Overall, Opus is a new audio codec, and it will become a new standard for audio on the web. If you want to fine tune the bandwidth parameters, ffcvt can help. So test out those Sound Examples yourself and see how different you can tell from each of them, and find your comfortable level. Of course your experience will be different. I know your are worrying about the lossy-transcode comparing to AAC because of the potentially reducing quality, however, let me tell you, most people won't notice any differences, including some sound experts. If you are interested, check this out for some comprehensive info on Opus, which includes links to Sound Examples you can test out yourself. Not to commenting on the youtube-dl but trying to answer your Opus audio related questions.Īs ffcvt suggested, ' the Opus audio codec is becoming the best thing ever for compressing audio - A 64K Opu audio stream is comparable to mp3 files of 128K to 256K bandwidth'. So, my question is: Do you think I should download the AAC track instead of the Opus track, or should I just let youtube-dl does its stuff? What benefit will I get downloading the Opus track compared to downloading the AAC track? (FI, I have no problem playing the remuxed video+audio using MPC-HC + K-Lite Mega Codecs, and I also have no problem extracting the audio using ffmpeg -c:a copy and playing it using Foobar2000) Which means the Opus audio track will be a lossy-transcode from AAC, potentially reducing quality. However, I also know that Opus audio is not supported by the MP4 container, and since uploads to YouTube does not (yet) support MKV, the original upload would be using AAC. I know that, encoded from source, Opus tracks usually have better quality than AAC tracks at the same bitrate. I noted that left to its defaults, youtube-dl will use bestvideo+bestaudio, and with recent videos, for bestaudio it will nearly invariably download the Opus track. I have been using youtube-dl to download some music videos from YouTube. No, this is not a duplicate of this question.

Sampling audio from youtube