I use a 1080p monitor and what I’ve noticed is that once creators start uploading 4k content the 1080p version that I watch on fullscreen has more artifacting than when they only uploaded in 1080p.
Did you notice that as well?
Watching in 1440p on a 1080p monitor results in a much better image, to the detriment of theoretically less sharper image and a lot higher CPU usage.
Youtube pushes the AV1 “format” heavily these days which is hard to decode using hardware acceleration, given that a lot of devices still out there do not support that.
Good point, though I believe you have to explicitly enable AV1 in Firefox for it to advertise AV1 support. YouTube on Firefox should fall back to VP9 by default (which is supported by a lot more accelerators), so not being able to decode AV1 shouldn’t be a problem for most Firefox-users (and by extension most lemmy users, I assume).
I am running mostly Firefox or Librewolf on Linux these days, but I do not remember having to enable it. Not all of my systems support accelerating AV1 in their hardware, but they do play at 1080p (but with framedrops once above 30fps on the unaccelerated computer). But yeah, I do hope YT keeps VP9 around because of the acceleration.