Force low-quality Youtube?

[Bonez]

Hi folks-

So I'm one of the 'heavy users' on Cox and am about to get overage fees (because my household uses more than 1TB/month at home thanks to the kids...). (read here if you're not familiar with their policy changes) - So much for the benefit of a 32x8 modem and a nice merlin-powered RT-AC87U)

Thanks to the wonderful 'Traffic Analyzer - Statistic' feature, it's clear that youtube and netflix are the culprits (but mostly youtube). So while I've been able to login to my Netflix account and downgrade stream quality on a per-account basis for the kids, I can't find anything similar to do for Youtube. All clients in this case are iPhone 7 -- and the youtube iOS app doesn't have a feature to sticky-select low quality.. only on a per-video basis (which obviously the kids won't do consistently).

Has anyone found a way to QoS/bandwidth limit/something youtube streams coming through the router to get it to auto-select low-quality client-side? I'm still toying with 'Bandwidth Limiter' (sfq) on a per-client basis but so far, it hasn't seemed to impact things (I'm still going lower, maybe just not low enough... at 1.5Mb/s right now on the downlink) - Edit: I should note that I'm fine limiting bandwidth on all apps on these iPhones while on wi-fi...not just youtube...

thanks in advance for any thoughts/experiences/suggestions.

-Mike

 

[Rubenel]

I'm subscribing to this. I would like to know as well. I'm used to watching 480p quality on the cellular network. Watching 480p on Wi-Fi won't bother me.

Sent from my SM-G950U1 using Tapatalk

 

[CaptainSTX]

I'm subscribing to this. I would like to know as well. I'm used to watching 480p quality on the cellular network. Watching 480p on Wi-Fi won't bother me.

Sent from my SM-G950U1 using Tapatalk

YouTube as well as most sites are moving to use https which makes setting up rules to block them tough. Several years ago before the migration to https blocking sites using firewall rules would have been straight forward. Now if you can get your family to cooperate, an approach is to setup an AP that everyone will voluntarily and faithfully use for YouTube. Set the radio on the AP for G only and if that doesn't sufficently cut back data use rachet the radio back to B only. (To have the option for B radios you will need an old Linksys 54G or similar old router).

Perhaps someone smarter than me will come with a more automatic or at least more elegant solution.

 

[Vexira]

use the bandwith monitor device priorty to set low band with priorty to the kids devices, you could also set cusom priorites and lower the video streaming category

 

[Bonez]

Thanks for the replies on this. Definitely doesn't have to be elegant, just has to work. I decided to try and mess with bandwidth device priority some more (vs introducing a B-band router) and after a bunch of testing, was able to make it work. The iOS youtube client auto-adjusts bandwidth real time which made it easier to test once I figured this out.

Net: A combo of forcing them to the 802.11G side of the network in concert with limiting bandwidth on each client to 1Mb/s (on both Uplink and Downlink) has done the trick. This seems to auto-limit all of their youtube streams to 240p (client auto-detects and chooses this when set to 'auto') which is fine for viewing on their iPhone7 devices. Initial stats show a decrease of 75% in youtube bandwidth utilization and no other complaints about other things not working well enough.

Also of note... on 802.11G at 1.5Mb/s on both up/down caused an auto-detect of 480p video quality in my tests if you're looking for a bit more quality @Rubenal

cheers!

-Mike