Whats the best way to make YOUTUBE sound good from windows PC??

[beerandmusic]

We all know you can play music through a player or a streamer to get optimal sound for your flac/wav/dsd files, but what about best way to play youtube?

 

probably very few lossless files on youtube (if at all?, is there a way to search just for hd, and do the hd all have lossless audio?)

no way to use a player like jriver to upsample?

Is there a way to stream it so you don't have to use noisy usb?

 

without building a high perfomance server with audio optimizing software, what is the best way to be able to play youtube from a windows pc?

 

 

[BigAlMc]

Hey Beer,

 

Long time!

 

Not sure about 'best way' or even if there is a best way.

 

I would think that many of the usual ways of getting audio from windows pc to your DAC apply. USB connection, etc.

 

Never tried from PC to be honest so sorry but can't answer directly. Will offer my own approach and a few thoughts in case it helps.

 

We have an Apple TV streamer that connects to the TV via HDMI and supports YouTube. I bought one of the following:

 

Neoteck Audio Extractor with HDMI Splitter 4K HDMI to Optical SPDIF Toslink Converter

http://www.neoteck.cn/index.php/2017/02/08/ntk006/

 

Cost £21 and takes HDMI in, outputs HDMI and Toslink optical out. I connect that Optical to my DAC and bingo! Picture on screen and music via my system. 

 

Sound quality is surprisingly decent on some of the YouTube content. That said you get dodgy ones and changes on volume for next video can be startling!

 

Anyway. Point is and may or may not be relevant. If you have a smart TV or you can connect your laptop to your TV via HDMI. It might be possible to output Toslink optical audio from the TV to your DAC or Hifi. Most TVs have optical out intended for a soundbar or surround sound.

 

Be great to hear some thoughts on your actual question around the best way. But these work as a starting place and sound decent.

 

Hope you don't mind the slightly OT reply.

 

Cheers,

Alan

[sandyk]

10 hours ago, beerandmusic said:

We all know you can play music through a player or a streamer to get optimal sound for your flac/wav/dsd files, but what about best way to play youtube?

 

probably very few lossless files on youtube (if at all?, is there a way to search just for hd, and do the hd all have lossless audio?)

no way to use a player like jriver to upsample?

Is there a way to stream it so you don't have to use noisy usb?

 

without building a high perfomance server with audio optimizing software, what is the best way to be able to play youtube from a windows pc?

 

 

 The best way is to Download only those that you really want to keep using freeware such as 4K Video downloader .

 If you also have suitable Video Software such as TMPGEnc Video Mastering Software you can usually Demultiplex the audio from the video with the .mkv version, and in most cases you will also find a 529kbps .aac Audio track.

 It is also possible to also download the .mp4 version as well, and Multiplex the newly discovered audio with the video of the .mp4 and create even a much larger file size version as a BluRay format file with this audio instead of the normal <128 kbps that we hear.

 Even converting the lowly <128kbps YouTube Audio to LPCM results in a better sounding file, but nowhere near as good as the 529kbps version.

[beerandmusic]

2 hours ago, sandyk said:

 The best way is to Download only those that you really want to keep using freeware such as 4K Video downloader .

 If you also have suitable Video Software such as TMPGEnc Video Mastering Software you can usually Demultiplex the audio from the video with the .mkv version, and in most cases you will also find a 529kbps .aac Audio track.

 It is also possible to also download the .mp4 version as well, and Multiplex the newly discovered audio with the video of the .mp4 and create even a much larger file size version as a BluRay format file with this audio instead of the normal <128 kbps that we hear.

 Even converting the lowly <128kbps YouTube Audio to LPCM results in a better sounding file, but nowhere near as good as the 529kbps version.

 

i meant i wanted to be able to play from youtube.com and just everything...i found out that Jriver has a wdmdriver where you can just select that as your driver and everything will be routed through jriver as your default speaker, that way you can upsample even youtube while you are watching it from youtube.com...i haven't tried it yet as i had a hard drive failure and busy doing restores...will try it tomorrow...anyway if i am reading correctly, i can upsample youtube.com to dsd rates

 

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/WDM_Driver

 

 

[beerandmusic]

5 hours ago, BigAlMc said:

Hey Beer,

 

Long time!

 

Not sure about 'best way' or even if there is a best way.

 

I would think that many of the usual ways of getting audio from windows pc to your DAC apply. USB connection, etc.

 

Never tried from PC to be honest so sorry but can't answer directly. Will offer my own approach and a few thoughts in case it helps.

