YouTube for Android TV bug won’t let you adjust video quality

In what has become a frustrating new development, the YouTube app for Android TV (and Google TV by extension) will no longer let users adjust simple things like playback speed or video quality. I thought it was just happening to me on my single Chromecast with Google TV, but after removing and re-installing the YouTube app on that device, I still had the issue present.

I then installed the YouTube app on my TV’s internal hardware and had the exact same issue. It was at this point that I realized a bigger problem may be happening with the Android TV version of the YouTube app across the board. So I hopped online, looked around a bit, and came across a small-ish Reddit thread that points to this exact issue cropping up for multiple users over the past few days.

Settings Button Not Working On TV
byu/therlwl inyoutube

What is going on

To clarify, the issue is very strange and is small enough that I’m sure many users haven’t even noticed it yet. When in the YouTube app for Android TV, if you press up on the controller, you’ll see a handful of options like thumbs-up, thumbs-down, comment, add to list, and settings. Generally speaking, if you click the settings icon, a sub-menu will appear that lets you adjust the quality and playback speed of the video you are watching.

While all the other buttons in this section are all working fine, once you hover over the settings icon and click, you get nothing. There’s no error, no attempt to load or any other indication that you’ve tried an action and the software has failed. It just clicks and sits there idle.

But seeing the linked Reddit thread above and now having the issue persist across hardware, I’m convinced there is a bug present. For me this is a bit annoying as I like to leave videos playing for my dog at night, but cranked down to 480p to conserve bandwidth since she doesn’t care too much about what’s on the screen. With this bug, everything is loading in at 4K, and streaming that all night long is a good way to hit my monthly data cap from Xfinity – a thing we don’t ever run into unless we stream a bit too much 4K content in a month.

What’s the solution?

For now, there’s no workaround for this issue. The only thing I can suggest at this moment is to file a report with YouTube by going to this site – https://www.youtube.com/tv/feedback – and telling them you are seeing the same issue. It takes about 2 minutes and it could go a long way towards making the YouTube team aware that there is a pretty glaring problem that needs to be addressed in the next update. Until they get around to doing that, however, I suppose we’ll all just have to wait patiently.