Is it like that for everyone?

 

Nope. The source video quality and your available bandwidth will impact it quite a lot. H.264 scales per available bandwidth-- so if the source video is good and your viewing of it is degraded, you don't have the bandwidth required to stream it at maximum quality.

Or, as is often the case, youtube has run out of capacity again and the bottleneck is them.

Try a vimeo video for comparison-- if it looks sharp, it's youtube's problem. If not, yours.

 

Yeah other video is sharp. Just youtube sucks.

I thought maybe it's our shitty network restricting youtube.

Thanks SImba.