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The name of the program being used is 4K Video Downloader.

Question is, if for example, the Original Quality says it's 128k, is it really going to get any better if I try to extract it with High Quality, be it 256 or 320k?

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After reading a lot on this, it seems that the reason why these downloaders offer such "higher quality" settings is because they are actually re-encoding the YouTube file to a higher bitrate (e.g. 320 Kbps) so to give you the impression that you will get a higher quality media file. But when you re-encode a file, quality can never get better than what it was on the original file (which was already encoded by YouTube BTW!), and because of the higher bitrate in those "high quality" settings, the file size will inevitably get bigger.

So, I think fair advice would be to stick with the "original quality" setting, hoping that the software will not re-encode the file anyway only for purposes of letting you choose a different format, which would still compromise the quality as well as being useless, because today all music players also read AAC (.m4a). YouTube downloaders though, for marketing reasons, will still show an MP3 option, because people still go with "hey, I want the MP3!", not understanding that this will cause a re-encoding and consequently a quality loss at any bitrate they choose.

That said, a better approach would be to try using open-source downloaders that do not obsess about "letting people see what they want to see" but will show exactly what the available original streams are and let you choose which one of them you want to download. Among those open-source apps, the most popular are youtube-dl (or youtube-dl-gui for a GUI version) and JDownloader.

Also, check Best method to extract highest quality mp3 from YouTube? -- Video Help Forum as reference.

I know this is an answer and as such it should provide the most accurate response, but I have to stress that all the info I could find on this were very fragmented. So, please take it with a grain of salt and hopefully it can be good ground for someone else to build upon.

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  • youtube-dl-gui and click on the settings cog wheel top right - options - formats - audio quality = high. Get between 234 -275 kbps quality from downloaded.
    – ron
    Commented Apr 6, 2021 at 5:03
  • Agree w/ your assessment re the "higher quality" downloads, and on yt-dlp (née youtube-dl). Most everything I find on youTube is medium, m4a_dash. I think this is roughly equivalent to a mediocre mp3.
    – Seamus
    Commented Jul 16 at 5:55
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My experience is complete opposite. I downloaded something with original quality setting and I immediately noticed that it was much worse than watching original video. Turns out you have to use high quality setting to get the original file! And the difference wasn't subtle. It was very obvious.

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The reason you'll get conflicting answers is that the "original" quality is not original at all. All the streams you see are going to be re-encoded, which degrades quality (even at the highest quality setting). "Original" (in this case) matches the re-encoded bitrate to the source bitrate, which if memory serves is likely AAC@128k or Opus@160k.

Lossy to lossy conversion should generally be avoided, but in the case it's inevitable, the best bet is to pick a destination bitrate that is higher than the source bitrate. From the options you've provided, I'd suggest 256kbps as the best compromise between file size and not introducing a significant amount of further loss.

If you want to grab the original streams and prevent re-encoding, your best bet is youtube-dl.

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