YouTube uses lower quality options on browsers running on Arm-based systems β€” misreporting as an x86 CPU appears to be a widespread browser fix

https://lemmy.nz/post/4381230

YouTube uses lower quality options on browsers running on Arm-based systems β€” misreporting as an x86 CPU appears to be a widespread browser fix - Lemmy NZ

this prolly wasnt a bad decision early on... why pushing something to a population who cant utilize it... but shit changes fast, google.
The weirder thing is Firefox on ARM being detected as a HiSense TV. I did a cursory search to see if HiSense ever used Firefox OS on the TV and it doesn’t seem like it. Panasonic seemed to be the only manufacturer using it.
Hector Martin (@[email protected])

Attached: 3 images Today I learned that YouTube is deliberately crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux. It will give you lowered video resolutions. If you just replace "aarch64" with "x86_64" in the UA, suddenly you get 4K and everything. They literally have a test for "is ARM", and if so, they consider your system has garbage performance and cripple the available formats/codecs. I checked the code. Logic: Quality 1080 by default. If your machine has 2 or fewer cores, quality 480. If anything ARM, quality 240. Yes, Google thinks all ARM machines are 5 times worse than Intel machines, even if you have 20 cores or something. Why does this not affect Chromium? **Because chromium on aarch64 pretends to be x86_64** `Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36` πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈβ€‹πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈβ€‹πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈβ€‹πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈβ€‹πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈβ€‹ Welp, guess I'm shipping a user agent override for Firefox on Fedora to pretend to be x86. **EDIT**: The plot thickens. Pretending to be ChromeOS aarch64 *still gets 4K*. Specifically: `Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS aarch64 10452.96.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.181 Safari/537.36` still works. **EDIT 2**: OK, so the plot *really* thickens now. Chrome is not affected even if it claims to be aarch64. Turns out there is another codepath: apparently YouTube thinks aarch64 Firefox is... a HiSense TV?!?!?!?! Specifically, model 65a67gevs...????? This is *server-side* sniffing now and it's *specifically* looking for Firefox aarch64 (or at least "Gecko and not Chrome/CrOS/something else known to pretend to be Gecko"). And it's the "TV" platform that is triggering the resolution crippling.

Treehouse Mastodon
Could be that the developers for the HiSense TV just copy-pasted whatever UA into their browser and called it a day.