Getting the best quality from YouTube??

[Anonymous]

I’ve been experimenting with different video sizes/compression/codecs on YouTube and I can’t seem to find a good combo…. at least in my opinion. I know their quality is mediocre at best, and they over compress the video files.

My first discovery is the video should be exactly 320×240, or it gets resized…

What file format/codec gives the best quality in your experiences? Any suggestions (specific to YouTube) or tips would be appreciated.

[Anonymous]

here’s a tip.
read the fine print.
please correct me if wrong, but weren’t they demanding that you give up your copyrights on anything you post there?

[Anonymous]

;0) Wrote:

here’s a tip.
read the fine print.
please correct me if wrong, but weren’t they demanding that you give up your copyrights on anything you post there?

when was I asking about copyright??? I am asking about getting the best quality from my YouTube posted videos…

[Anonymous]

My Bad. I apologize.
I assumed anybody who didn’t read the Youtube instructions on how to prep videos, for uploading to thier site, also may have failed to read the fine print on copyright.
I figured the warning about copyright may may encourage one to reread thier info. If you didn’t want to give up your rights to your work, then the codec issue becomes a moot point.
I find quicktime works just fine. I use quicktime pro. Hope that helps.

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=55745&topic=10526
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=55744&ctx=sibling
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=57410&ctx=sibling

[birdcat]

;0) Wrote:

here’s a tip.
read the fine print.
please correct me if wrong, but weren’t they demanding that you give up your copyrights on anything you post there?

According to the user agreement on YouTube: For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions

It’s on this page: http://www.youtube.com/t/terms under Chapter 5 – User Submissions

As for the best format to use, I’ve had good experiences rendering to MP4 (what YouTube suggests).

[Anonymous]

I believe I heard about it a year or so ago when a video creator, was sued and ordered to take down a video (from his own site) that he made after some company downloaded it from Youtube, altered it for thier own purposes and decided they owned it.

True, there is a newer clause, that is in response to public outcry when people discovered the original terms. and is followed by:

However, by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service. The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website.

The new clause still makes you liable for damages, and on your own if somebody sues, or steals.

But I stand corrected.

[Anonymous]

I always burn my web site into the video. http://www.kbvp.com

see: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=www.kbvp.com

[faqvideo]

YouTube is a poor quality video. Unless you want to use it for promotion purposes, I would recommend to try Google Video. They use Flash as well, but with better size/resolution format.

If you are really concern about video quality, you may try DivX.com, Stage 6. Your viewers will need good broadband and some patience to watch the videos though, but download works great, and that’s real DivX, not Flash. Hopefully they will fix lagging problems soon enough.

Shoot-It-Yourself Wedding Video Guide

[birdcat]

faqvideo Wrote:

YouTube is a poor quality video. Unless you want to use it for promotion purposes

I don’t know that it’s as poor as you say – If you render to 320X240 MP4 it looks pretty good to me after uploading –

As an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUuTHDUMJuE

I agree with you if you are taking a 720 X 480 MPEG2 and uploading, but this looks fine to me.

Just my opinion.

[Anonymous]

;0) Wrote:

My Bad. I apologize.
I assumed anybody who didn’t read the Youtube instructions on how to prep videos, for uploading to thier site, also may have failed to read the fine print on copyright.
I figured the warning about copyright may may encourage one to reread thier info. If you didn’t want to give up your rights to your work, then the codec issue becomes a moot point.
I find quicktime works just fine. I use quicktime pro. Hope that helps.

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=55745&topic=10526
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=55744&ctx=sibling
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=57410&ctx=sibling

I have read all their available FAQs… and I still think they look like crap. I have seen super sharp video uploads and some super crappy ones. I have tried MPG2, MPG4, Divx/Xvid… I just don’t find a codec/compression level/etc that seems to fit my personal standards of quality…

[Anonymous]

You really can’t get good quality from them, unless you have a really good camera.
I have a Sony DCR-TRV250 and the footage is decent, on youtube.

[Anonymous]

Yes, as videographers you all do your absolute best to capture the highest quality. But youTube thrives because of its delivery method. Fast delivery online means compression. While you can certainly rely on their compression, you can do a lot better if you compress your own video files before uploading. For all the scientific settings on compressors these days, it is still an art, and you get to be the artist. Here’s a hint: YouTube’s final output is FLV video, flash video.

