YouTube. What's the current method of maximizing quality?

[Asterra]

Back in the day (years ago), I managed to force Youtube to accept the stereo audio in my videos by specifically uploading FLV files that never exceeded a certain bitrate. (The video content itself was of poor quality, though.) Since then, YouTube's specs have updated, and now even old videos that were upload with stereo audio (before YouTube supported that) can be played with stereo.

I'm going to be uploading a 1080p video. I'd like to know:

1) Is there a set of guidelines I could follow to ensure that the 1080p version YouTube ends up with is identical to what I upload? (Meaning no re-encode.)
2) Barring that, what are some good ideas for maximizing the quality?

The video is going to be 59.94fps. YouTube does not support this today, but there are already video services which do, so YouTube is destined to add the support, which will probably cause pre-upgrade videos to suddenly play at 59.94fps. I'm bearing this in mind. But if I do have a way of uploading a video without it being re-encoded, and that means forcing 29.97fps, then so be it, because that would probably give a better result.

[aedipuss]

1 - no. everything is always re-encoded.

2 - upload the highest quality progressive source you can.

3 - better you upload 30p rather than have youtube re-encode it to 30p from 60fps. you never know how that will turn out, but most likely not well.

[budwzr]

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=16560

[Asterra]

3 - better you upload 30p rather than have youtube re-encode it to 30p from 60fps. you never know how that will turn out, but most likely not well.

Right. I think Youtube drops alternating frames. Just drops them.