Welcome to sucky Youtube bitrate.

A solution is to try different codecs and see what works best. Another tip is to render the master files in 720p which will give better bitrates when played on Youtube. I've posted much about this before and if you take a look at my videos (many are recorded in 640x480) they look much better when watched in 720p than in 480p on youtube.

vetz wrote:

Welcome to sucky Youtube bitrate.

A solution is to try different codecs and see what works best. Another tip is to render the master files in 720p which will give better bitrates when played on Youtube. I've posted much about this before and if you take a look at my videos (many are recorded in 640x480) they look much better when watched in 720p than in 480p on youtube.

I have noted that the 720p video I uploaded prior looks perfectly fine. I'm almost positive it's not a bit-rate problem, but a conversion problem. The bit rate of the Episode 0 conversion on Blip is LESS (far less) than YouTube's conversion, yet looks perfectly fine. :P

Also, upscaling to 720p or even 1080p may make the videos look better in HD mode, but they'll look even WORSE in 480p or less if I do that, which kind of misses the point and wastes everyone's bandwidth. :/

(I know that didn't make a lot of sense, but consider that 480 does not scale perfectly to 720 or 1080, so any thin lines, like the two-pixel-wide lines in my fonts, will get aliased on the upscale and aliased AGAIN on the downscale.)

The weather's gonna be going crazy again very soon so sometime tomorrow I'm gonna try fiddling with codecs and container formats and uploading short private videos until I find some combination that doesn't make YouTube hate the conversion process. Heck, maybe just uploading the master AVI render files straight, despite using a VFW codec processor, will actually work? :P

I also sent feedback to YouTube about it but I'm skeptical if that'll solve anything. I can't be the only person out of the entire planet who's run into this problem and reported it.

I noticed that earlier, but it looks fine now.

Youtube sometimes keeps processing your video after the "Your video is now processing..." message is gone. *shrug*

SquallStrife wrote:

I noticed that earlier, but it looks fine now.

Youtube sometimes keeps processing your video after the "Your video is now processing..." message is gone. *shrug*

True... it appears to do a "q=crap" pass first just to let you view the video immediately, then a better one (which also enables >480p resolutions for HD videos).

*checks* ...video quality still looks like lame on my end. Even tried it in a different browser that hadn't yet touched it just in case it was a cache issue. :/

Seems OK?

It looks fine at 480 but I for one do not consider the 720p or 1080p to be a waste of bandwidth, my Comcast connection can handle that just fine.

Now the issue however is your upstream, are you limited by this when uploading and hence why you are only using up to 480p ?

Going to subscribe to you channel as well as I enjoy watching vids like this so keep up the good work.

I'm sure you will be able to figure out what is causing this but I bet it is something with how the tube does their streaming.

I've found that upscaling (nearest neighbor) and adding black borders to low-res content so that the video resolution ends up as 1920x1080 (or x1200) yields better results in youtube..

...or maybe it IS a bitrate thing... I just took a comparison shot with what the quality SHOULD look like from the master file, and what it ended up becoming:

This is what it SHOULD look like...

...and this is what it looks like in 480p on YouTube...

Also, everything is shifted by a fraction of a pixel... easily seen in the ticker bar in the lower-left corner. x_x;

Again, I'll put together some test files tomorrow and see if I can improve the upload quality simply by uploading in different container formats or with different codecs. I'm more than capable of switching things around with ease, especially now that I can recompress entire episodes in a matter of minutes instead of an hour... I might try a MOV container first... that seems to be the one format YouTube wants the most.

Also gonna check to see if my initial 720p video upload is suffering. I don't think it is, but I'm gonna double-check at some point.

EDIT: Just did a comparison with the 720p video I uploaded. It's fine. The bit-rate is definitely less and there's a change in contrast, but each pixel is exactly where it should be, which is less than can be said for my Episode 0 upload. x_x;

Problem solved! :D

Solution: Recompress master files to Xvid codec format prior to upload using an AVI container.

Quality at 480p on YouTube is perfect when I do this. I may in fact start using Xvid for all of my master files with YouTube stuff in the future. A little annoying having to do this of course, but oh well. Could've been much worse and only took three upload tests to nail this down.

So yeah. In a moment, Episode 0 will be taken down from YouTube so I can recompress and reupload it with these new compression settings. Anyone who's left a comment may wish to do so again once it's been re-uploaded. ;)

Gemini000 wrote:

Problem solved! :D […]
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Problem solved! 😁

Solution: Recompress master files to Xvid codec format prior to upload using an AVI container.

Quality at 480p on YouTube is perfect when I do this. I may in fact start using Xvid for all of my master files with YouTube stuff in the future. A little annoying having to do this of course, but oh well. Could've been much worse and only took three upload tests to nail this down.

So yeah. In a moment, Episode 0 will be taken down from YouTube so I can recompress and reupload it with these new compression settings. Anyone who's left a comment may wish to do so again once it's been re-uploaded. 😉

Nice to hear, I will check it out later 😀

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcMEDWkFU4E

...even the 360p mode now looks better than 480p did in the initial upload. ;D

I've got the next three episodes all converted in the way YouTube seems to like best so I'll be getting to uploading those in a bit. About to go cook dinner. ;)