My Youtube videos look incredibly low quality

[ilman]

Hello, dear Temp.
Yesterday I spent my whole day trying to get this:

compressed so that it doesn't look like sh*t and it doesn't weigh over a gig.
Sadly, as you can see from the video, I failed and it looks really bad. That video weighed 24 gig uncompressed (or recorded with Fraps, which is a tad compressed), then compressed it with a lossless code and it resulted in a 4 gig file and then I tried all sorts of codecs and none of them did the job done(either too large or too crappy). I finally decided to rerecord the video with bandicam, which resulted in the quality you see up there in 250 megs. It was recorded with the default Youtube 720p settings.
I'm sure there's some sort of a way to upload better quality videos, I just don't know how.

Soo, if anyone has an idea how to make my vids look less crappy, I'll be extremely thankful.

 

[trumpet-205]

The problem with YouTube is that it always going to re-encode the video on its end. What you upload does not equal to what is shown.

Try 10 bit x264 (HI10P) with

* CRF of 20 (I suspect you can increase it to 23 before quality tanks).
* Reference frames of 6 to 8.
* Tune it to animation.

If you want quality don't use ABR or two pass encoding. Also what audio codec are you using?

 

[Originality]

I'm not too knowledgable in this field, but I always thought YouTube converts any uploaded file into its own format (is it FLV still?) that's compatible with their variable bitrate system (which can range from LQ to 1080p HD). It might just be this conversion that's screwing up your vids.

EDIT: Ninja'd. Good to see I thought correctly.

 

[ilman]

The problem with YouTube is that it always going to re-encode the video on its end. What you upload does not equal to what is shown.

Try 10 bit x264 (HI10P) with

* CRF of 20 (I suspect you can increase it to 23 before quality tanks).
* Reference frames of 6 to 8.
* Tune it to animation.

If you want quality don't use ABR or two pass encoding. Also what audio codec are you using?

For audio I use MPEG-1 L2, the one provided with Bandicam. It does a decent job, although high-pitched sounds can be irritating at times. If you can give a suggestion on an audio codec, I'd be thankful. I'll try to do what you told me.

 

[trumpet-205]

For audio I use MPEG-1 L2, the one provided with Bandicam. It does a decent job, although high-pitched sounds can be irritating at times. If you can give a suggestion on an audio codec, I'd be thankful. I'll try to do what you told me.

For those without high end audio equipment, foobar2000 + Nero AAC encoder using quality scale (VBR) of 0.4 (~128 kbps) should achieve transparency.

Those who use high end audio equipment such as dedicated sound card, external DAC, etc will want to increase it to 0.55 (~192 kbps) or 0.65 (~256 kbps).

 

[ilman]

Hmm, I just tried encoding the video with x264 with these settings:
x246 --crf 20 -- ref 8 -o dinner.mp4 dinner.avi
And strangely all sound was gone. Is there a way to extract it withing x264 and compress it or do I have to obtain the audio from the original, compress it, then inject it back into the compressed video? Either way, it worked like a charm, the vid looks great on my PC(not sure how it'll look on Youtube) and it uses only 110 megs. Nice.

 

[Shadowlurker]

Also, it should be mentioned that currently A LOT of videos are being plagued with pixels and and other graphical issues that weren't there the last time youtube updated so it's safe to say they screwed something up again..

 

[trumpet-205]

Hmm, I just tried encoding the video with x264 with these settings:
x246 --crf 20 -- ref 8 -o dinner.mp4 dinner.avi
And strangely all sound was gone. Is there a way to extract it withing x264 and compress it or do I have to obtain the audio from the original, compress it, then inject it back into the compressed video? Either way, it worked like a charm, the vid looks great on my PC(not sure how it'll look on Youtube) and it uses only 110 megs. Nice.

x264 is a video encoder. Encode audio from the source, then put it all back together using mmg from mkvtoolnix. This'll generate a mkv file.

 

[ilman]

x264 is a video encoder. Encode audio from the source, then put it all back together using mmg from mkvtoolnix. This'll generate a mkv file.

Thanks for everything.
Gonna test it out tomorrow.

 

[PityOnU]

Not related to helping, but from watching it, yeah, it's not super crisp, but it's not horrible either.

Grats on your 'chieve. Looks pretty hardcore.

 

[ilman]

Not related to helping, but from watching it, yeah, it's not super crisp, but it's not horrible either.

Grats on your 'chieve. Looks pretty hardcore.

Well, I wanted for it to look crisp while in fullscreen, which it doesn't.
Anyways, thanks. You don't know how many tries I put into this to score an S.

 

[KazoWAR]

also remember to limit fps to 30, that will save space since youtube coverts all vidoes down to 30 fps.

 

[ilman]

also remember to limit fps to 30, that will save space since youtube coverts all vidoes down to 30 fps.

Yeah, that's what I do. Even in general, I never record videos with a framerate above 30, because it results in a big loss of disk space with minimal effect(at least to me).

 

[ilman]

Ok, now I'm sure that Youtube's screwing me over. I uploaded a new vid with the settings trumpet-205 suggested and it looks the same quality:

I'll try something else. But at least the audio's a tad better now.

 

[trumpet-205]

YouTube loves to do that. For example, if you upload a video of 23.976 fps, it'll change it to 25 fps.

Very annoying, nothing you can do about it.

 

[ilman]

YouTube loves to do that. For example, if you upload a video of 23.976 fps, it'll change it to 25 fps.

Very annoying, nothing you can do about it.

Well, at least my videos are smaller now and the audio is fixed. Thanks for the help.

 

[GHANMI]

Any soluton to make it not force that awful 144p resolution? Once it's enabled I can't switch back to higher resolutions.
And did I mention how much I hate them for removing that "Stop Video Download" option... "integrating" it in the Play button so that you "enjoy" your videos being now impossible to buffer beyond a few seconds when paused!

 

[ilman]

Any soluton to make it not force that awful 144p resolution? Once it's enabled I can't switch back to higher resolutions.
And did I mention how much I hate them for removing that "Stop Video Download" option... "integrating" it in the Play button so that you "enjoy" your videos being now impossible to buffer beyond a few seconds when paused!

Why would you even enable 144p?
In Youtube's settings I think there was a place to set the resolution to the highest possible which might be a way to reset it back to a bearable res.
And there was a plug-in for chrome that fixes the integration of the 'Stop Video Download' option with the Play button, but I can't remember its name for the likes of me.

 

[PityOnU]

Any soluton to make it not force that awful 144p resolution? Once it's enabled I can't switch back to higher resolutions.
And did I mention how much I hate them for removing that "Stop Video Download" option... "integrating" it in the Play button so that you "enjoy" your videos being now impossible to buffer beyond a few seconds when paused!

You're being set at the maximum bandwidth your connection is being detected as able to handle. Either you have horrible internet service in general, or your ISP's connection to YouTube is bottlenecked (I have the latter).

And the just-in-time-buffering was implemented to allow for dynamic quality adjustment based on fluctuating bandwidth allowances.

 

[dragonblood9999]

Also, it should be mentioned that currently A LOT of videos are being plagued with pixels and and other graphical issues that weren't there the last time youtube updated so it's safe to say they screwed something up again..

yeah my videos are suffering from this

here is an example of my fear 2 walk-thought i was doing but had to stop uploading it because of this problem