TheLazy1 wrote:Defaults should be ok, but upscaling is better done by video players than by resizing the video and encoding it.
You'll save space and encoding time.

Yes you do, however you gain quality by upscaling and uploading the upscaled video to YouTube. It's a compromise I'm willing to take, I got fast broadband with lot's of quota and broadband will only keep getting better.
Also viewers can just switch to 480 if they have slow internet...
Also just in case anyone is wondering WTF why am I uploading old Retro videos in 1080...
The cropped source footage is pretty close to 480p (614 x 490) so it's natural to scale it to 640 x 480 and upload the video like that. Now I know that upscaling does increase the quality of the encode slightly from having done DOSBox videos in the past.
Still I might as well document this, because the "WTF why am I uploading old Retro videos in 1080" question keeps popping up
So I took a small recording, added the deinterlacing filter, cropped the image and scaled it to 640 x 480 (and then again to 1440 x 1080).
Codec is x264 and I use "Constant Quantizer" of 16. The 480 file ended up being 17.6 MB and the 1080 file 76 MB. File length is just under 4 minutes.
This is how the videos compare:
Now once you upload the files it gets interesting. YouTube reencodes the videos and this is something you have no control over. So after the videos are uploaded and YouTube has done the reencode, I can download the file that is stored on YouTube and let's take a look. Note this option is only available to me (Because it's my YouTube account)
The 480 file has shrunk down to 9.09MB and the 1080 file is now only 41.2MB. Let's take a look at what the videos look like after YouTube "got it's hands on them"...
Looking at the DOS command line, the 480 version has clearly lost detail. Looking at the other image we can see that there is lost detail on the 480 video (Markings on the floor and detail on the prince)...
There you have it
PS: You can watch the 480 version here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Em0zK821V4
and the 1080 version here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOz3P3fZHq8