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.

                ensete Is anyone else having symptoms from Youtube?

                I just checked on my phone. I updated the app 4 days ago last time and I can't tell a difference. I have not yet used YouTube on my new TV so I'd not be able to judge but it's my first Android TV and it's unpleasant overall. I noticed that changing the colors from the standard setup to the night setup produced some relief. Earlier, the colors were ridiculously vivid to the point that sports images looked unreal. I'm not sure why people would be attracted by that crap.
                I conclude that I do have some issues with colors as well.

                Sunspark They aren't re-encoding the video. They are changing the saturation levels in the player. You can open a video in VLC and mess with all sorts of visual filters, none of those impact the underlying video file.

                The UI change they made is that in dark mode

                I do not use dark mode. That is the "ambient lighting" feature and you can turn it off (which I did), it is not the issue

                I got my desktop YouTube application built to a point I can use it, so I can watch YouTube in VLC, and I noticed while messing around with some of the VLC settings that lowering the saturation seems to help. This certainly feels like a color related trigger to me. I have made my app launch VLC at 80% saturation levels and I am going to try that over the next few days, and if I see improvement I will go down lower. The nice thing about using VLC is that I now have total control over how the video is displayed, and they have command line arguments for all their features so I can launch a video with my prferred settings.

                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

                There was a Youtube update May 3. Unfortunately despite my best efforts I cannot find any published, detailed change log to see exactly what was changed, and I have been completely unable to find any way to contact Google or Youtube and submit a question. They are absolutely the least customer focused/accessible technology company I have ever encountered, and I am kinda glad that AI is going to eat their lunch

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

                This is true although I have no idea why, since they have basically force fielded themselves against any customer contact, I have no idea how they would now the results of any test,

                I am also not completely ruling out the allergy theory. I am getting symptoms from other, non YouTube things that usually do not cause me any issues, and historically this is a time of year where my symptoms become even more sensitive. And, oddly enough, at least one thing, Windows 10, is actually MUCH BETTER than usual, I was able to use Win 10 for a few hours without patching with almost no symptoms whatsoever which has never, ever happened before.

                Allergies cause inflammation, especially in the sinuses, inflammation impacts nerve function, the likely nerve pathway of our condition goes through the sinus area (most of use have sinus issues and the sinus cavity is high enervated and all sorts of nerve passages go through there), allergies also cause inflation around the eyes and one of the primary nerves involved in our symptoms is the supraorbital branch of the trigeminal nerve, which pierces the muscles surrounding the right eye and could easily be impinged if that area is inflamed due to allergies.

                Time will tell if these symptoms start to subside on their own, we'll have to see.

                Well I can tell that as soon as I open youtube in latest chrome I can feel that something is wrong and in 5-10 mins I will start feel slight nausea. It's not happening with any other websites. I tried with dark/light themes, same problem. I tried youtube in Safari - all good there. Everything was fine with Brave browser with chromium version 112, then I updated to 113 and didn't test it yet.

                No issues here.. go into chrome://flags and pull up "Choose ANGLE graphics backend".

                I use D3D11, but you can test all the choices.

                Found one thing, one major source of the issue is thumbnails It s seems besides just adding rounded corners they must have made changes to how the images are displayed themselves. I installed a Chrome plug in that hides thumbnails in YouTube and saw an immediate 80% improvement. I also disabled thumbnails in NewPipe and now that app is nearly pain free for me.

                Well I can tell that as soon as I open youtube in latest chrome I can feel that something is wrong and in 5-10 mins I will start feel slight nausea. It's not happening with any other websites. I tried with dark/light themes, same problem. I tried youtube in Safari - all good there. Everything was fine with Brave browser with chromium version 112, then I updated to 113 and didn't test it yet.

                Google does run pointless A/B tests so you can get completely different experiences on different browsers or clients. Try disabling thumbnails and see if that helps. The extension I got was called "Hide Youtube Thumbnails"

                  ensete This reminds me of something somewhat similar @jen wrote about in her excellent Flicker Sense website:

                  Certain software immediately triggers nausea/spatial disorientation, including following a late April 2021 update to the web version of Microsoft Outlook used for my work email. Something “invisible” about the updated graphics immediately made me intensely nauseous with enhanced spatial disorientation each time I tried to look at it. I switched to only using the old desktop application which doesn't have this quality.

                  These website updates problems are really interesting, especially only some websites doing it. Jen also writes about non-tech triggering symptoms such as The painting Elysium by Bridget Riley...I wonder if there is something in these repetitive patterns (like windshield wipers even) that really messes us up.

                  dev