First of course, get the highest quality source. Then to get the best online compression use dual pass FLV encoding at a bitrate you feel your audience has the capacity to consume. By not wasting your own or youTube’s time trying to best guess their compressor settings and by you supplying high quality flv files, you will be miles ahead of your competition. This also allows you to upload their absolute limits in terms of filesize restrictions, as creative compression will allow you to put in more minutes of your content than the defaults they allow.

This is what my own compressed video looks like taken from my site.

http://www.virtualscribe.com/blackBoxChicago/

I then uploaded the very same piece, as an FLV file, directly onto youTube in November or December of 2006.

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=virtualscribe

Compare and contrast the compression both on my site and youTube; youTube does not recompress video when you already have it in Flash. The reason my video is bad is that I tried too many motion backgrounds on it. Also, youTube demands blackbars if your content can’t fill its requirements, so at the youTube section, click the rectangle next to the audio icon, to get it back to its original dimensions. All artifacts are mine; you can do a lot better if your source content does not have a lot of motion, transitions, fades, and other compression causing problems.

You can also see the encoding quality on my website, of 5 different wedding videography samples. These are clips which individual videographers have created. The source material is theirs, in very high quality material and my part is creatively, artistically encoding it so that it looks good to both the videographers and the bride/groom parties. Each has slightly different challenges; some are in black and white, some slow motion, transitions, water and hair, waving flowing cloth.

http://www.sharingmyjoy.com

Short answer:

1. Compress to FLV before uploading

2. Upload

If you don’t follow these steps, your final output depends on the guesswork on the part of youTube’s compressor. And it doesn’t care what your video is, it applies the same compression to EVERY one of the 150 thousand videos per day which are uploaded. The same formula applied to cell phone video, digicam video, vcr tape capture, or high end XL2 camcorder footage, like the ads on the right. So be better than your peers, do your homework, and compress to flash FLV format before uploading.
______________________
virtualscribe
http://www.sharingmyjoy.com
share your wedding video online

[Anonymous]

Very good! My stuff is high speed action, which totally dies after compression. I have had to change my edit style when doing dissolves. One second dissolves get trashed in the re-compression, so I got acceptable results with 1/4 second effects. I had one video that had a 50% larger file size than a much shorter duration video. If the amount of background motion makes that much difference, guessing the bitrate gets a bit complex.
The YouTube played straight through without pausing, but your site took a long time and loaded in segments. I don’t think it was my computer. Equipement list: http://www.videomaker.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4228

[Anonymous]

Hi guys

You might want to read this article:

How To Make YouTube Videos Look Great
http://www.squidoo.com/youtuberight/

Hope it helps

[Anonymous]

O.K., let’s put some of these claims to the test. 😉 I’m having trouble getting any decent quality for a documentary I’m trying to produce, and would like some advice. I’m going with my existing capturing technology as explained in my other thread elsewhere on this forum. For purposes of the below videos, I caputured some footage in AVI DVD Quality, and compressed in MPEG-4 in the case of the first two tests. Upon playback on my pc, the finished MPEG-4 file looked fine.

To recap, users on this forum are suggesting:
a) Render your video in MPEG-4 320×240 as per YouTube’s instructions – what birdcat advised.
b) Encode your video to .FLV before uploading.
c) Render your video in WMV streaming format.

Video 1 – I uploaded my clean MPEG-4 320×240 to YouTube. The picture quality I received back was unacceptable – blurred faces and checkerboard background. See for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsR7iHGA9HI

Video 2 – Same process, but at 640×480. Actually, slightly better picture, but still unacceptable. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQsXaYLieE0 That also seems to kill the 320×240 theory.

Video 3 – We try encoding in .FLV . But I had to go with an AVI rendered file because my FLV encoder did not recognize the MPEG-4 file. Still very poor quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSNI08NJXbA

Video 4 – FLV again, but first render in streaming format WMV. No change in quality either. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isZvNADO-pg

Oh, yes, and I read that article as well – utilized 2000 bps data rate whenever possible and non-interlaced.

What options do I have left??

[Anonymous]

RLN_USA,

Send me your clip, and I’ll see what I can do with it; I just want to see if the quality you are getting and the quality I can get is different. It would be an interesting experiment for me. Get in touch with me at my website, http://www.sharingmyjoy.com and I’ll see if I can encode the same timecodes you have encoded, and put them up on youTube.

