Personal Experience: Best results on YouTube?

[Xarathion]

Got a question for anyone experienced with YouTube.

I'm slightly annoyed with the visual quality of my videos on YouTube. I watch the videos of other people, and the quality is reasonably good. It's not perfect of course, but the image is crisp enough. Yet, all my video uploads seem to have more blur and lossy-ness problems than most.

The official page says that the best format is 320x240, DivX/XviD/etc... That is pretty much exactly what I do.

I edit the main project in Vegas. Export the video as a lossless avi, or huffyuv/lagarith avi, full resolution. Export the audio separately as wav, and convert it to properly compressed mp3 using BeSweet. I then go and import the lossless video into VirtualDubMod via Avisynth. I then resize, and letterbox if needed, down to 320x240, with AviSynth. Attach the mp3 audio stream. Setup XviD compression settings, do 2 passes, and I get the final product.

I don't vlog...my stuff on the site is usually short movies and other nonsense I make that has more action than the typical vlog, so I don't know if higher bitrates are playing a part or anything.

Does anyone have an effective method of uploading to YouTube, that yields good results? Because I'm doing exactly as they recommend, and it doesn't seem to be doing any good.

Thanks.

[Soopafresh]

Movement in your video is always an enemy of flv encoding.

The longer the video clip, the lower the overall bitrate.

Use an Avisynth plugin such as Addgrain, Mplayernoise, or Blockbuster to add artificial grain, forcing Youtube's flv encoder to allocate more bitrate to the image.

Since Youtube converts audio to 22050 64kbs (or less) mono, give them a mono signal.

Practice flv encoding by using ffmpeg (which is what Youtube uses), and a very low video bitrate. - 240-400kbs

[hech54]

I have about 50 vids on YouTube....their methods are not consistant. I just convert to .FLV with Riva beforehand and be done with it. YouTube is not for archiving anyway....it's just for a sample view to show people what is out there.

[sincostan]

The official page says that the best format is 320x240, DivX/XviD/etc... That is pretty much exactly what I do.

Does anyone have an effective method of uploading to YouTube, that yields good results? Because I'm doing exactly as they recommend, and it doesn't seem to be doing any good.

Thanks.

I'm no expert, but I found that the 320 x 240 thing they claim is a bunch of shit. 640 x 480 works much better, but in my personal experience, 512 x 384 is the best to upload videos in. (Unless you have a really long video (over 15 minutes) that needs to be in lower resolution so the bitrate can be distributed better across the video.)

Second, try to get your videos as close to 100MB as possible without going over, regardless of how long your video is. The shorter it is, the more crisp it will be. I don't know how you can change the filesize in Avisynth, but in VirtualDub, I do this by encoding in Divx and playing with the bitrate.

See what that does for you.