The YouTube app on Android lets you play videos in up to 4K resolution. All you need is a phone with a 4K display and a decent internet connection and you're good to go. However, it seems that Google has now opened up unsupported video resolution options on some devices, allowing some users to play 4K videos on a device with a low-resolution display.
According to a few recent posts on the YouTube subreddit, the YouTube app on Android now lets you play 4K videos even if you don't have a supported device. As seen in the screenshot below from Reddit user u/Liskowskyy, the app now displays all video resolution options up to 2160p60 regardless of your screen resolution.
While some believe this change is unintentional, a user in the comments on another Reddit thread, user u/sssxun, speculates that the change may not, in fact, be a bug. They claim that by enabling unsupported video resolution options on devices with lower-resolution displays, videos will have higher fidelity than when playing them at a supported resolution. We tested this on a device with a 1080p display, and videos appear to look much better than when played at 2160p60.
As another commenter points out, the sharp improvement in video quality is due to the fact that higher resolution videos have a higher bitrate and therefore fewer “blocky compression artifacts” on high-motion displays. Playing higher resolution videos on a lower resolution display also increases sharpness due to downscaling, making the video look better overall.
The unsupported video resolution options appear to be widely available across various versions of the YouTube app on Android . We checked a few devices and were able to find the additional resolution options on all of them, even though they were running different versions of the app. This leads us to believe that it may have been enabled via a server -side switch .
Information source: xda-developers.com
