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Plain and simple, 160kbps Opus is better than 256kbps AAC - no ifs, ands,or buts.

During my ABX-ing, if I by chance played the AAC version first (note that I always play the first track for 5-10 minutes straight), when I switched to the second audio track I could tell literally within 5-10 seconds that it was higiher quality, and every single time this occurred the second and higher quality-sounding track was Opus.  It didn't matter if the source audio that was uploaded to YouTube was 22050Hz, 32KHz, 96KHz (all in lossless), or even a 44.1KHz 160kbps MP3 that was 7 years old - Opus was always better.

Interestingly enough, if I ended up playing the Opus version first and then played the AAC version second, it wasn't obvious at all that it was lower quality.  I didn't figure out until late that, whenever I did not notice an almost obvious difference within 5-10 seconds, it meant that the first track I played was Opus.

One distinct thing I noticed repeatedly was that the Opus version was constantly more "musical" and enjoyable while the AAC version was almost more "artificial" and boring, ironically even for synthesized electronic songs!

Fun fact: the quality difference between 256kbps AAC and 128kbps vorbis is similar to the difference between 160kbps Opus and 256kbps AAC.

EDIT: Oh, and regarding my audio setup, it's much more budget-fi yet it still amazes me that it seems to still get the job done with results comparable to more expensive setups.  It's the Monoprice 9963 IEMs with LostEarBuds single-flange medium-sized tips plugged directly into a Xonar DS with an LME49990 op amp; audio for the ABX-ing was played back in foobar2000 via ASIO (the only way to avoid resampling on Asus sound cards - yes the stupid drivers even resample WASAPI exclusive!)

EDIT 2: I must admit though, I actually didn't do a lot of testing with 44.1KHz native content since it seemed that most of my YouTube videos with 44.1KHz source content did not have Opus encodings (that above-mentioned 160kbps MP3 being the only major one), so I may just test that a bit more sometime tomorrow...other than that though, Opus is definitely better

Well for one thing, before smart phones, raw CPU performance was hardly an issue and the main concern was purely battery life, so there was considerably less R&D on ARM CPUs and similar.  Therefore, we should not be surprised that once smartphones came onto the scene that ARM CPUs started being developed and invested into on a much greater scale.

In other words, it's more like the rapid development of ARM CPUs is making up for all the years before hand - the performance increase of ARM CPUs in the last 8 years or so is very comparable to the performance increase in desktop CPUs from the mid 90s to the mid 2000s, at which point one could argue that all the low-hanging fruit architecturally were taken care of.

You should probably not use the same ratio for VP8 since it's quality is not even better than h.264 at the same bitrate (maybe against h.264 baseline)

And regarding Opus, it actually is flat-out the best general lossy audio codec currently available.  Now since YouTube's AAC encoder isn't all that great, it's still possible that Opus could in fact be better.

Even better than non-DASH 360p h.264, aka fmt18?

Also, quick question - your 35% size calculation for determining h.264 vs VP9 - is this only for the DASH video stream alone without any audio?

Speaking of audio, since I've now got that Opus mod I rigged up for CompleteYouTubeSaver, I can finally do the quality comparison between 160kbps Opus, 128kbps Vorbis, and 256kbps AAC.  Also, it must be noted that Opus does not support 44.1KHz so anything of that sampling rate will be resampled to 48KHz - this is something I will definitely be investigating quality-wise.

Does PotPlayer have a "D3D Fullscreen" function like MPC-HC?  If so, try that.

Alternatively, are you able to use MadVR?  By default it uses a renderer similar to D3D Fullscreen, so you could try that as well (if your PC is low-end, then just use low-quality settings).

None whatsoever.

The only thing I can suggest is asking the developer himself.

BTW, I'm going to guess that 256kbps AAC still exists for browsers and such that don't support Opus (particularly IE and Safari along with plain-old flash player).

Well if it's drivers, then perhaps the brand of GPU makes a difference?

I personally am unsure whether I had the issue on Intel integrated graphics or with AMD integrated graphics, but I at least know that it was one of those two and was not Nvidia.

(I say I am unsure because I majorly upgraded my CPU 6 months ago and I don't really recall if the issue mainly occured before or after the upgrade.  I think it may rarely occur sometimes nowadays, but I know that some point in the past it occured much more frequently for me)

Technically the one I linked totally could support Opus by simply changing the fmt values - I did this on my own to support 60fps before it got added officially, and am tempted to replace the depreciated 192kbps Vorbis with Opus.

Speaking of which, I was digging around the extension's XPI archive and I can confirm that the fmt values I posted above for AAC are definitely correct since it's what the extension itself uses.  So if you're not getting any fmt141 listed, you may want to see if you can manually input and retrieve it...

EDIT: Yup, just made an "Opus mod" of it.  It still says OGG vorbis and saves stand-alone audio to an OGG container, but Opus actually natively uses the ogg container anyway (though with the file extension .opus) so everything works just fine.

Download link if you care:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/tur9j … us-mod.xpi

The fact that I came up with this process on my own while trying to tackle the very same issue sounds to me like it's a bug, not a miracle.

My guess is that, much like the crazy flickering that can be (at least temporarily) fixed by changing the thread count, it is something related to the GPU acceleration since I discovered that both of these issues do not occur when GPU acceleration is disabled...

Or it could be all down to that mess known as graphics drivers. 

I think you are downloading the wrong AAC audio then - the DASH audio stream for 480p is 128kbps while the DASH audio stream for 720p is 256kbps.

Also, it's very possible that they may have downgraded the 720p vorbis at some point in time due to it being depreciated in favor of Opus audio (fmt251).

I was only talking about video, not audio.  A 128kbps h.264 video would look like crap (see: 144p).

My point was that, I wonder if there are YouTube videos that do not have non-DASH 360p h.264.

Regarding audio, the bitrate for 360p DASH should be 128kbps AAC while non-DASH 360p should be 96kbps AAC...

But honestly, if you're really concerned about audio quality, use the audio from the VP9 DASH videos if you can - YouTube's AAC encoder isn't as good as their Vorbis encoder (probably because they use open-source encoders, and AAC open-source encoders are inferior to open-source vorbis encoders).

(though actually some videos even have Opus audio, which is even better than both AAC and Vorbis, but I unfortunately haven't really tested it)