 

We have an Apple TV streamer that connects to the TV via HDMI and supports YouTube. I bought one of the following:

 

Neoteck Audio Extractor with HDMI Splitter 4K HDMI to Optical SPDIF Toslink Converter

http://www.neoteck.cn/index.php/2017/02/08/ntk006/

 

Cost £21 and takes HDMI in, outputs HDMI and Toslink optical out. I connect that Optical to my DAC and bingo! Picture on screen and music via my system. 

 

Sound quality is surprisingly decent on some of the YouTube content. That said you get dodgy ones and changes on volume for next video can be startling!

 

Anyway. Point is and may or may not be relevant. If you have a smart TV or you can connect your laptop to your TV via HDMI. It might be possible to output Toslink optical audio from the TV to your DAC or Hifi. Most TVs have optical out intended for a soundbar or surround sound.

 

Be great to hear some thoughts on your actual question around the best way. But these work as a starting place and sound decent.

 

Hope you don't mind the slightly OT reply.

 

Cheers,

Alan

thanks for the welcome...i will try to digest what you wrote here later, thanks for your input...i currently don't have a usb dac, just streaming dsd to my marantz.  Someone on jriver website said they have a wdmdriver that may work...i have had several usb dacs but found i preferred optical or dlna sounding better, but that may have been because i didnt have any usb toys and i was waiting on a dac with good isolation without a "toy" in my budget, and just sold off all my usb dacs....i am in the market for a usb dac again, now that it seems you can get more for your money these days. 

 

[sandyk]

5 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

 

i meant i wanted to be able to play from youtube.com and just everything...i found out that Jriver has a wdmdriver where you can just select that as your driver and everything will be routed through jriver as your default speaker, that way you can upsample even youtube while you are watching it from youtube.com...i haven't tried it yet as i had a hard drive failure and busy doing restores...will try it tomorrow...anyway if i am reading correctly, i can upsample youtube.com to dsd rates

 

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/WDM_Driver

 

 

 G.I.=G.O.

 

You can't do too much to improve a lossy format such as <128kbps .aac audio just by upsampling  .

You may be able to get higher quality audio from YouTube by a paid subscription

[beerandmusic]

I am unsure, even if i buy a usb dac which dacs support hardware upsampling so i can try upsampling from youtube.com.

i think the chords, psaudio, and schiit upsample everything that is input to it?

 

I would like the option to either upsample everything OR play dsd direct.

[sandyk]

1 hour ago, beerandmusic said:

i meant i wanted to be able to play from youtube.com and just everything...i found out that Jriver has a wdmdriver where you can just select that as your driver and everything will be routed through jriver as your default speaker, that way you can upsample even youtube while you are watching it from youtube.com...i haven't tried it yet as i had a hard drive failure and busy doing restores...will try it tomorrow...anyway if i am reading correctly, i can upsample youtube.com to dsd rates

B&M

 A brand new video, selected randomly.

 You choose, upsampled or any way you like .

 

OR

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hi29pptboo2f6l2/Ellie Goulding - Power.mp4?dl=0

[BigAlMc]

I personally wouldn't get too distracted by upsampling as often you're dealing with a low quality lossy soundtrack and as @sandyk said it won't miraculously cure that.

 

I'd prioritize two things.

 

A. Being able to select the best soundtrack on each video.

 

B. Useability. By that I mean you don't need to faff around on each video to set the right settings. And your solution sees your Marantz and will play to it.

 

I'm assuming here you want to listen to the video's you're watching as opposed to rip the audio to your library.

 

Don't know JRiver so can't comment there. But sounds like your ideal solution is a media player that supports selectng the higher bitrate audio and playing it to the Marantz while showing the video on the PC monitor/screen. If JRiver doesn't pan out I'd explore the different media players as one of them might support this.

 

PS saw a thread on Roon forum asking them to support YouTube but no idea if they'll ever do it or not. Don't think you were a Roon user but just as background.

[beerandmusic]

6 hours ago, BigAlMc said:

 

I'm assuming here you want to listen to the video's you're watching as opposed to rip the audio to your library.

 

 

 

I enjoy watching videos and just wish there was something you could do to improve the audio on them.  If i like a song enough, i will almost always download as flac if i can find it, but i still enjoy watching the videos....many times, it "pulls me in" more than audio only.

 

I am thinking a "FPGA" type dac may be able to make even lossy audio sound better? 

 

[beerandmusic]

10 hours ago, sandyk said:

 A brand new video, selected randomly.

 You choose, upsampled or any way you like .

 

OR

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hi29pptboo2f6l2/Ellie Goulding - Power.mp4?dl=0

 

many times i will download videos if i like them, but if i am just "surfing", would just like a way to possibly make them sound better...thinking an fpga dac may help...something that upsamples everything, not just what a music player sends it....

