YouTube can stream 8K videos to your Meta Quest 3 even though the screens are not 8K
Following the news that Meta’s Quest 3 is getting some major mixed reality upgrades, including an AI that can recognize furniture and improved passthrough quality, there’s another improvement coming this time for one of my favorite Quest apps: YouTube.
That’s because the VR version of the video sharing platform now supports 8K video playback on Quest 3 – an increase from the previous maximum of 4K.
To enable it, make sure you’re using the YouTube VR app version 1.54 or higher, then fire up a video that supports 8K, tap the gear icon and where it says Quality, you’ll want to change the resolution to 4320p – or 4320p60 if you want 8K at 60 fps instead of the usual 30 fps. If 4320p isn’t an option on this list, unfortunately the video you want to watch won’t stream in 8K.
There are a few additional caveats. Firstly, you’ll need a strong internet connection, because even if the video supports 8K playback, you’ll struggle to stream it over weak WiFi – unless you like to wait for the video to buffer. Oh, and one more important detail; the Quest 3 does not have 8K screens. But that’s not as big a problem as it seems.
Method in the 8K madness
The Quest 3 has two displays (one for each eye) with 2,064 x 2,208 pixels each; The 8K resolution is 7,680 x 4,320 pixels. Even if we combine the two screens, they still only have just over 25% as many pixels as an 8K screen.
So is 8K streaming pointless? Well, not quite.
For flat YouTube videos, 8K playback is probably worthless on Quest hardware. The only benefit you may experience is that you will see a downscaled video (the opposite of upscaled, which plays a higher resolution source at a lower resolution), which can sometimes result in a more detailed picture than just streaming of a video at the same time. lower resolution.
The real improvement is in immersive 360-degree videos.
To put it simply, when you see a flat video, you see the entire resolution in that 16:9 frame. In 360 videos, the resolution is spread over a much larger image and you only see parts of that image based on where you look. That’s why (if you’ve been watching 360 videos in VR) 4K content can look more like HD, and HD content can look like blurry junk.
By bumping things up to 8K you’ll find that immersive 3D video should look much crisper – as the sections you’re watching are now effectively 4K. So while you won’t see 8K, you’ll still get a higher resolution.
This update could also be a good future-proof update for the next Meta hardware. With rumors that a Meta Quest Pro 2 could up the display game for Quest hardware, there’s a chance it could be closer to true 8K displays, although we’ll have to wait and see.