue to YouTube or Google about this. Great

              So some more info:

              I tried watching a Youtube video directly from VLC, and it did not seem to cause me any issues. Unfortunately it lags so often it is unwatchable, I am not sure if Youtube is throttling it or not

              I tried watching a Youtube video while wearing my eyepatch, and it did seem to help. I need to experiment more with this tommorow

              There is also the off chance that the video is not the problem but it is some change on the UI, so I am going to use Stylus to hide all of the UI elements except the video itself and see if that makes a difference.

              Is anyone else having symptoms from Youtube?

              • AGI replied to this.

                I am not. I did notice that Dark Reader extension flickers with it, but turning that off stops it.

                  Sunspark Interesting

                  I got VLC kinda working, and when watching the videos on VLC I do not seem to have symptoms. Which makes me thinks it may be some other part of the UI

                  I also started working on a desktop program that I can use to watch Youtube videos in VLC. I have it so I can set a button to a particular channel, get a list of the 10 most recent videos on that channel, make a button for each video, and clicking the button plays it in VLC locally. Just a proof of concept but I may blow it out some more.

                    ensete It would be an interesting experiment to compare screenshots of a certain frame of a video from youtube and from vlc, maybe it could give some ideas what goes on, whether the "effect" is retained by screenshots that is.

                    ensete While no solution for you because I know you don't use Win11 (me neither), for those who do use 11 and YouTube, one option to consider is actually to take advantage of the built in Android emulator and run Newpipe on Windows.

                    I can confirm that something really changed just recently, as soon as I open youtube, I'm getting slight nausea effect, wtf. Chrome: Version 113.0.5672.92 MacOS: Big Sur 11.7.2. Btw looks like i dont experience this problem with my working laptop which is on latest MacOS version. Weird! I'll try tomorrow to do some tests and versions.

                      It's more likely the browser than the website. There isn't a lot of value in them playing around with colour, etc. That's a lot of re-encoding for no real reason.

                      I use Firefox 102.11 ESR, try that. Also, try turning off hardware acceleration in Chrome to see if there is a difference.

                        madmozg Btw looks like i dont experience this problem with my working laptop which is on latest MacOS version

                        Google also runs massive A/B tests -- depending on how it's done, one session may be different than another.

                        I do notice they rounded corners on the video thumbnails but can't tell much visual difference otherwise.

                        If it's not the video, maybe it's the colors? Font? Layout / spacing? I can't think of anything else at that point.

                        I was just looking at YouTube again because I was testing out an audio dongle and noticed something.

                        The UI change they made is that in dark mode they have added a layered "glow" effect that takes the colour of the video being played in the playback window. As the video plays you can see the banding moving around the window.

                        That's probably what it is for you Ensete. I don't know that it's bad, but that's probably what it is. It's more noticeable on videos with bright solid colours.

                        To turn it off, start playing a video, click the gear icon, and move the slider for ambient mode to off.

                        I feel like the whole chrome browser started to give me some bad times.. Still trying to figure out. I don't have any problems with my working laptop with latest macos version tho, which is strange. I was thinking that apple maybe released drivers updates with new macos lately, to optimize problems with 8/10bit, but its just my feelings.

                        dev