 

 

[sandyk]

39 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

 

many times i will download videos if i like them, but if i am just "surfing", would just like a way to possibly make them sound better...thinking an fpga dac may help...something that upsamples everything, not just what a music player sends it....

 

Let's see if this works  The hidden Audio

 Upsampling 127kbps .aac audio won't help much. This one is 529kbps .aac 

PSY - GANGNAM STYLE(강남스타일) M V-0x0002.aac

[semente]

46 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

many times i will download videos if i like them, but if i am just "surfing", would just like a way to possibly make them sound better...thinking an fpga dac may help...something that upsamples everything, not just what a music player sends it....

 

Most DACs will upsample their inputs.

[BigAlMc]

Hi Beer,

 

I see this as there are three challenges here:

 

1. Selecting the hidden better quality soundtrack that Alec mentioned - the 529kbps one rather than the default 128kbps.
2. Sending that signal to your hifi system to play it.
3. Optimising the signal by upsampling or even decrapifying it to make the most of it.

I focused on 2 and bought a gizmo to split the audio out from the HDMI signal and send optical to my DAC. I was always aware that a £21 HDMI splitter might be generating a crap audio signal. In this hobby how could I not be aware. I power that 21 quid cheapo gizmo with an LPS-1 because I had one to hand. Again the irony of £300 PSU for £21 gadget was not lost on me!!

 

You on the other hand seem focused on 3. You understandably want to make the MOST out of that signal and basically rescue it to make it sound as good as you can.

 

This thread has got me thinking we're both wrong. We should be focused on 1. Software that lets you select the better soundtrack is surely the first priority. Once you have that better soundtrack then you need to worry about 2 (how to get it to your system). And only after solving both of those does it make sense to worry about 3 and trying to upsample/rescue that signal.

 

I chose convenience over sound quality. But the sound quality really wasn't that bad which is partly why I settled.

 

It might help if you explain your setup. Do you have a TV in the same room as the Marantz? If so then a dedicated player that supports YouTube might be quick win for getting YouTube more directly to your Hifi. e.g. an Amazon Fire, Apple TV etc. These are pretty affordable and come with the benefit they might increase your TV streaming options.

 

Or alternatively is the PC integral to what you are trying to do here. In which case it's probably a software solution that you need.

 

Sorry for rambling but I'm genuinely intrigued by your thread and am gonna play around with my own set up.

 

Cheers,

Alan

 

[sandyk]

BigAlMc                  A very recent S/W update (yesterday)  to 4K Video Downloader to accommodate very recent YouTube format changes ,now has even the .mp4 version  showing the hidden 529kbps track when Demultiplexed, which reduces the amount of processing needed, but still can't be used without re encoding the .mp4 video with the new audio instead. However you still need Video conversion S/W to do this. 

 As shown in my previous post , if you use suitable Video S/W you can separately save the new Audio track without processing it, instead of using an .mp3 audio version that some download S/W give as an option.

 

What we are coming up against here, is that Vevo and YouTube obviously do not want people to do this, and keep changing the format of their video, so no solution is likely to be permanent, so in the meantime save as many of your favourite videos with the improved audio as you can . 

  P..S

 Try using the Freeware 4K Video Downloader and select the .mkv version to save. It is possible that your current player MAY be able to directly play .mkv files

[beerandmusic]

On 5/30/2020 at 3:24 PM, sandyk said:

BigAlMc                  A very recent S/W update (yesterday)  to 4K Video Downloader to accommodate very recent YouTube format changes ,now has even the .mp4 version  showing the hidden 529kbps track when Demultiplexed, which reduces the amount of processing needed, but still can't be used without re encoding the .mp4 video with the new audio instead. However you still need Video conversion S/W to do this. 

 As shown in my previous post , if you use suitable Video S/W you can separately save the new Audio track without processing it, instead of using an .mp3 audio version that some download S/W give as an option.

 

What we are coming up against here, is that Vevo and YouTube obviously do not want people to do this, and keep changing the format of their video, so no solution is likely to be permanent, so in the meantime save as many of your favourite videos with the improved audio as you can . 

  P..S

 Try using the Freeware 4K Video Downloader and select the .mkv version to save. It is possible that your current player MAY be able to directly play .mkv files

 

thanks for this....i am downloading the Freeware 4K Video Downloader now to try.

 

[beerandmusic]

On 5/30/2020 at 5:52 AM, sandyk said:

Let's see if this works  The hidden Audio

 Upsampling 127kbps .aac audio won't help much. This one is 529kbps .aac 

PSY - GANGNAM STYLE(강남스타일) M V-0x0002.aac 3.92 MB · 7 downloads

but that is audio only...can you download the video so that it has 529k audio?

