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).
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023
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About the “much higher CPU usage”: I’d recommend checking that hardware decoding is working correctly on your device, as that should ensure that even 4K content barely hits your CPU.
About the “less sharper image”: this depends on your downscaler, but a proper downscaler shouldn’t make higher-resolution content any more blurry than the lower-resolution version. I do believe integer scaling (eg. 4K -> 1080p) is a lot less dependant on having a proper downscaler, so consider bumping the resolution up even further if the video, your internet, and your client allow it.
I believe YouTube always re-encodes the video, so the video will contain (extra) compression artefacts even if you’re watching at the original resolution. However, I also believe YouTube’s exact compression parameters aren’t public, so I don’t believe anyone outside of YouTube itself knows for sure which videos are compressed in which ways.
What I do know is that different content also compresses in different ways, simply because the video can be easier/harder to compress. IIRC, shows like last week tonight (mostly static camera looking at a host) are way easier to compress than higher paced content, which (depending on previously mentioned unknown parameters) could have a large impact on the amount of artefacts. This makes it more difficult to compare different video’s uploaded at their different resolutions.
I agree that, theoretically speaking, YouTube might be protecting some end users from this type of attack. However, the main reason YouTube re-encodes video is to reduce (their) bandwidth usage. I think it’s very kind towards YouTube to view this as a free service to the general public, when it’s mostly a cost-cutting measure.