I don't know if this was just my setup but I noticed that YouTube that the max video quality was only 720p. I know my Lenovo laptop hardware is capable of better as I dual boot with windows 11 and there are no problems there.
What I noticed while playing a YouTube video there was no setting to change the resolution which I thought was odd.
Enabling hardware acceleration on it's own in Brave settings was not enough to change anything.
So I went on a search to find a solution and eventually came across a post that mentioned experimental Brave settings although not specifically related to the subject of video resolution.
brave://flags/
So I searched those flags for anything related to video and there indeed some so enabled them for H.264 and another for HEVC.
Now there is a warning advising... , well read for yourself but I can't see how enabling these two features on their own would cause anything drastic to happen. So I went ahead and enabled them both and nothing bad has happened and lo and behold 1080p and 4K where offered on YouTube are now selectable.
Now the list of Brave experimental features is very long so use the search for H.264 and HEVC but of course you do all of this at your own risk!
On the subject of video resolution I note that Netflix offers no native app for linux with only web based again at only 720p, I see there are various web wrappers but I prefer to use Brave and discovered an extension to enable 1080p and 5.1 audio.
It's available on the chrome web store ' New Netflix 1080p' and this works nicely too. I believe Firefox already does this without any extension.
I had a similar issue with Brave on Linux. At first I also assumed it was a hardware limitation, but since the same machine could play higher resolutions under Windows, it was clearly something browser-related.