[beerandmusic]

On 5/30/2020 at 8:58 AM, BigAlMc said:

Hi Beer,

 

I see this as there are three challenges here:

 

1. Selecting the hidden better quality soundtrack that Alec mentioned - the 529kbps one rather than the default 128kbps.
2. Sending that signal to your hifi system to play it.
3. Optimising the signal by upsampling or even decrapifying it to make the most of it.

I focused on 2 and bought a gizmo to split the audio out from the HDMI signal and send optical to my DAC. I was always aware that a £21 HDMI splitter might be generating a crap audio signal. In this hobby how could I not be aware. I power that 21 quid cheapo gizmo with an LPS-1 because I had one to hand. Again the irony of £300 PSU for £21 gadget was not lost on me!!

 

You on the other hand seem focused on 3. You understandably want to make the MOST out of that signal and basically rescue it to make it sound as good as you can.

 

This thread has got me thinking we're both wrong. We should be focused on 1. Software that lets you select the better soundtrack is surely the first priority. Once you have that better soundtrack then you need to worry about 2 (how to get it to your system). And only after solving both of those does it make sense to worry about 3 and trying to upsample/rescue that signal.

 

I chose convenience over sound quality. But the sound quality really wasn't that bad which is partly why I settled.

 

It might help if you explain your setup. Do you have a TV in the same room as the Marantz? If so then a dedicated player that supports YouTube might be quick win for getting YouTube more directly to your Hifi. e.g. an Amazon Fire, Apple TV etc. These are pretty affordable and come with the benefit they might increase your TV streaming options.

 

Or alternatively is the PC integral to what you are trying to do here. In which case it's probably a software solution that you need.

 

Sorry for rambling but I'm genuinely intrigued by your thread and am gonna play around with my own set up.

 

Cheers,

Alan

 

 

Recently moved and setting up my mancave...yea i have several firetv's (real alexa nut here) and yes have tv still in the box (smile) ..i have been really slow with my mancave since moving here....(not that we needed another tv, already have one in bedroom, living room, outside patio,and family room...so why not a 4th for my mancave...they are so cheap these days....been in the box for going on a week now (grin). 

 

What i am really looking for though is for listening from my windows pc since i pretty much live on it....

 

I like the idea of downloading the videos i like with the program sandy recommended...will check it out....but i am just trying to best optimize sound from my every day computer.  It does have spdif and since i use it a lot the usb is probably noisy as sin....i can always use my jriver player and go over ethernet, but like i said i just want to just have the best optimized sound (without need of jriver) for everyday browsing and watching youtube or whatever else i do on the pc.

[sandyk]

15 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

but that is audio only...can you download the video so that it has 529k audio?

 That should have been all that you needed to compare with the video as I would have needed to upload the saved file to Dropbox.  I opted to give you a quick answer in this case.

Let me know how you get on with 4K Video Downloader when you select the .mkv version. The audio should sound better than the usual mp4 version, although you may need to find a suitable freeware player.

[beerandmusic]

3 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 That should have been all that you needed to compare with the video as I would have needed to upload the saved file to Dropbox.  I opted to give you a quick answer in this case.

Let me know how you get on with 4K Video Downloader when you select the .mkv version. The audio should sound better than the usual mp4 version, although you may need to find a suitable freeware player.

i downloaded it now and just saved as mkv thanks!

[sandyk]

1 minute ago, beerandmusic said:

i downloaded it now and just saved as mkv thanks!

 Don't forget that you can also DL complete playlists

[beerandmusic]

jriver played it fine and both the video and audio sound much better...super thanks!

 

now i will spend the night downloading videos (smile).....

 

this wasn't exactly what i was looking for, but in a way better...now i can build a video library (smile)

[beerandmusic]

1 minute ago, sandyk said:

 Don't forget that you can also DL complete playlists

yea, i saw that....and even set it to subscribe to a channel so you get downloads automatically...i don't think i will do that though..i like random selections and don't want to build up the library too big, but maybe 500 will be a nice start.

[beerandmusic]

yea this dlna stuff is going to have to go...its great for listening to stereo (I have been saying dsd sounds best over enet for nearly 8 years now), but i want something more "functional"...willing to give up a little in audio to have more functionality.  I picked up a schiit usb dac to hold me off, but will likely try the gustard a18 when released, and ultimately would like to get a qutest....oh yea..i just remembered, jriver told me they have a wdmdriver which will allow me to redirect everything from my pc over ethernet...so i will try that too before i spend a lot more.

[sandyk]

16 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

yea, i saw that....and even set it to subscribe to a channel so you get downloads automatically...i don't think i will do that though..i like random selections and don't want to build up the library too big, but maybe 500 will be a nice start.

 Good news.  The price was affordable too.