I still say this has to do with the art of encoding, not with the technical details of which preset options to take. If you can mail me your uncompressed footage, or place it online somewhere and have me download it, I can take a portion of the clip and put it onto youTube after compression to see if it is any different in resultsets than what you can come up with. If nothing else, we can learn from each other.

___________________________
virtualscribe
http://www.sharingmyjoy.com
Share your entire wedding video online, easily and securely

[Anonymous]

This was a test upload to Google Videos. The original was on my master DVD. I imported to WMM at highest quality and 720×480. Upload retained the same file size/resolution. The playback is killing the detail, but when downloaded it’s good. The super wide Canon lens had some cut-off that didn’t show when using a standard monitor- typical under scan/over-scan thing.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8052063294379998843&hl=en

Keith breazeal http://www.kbvp.com

[Anonymous]

Thanks Virtualscribe. I sent a message through your website.

KBVP, I watched half of your Google video. Compared to my file’s results, your quality looked fine at the "original size". Yes, when you blow it up to 200% there is a loss in quality, but that is a very wide screen. I would be interested to know how you went about rendering this and what settings you used.

[Anonymous]

First of all, KBVP shouldn’t have any problems
encoding low motion, quality should be acceptable.

The issue is to encode motion as RLN_USA did with his video,
that’s a tough one to encode since is changing all the time,
and at 250Kbps (YT encoding bit rate) is almost impossible
that it will look nice, in YT that is.

Try using the best I’ve see so far: Quicktime’s h.264 codec.

RLN_USA Wrote:

Thanks Virtualscribe. I sent a message through your website.

KBVP, I watched half of your Google video. Compared to my file’s results, your quality looked fine at the "original size". Yes, when you blow it up to 200% there is a loss in quality, but that is a very wide screen. I would be interested to know how you went about rendering this and what settings you used.

[Anonymous]

Here’s the same compression settings, but extreme motion:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1919786262154007198

Both cameras recorded on DV. Imported into a wavelet editor via S-Video(less compression). Exported S-Video encoded to Firewire into DVDShop. Same WMM settings as above response and video link.

Keith Breazeal http://www.kbvp.com

[Anonymous]

Here’s a screen shot of WMM settings when you go to "save". It results in full 720×480 screen size.

Keith Breazeal
http://www.kbvp.com

[Anonymous]

hi geys, i am still a student and is trying to do some research on YouTube, do u mind to help to do a survey?

thanks a lot for your help…. 😯 😀
the website is http://www.my3q.com/home2/156/zhuke/58602.phtml

[Anonymous]

YouTube looks great on the small screen, but when you want to see a fairly good full screen, you might want to use Google Videos.
My son wanted his mountain biking promo uploaded for sponsorships. The standard playback for high speed action leaves a lot to be desired. However, when downloaded, the full screen playback is really good. Using the above setting in the screen shot I posted, this is the result: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5136064393847142198&hl=en

[Anonymous]

Thanks KBVP / Cinetech,

Well, unfortunately, I am using this for promotion purposes, and I need my video work to join a particular "community" where it will receive better exposure, than on Google video. So I really need to get my work on YouTube rather than Google, Dailymotion, etc..

Now check this out: I processed some of the same footage with the same caputure standard (AVI, dvd quality) and compressed down to WMV 640×480 instead of YouTube’s recommended Mpeg4 @320×240. Then I uploaded to Myspace for a change. Although I won’t benefit from having my video on myspace down the road, but just wanted to run a test . . . . . . . so what happened??

http://www.myspace.com/58023979 click on my dummy profile to the left and watch the video! The picture quality beats YouTube hands down. Now why would that be??!! 640×480 compressed down to myspace’s standard of 430×346. But, hey, I don’t see any checkerboard background here (unlike YouTube). And I can see the details on human faces. Yet this is still a motion shot.

So why is YouTube’s technology inferior to Myspace? Aren’t video streams supposed to be YouTube’s selling point?? 🙂

[Anonymous]

YT rationale is simple there are more browsers
with flash 7 in the world, so they transcode everything to Flash 7.
Namely, they want reach more people, it’s not about quality.
They’re quite few other competitors that have better
quality videos: Stage6, Ravver or even MySpace, yet
they’re not as succesful….

If you want to be in YT, meet their requirements.

RLN_USA Wrote:

Thanks KBVP / Cinetech,
So why is YouTube’s technology inferior to Myspace? Aren’t video
streams supposed to be YouTube’s selling point?? 🙂

[Author]

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