desperate to get better youtube quality

[mstowe]

I'm using Windows Movie Maker to make videos for youtube. I've tried the high quality output plus custom youtube output profiles that I've found on video websites. I've tried converting and compressing using various utilities. I've tried wmv, avi, mpeg4 etc... I *cannot* get anything up on youtube that does not look like blurry crap!! My original video looks good.
Any suggestions would be welcome. Please help. I'm wasting hours getting nowhere. I see a lot of video on youtube that looks great. What can I do???
Help, and thanks,
Marg

[manono]

Hi-

The standard quality is always going to look lousy, especially if there's movement in the videos. How do the "High Quality" version videos look? Are they OK, or not? As you may or may not know, each video uploaded to YouTube is reencoded in at least 2 and usually 3 versions. You didn't say what resolutions you're making the videos, but I hope they're at least 480x360.

[mstowe]

I'm doing 640x480. Yes, the good quality looks fine, but the "good quality" link is not always present. You can't rely on people to click on that link even it is there, plus if you're embedding it in myspace or whatever, the "good quality" link isn't going to be there anyway.
Also, I see lots of videos (without choosing high quality) on youtube that looks great. I see good ones all the time that have all kinds of movement in them. Why are they sharp?? How come they look good?
thanks

[zoobie]

theres a huge thread here of over a thousand posts on this topic...try there

The standard quality is always going to look lousy, especially if there's movement in the videos.

[jman98]

I agree with zoobie - there is an insanely large thread about this very subject. Note that it is extremely difficult to submit video without You Tube re-encoding it and that's where the problem is. Wade through that massive thread if you want to know more on the subject. If you don't get everything exactly right with your submission, they'll re-encode it.

Welcome to the forums mstowe, but if your business depends on the quality of You Tube uploads, which is something you will NEVER be able to fully control, you have a broken business model. If this has nothing to do with business, well, maybe you just need to accept that this is just how things are with You Tube. You can try to improve the quality, but since ultimately YOU have no control at all over what You Tube does, is it really worth spending hours on it just to fail anyway?

[mstowe]

Well having videos on youtube is part of my business...I'm a musician and need to post regular live segments for promotional purposes. It's the only place to display video, and embed it in myspace pages etc.
I'll hunt around this forum for the thread on this subject that you've mentioned and see if I can get some answers. I just wish it was easier and less time consuming. Again, I see video that looks really good on youtube...so the statement that all video looks lousy hasn't proved itself to me. I just want to know the magic bullet that distinquishes the good looking stuff from the lousy.
Thanks a lot for the chat and I'll poke around and try to learn more.
Marg

[manono]

There are ways to embed the higher quality videos. It was explained in the thread, but as I have no interest in any of that, I didn't pay attention.

If you're a musician, perhaps the stereo version is important to you, but the only way to get that one is to manually add "&fmt=18" to the end of the URL. Then you'll get a 480x360 MP4 with decent sounding AAC stereo audio. The standard versions are all low bitrate video with low quality mono audio. There are things you can do to make them compress better and maybe look a bit better (like filtering them with spatial and/or temporal denoisers/cleaners), but in my opinion nothing at 320x240 is ever going to look very good. The big thread outlines some different methods of encoding them and optimizing the quality.

This is the thread to which zoobie and jman98 were referring:

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic336882.html

[mstowe]

Thanks so much! At least if I can embed the high quality...that's a start. It actually looks ok.
I'll check out the thread for details
...thanks again, Marg