There is some bad news for iMac or Macbook owners who loved watching 4K videos on Youtube: that’s no longer possible. At least that’s no longer possible on Safari, the default browser that most Mac owners use. But worry not – you can still watch your favorite videos on Youtube’s homepage with a bit of tweaking and I’m here to share with you a complete guide on how to watch 4K videos on Youtube, on a Macbook or iMac!
You might be wondering why you can no longer watch 4K videos on your Mac? It all happens because Youtube made a change on how they deal and deliver 4K videos on their platform. They switched to using a video coding format called V9, while the Safari browser only knows how to deal with the H.264 coding format. In other words, there was an update that Apple didn’t really want to prepare for.
Fortunately, this means that the problem is related to your browser – if you’re using the default one, Safari – and you can easily fix that by installing a brand new browser. I know you’re probably used with Safari and will consider any other browser completely unreliable and impossible to use, but you won’t have to uninstall Safari – just get a new browser and start it when you browse Youtube and you want to enjoy 4K videos on the website. That’s all!
The browsers that can still plan 4K videos on Youtube for Mac can be downloaded for free and I am listing them below – just click the links, download and install your favorite browser and you’re ready to go:
– Mozilla Firefox
– Google Chrome
So why doesn’t Apple make the required changes? That’s difficult to tell and we know that Apple is pretty stubborn when it comes to changing things it doesn’t want to change. Hopefully, in this case, they will make an exception and soon they will update the Safari browser to support the new encoding video format. Or hopefully Google will make some changes to allow Mac owners to watch 4K videos on Safari.
But even if nothing changes, you fortunately still have an easy option to fix this problem – so there’s nothing to worry about!
