Comments on: Best video compression settings for You Tube

By: BMC

BMC — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:16:49 +0000

These are great settings. I had a three minute video and so tweaked the bit rate a little and the audio and it came out as good as they come as far as youtube goes. Thanks for the help!

By: mary

mary — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:54:49 +0000

The bigger companies do not get an inside track: I have a friend at Disney who is continually frustrated by the look of videos they post themselves on YouTube. They have been unable to get any answers from anyone over there about how to compress for best playback.

By: Dane

Dane — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:34:58 +0000

Well…

I’ve tried it all and my conclusion is… our compression setting don’t affect Youtube playback quality. (within reason, of course)

As a base standard i chose the Chicago Trib’s UTube review of Kung Foo Panda. In one clip there were thousands of CG arrows flying thru the shot. they all looked great.

I uploaded my video’s FLV file that looks great on my demo site, but on Utube…total crap; worst looking by far of all my upload experiments.

I did H264 at 640×480, 320×240, 425×319 and even 425×350 (having the crop off 10% from the edges). Once uploaded, no version was appreciably different from any other. I did notice, however, that different sections of my video had different levels of compression artifacting.

The 1st 2/3’s of my video is quite frenetic; lots of dissolves, flying 3D logos, film clips shot with lots of Rosco smoke and a ticker-tape graphic banner racing across the top & bottom of screen… this section looks like total crap; “Jello on ice”. However, the final 1/3 of my video is straight cuts of relatively motionless shots… and that section is very nearly acceptable.

Also, I upload a 5min piece from a slo placed documentary (h264-425×319) which looks just fine… but not as good as the Trib’s clips from Kung Foo Panda.

i suspect that bigger media outlets can get an inside trak.

Orwell Warned us: in communal societies, “…all animals are equal. Pigs are just ‘more’ equal”

By: sweezy

sweezy — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:15:27 +0000

Thats right. There scaling it back up durring there own compression. there saving space. In fact they recommend 320 on the site. its actually scaling the video back to 425 by 318. A very odd 4:3 aspect ratio.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 23:28:32 +0000

Very helpful post, with some great links. So this may be the dumbest question ever: Why is the YouTube player 480 wide in my browser if everyone is uploading at 320. Does this mean YouTube is scrunching everything down to 320 for storage then boosting it back up to 480 when it plays?

And why would they do that?

Cheers…Stephen