Youtube Upload, increase quality/control (HQ hack obsolete)

[Golgota]

lol yehhh saw that a while ago, this was discussed on another thread here how he took all the credit when he really got the info from here and publicised it on youtube lol glad he mentioned my name in the description XD

Then I FEAR that YouTube will pay more attention on our activities...

[harmster]

OMG!! Guys:

*dtfinch
*RajmanHD
*komikero
*bayme
*yawoo

You Got to pay attention on this:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9zDJ7Rf0MnU

lol yehhh saw that a while ago, this was discussed on another thread here how he took all the credit when he really got the info from here and publicised it on youtube lol glad he mentioned my name in the description XD

No wonder.. there's so many new comers - maybe one of them from Utube!!! Need to ask this guy to take out the link to this forum

[bayme]

Yes me too, I don't uderstand why YouTube converts a video at 700 kbps with stereo (&fmt=18), when it does not give any option to play it. It's just hidden from everyone, but for no reason it's on the server.
Could be something for the future broadcasts ?

Does it ever occur to you that these things have already been widely discussed on this forum? I posted the important links to the threads involved a few pages ago and it would really help to NOT see people post the same questions time and again.

And by the way, I'd take stereo (even for speech audio) over mono anytime, for any medium! I listen to my PC audio using headphones. The fact that you don't give a rat's ass about audio quality doesn't make you a better person or something.
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic346256-30.html#1814992
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic346256-90.html#1819020

Regarding the silly guy claiming to be the "HD HQ hacker" or whatever he calls it:
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic336882-390.html#1814412
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic346256-180.html#1825614

[dzvero007]

bayme, I didn't say that audio is not important to me. I'd prefer stereo over mono, too. But the fact that one video has better details, right duration time, not bugging (when advancing/seeking) and no buffering, I'd take the second. And I don't think that makes me "stupid" (maybe you?). Do not be fooled that every YouTube viewer pay attention to the video's audio. YouTube is big company, and if they have choosen all videos to be in mono, there is a reason. YouTube have many videos watched over 80,000,000 times, and I never saw somebody screams: "I don't like it, because it's in mono" (ah..., you'll scream). Do you understand what I mean?

Btw, by your links to back posts, I did not understand why YouTube hides stereo audio. The only thing I know is that pretty much every video has better quality with code "&fmt=18" (and it's in stereo if the video is recent,
I think after 20 May), but for old vids, the code "&fmt=6" does not work. Maybe in future they'll convert it.

P.S.: Why right duration is better? Because I now where exactly to seek the video and watch the part I want.

[Koppel]

Well heres my take on how to get hiquality videos on youtube.

Since flash player now supports streaming AVC, i uploaded some test files with video and audio settings suported by the latest flash player, some interesting facts:

1-conversion was fast

2- Got all 3 options on my first view, LQ, MP4 and HI Quality flash, that never happened to me before on my slow 512k connection

Audio: 96 bitrate/41000sample/LC/stereo
Video: 640x480 with a bitrate of 700k

3- this is the funny part, after 6 minutes i got a copyright claim from youtube, that was the fastesssssst ever. lol

here's an example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgYqNJH7QhQ - LQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgYqNJH7QhQ&fmt=18 - MP4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgYqNJH7QhQ&fmt=6 - HI QUALITY FLAH

How do you encode and with what?
I'd like to get the maximum quality without hacking because it has become such a pain in the ass. Before YT accepted *.flv files with bitrate under 350Kbps and I just uploaded these.
Now I don't know what to upload.

[ricardouk]

How do you encode and with what?

Avanti to the rescue again lol

[Koppel]

Thanks!
And you should always use these settings?
Audio: 96 bitrate/41000sample/LC/stereo - is this aac (Lib) or MP3 and what does LC stand for?
Video: 640x480 with a bitrate of 700k

Are higher resolutions and bitrate also OK? What about 448x252 for widescreen content?

EDIT: Damn, Avanti didn't start.

Process cancelled by FFmpeg which reports:
Nothing and returned immediately

EDIT2: Downloaded the latest FFmpeg beta revision 13778 and that fixed the problem.

I used Avisynth script as source:

DirectShowSource("C:\vids\myfile.mpg")
Lanczos4Resize(640,360)
AddBorders(0,60,0,60)

Original file is 720x576 anamorphic MPEG2 with 9800Kbps.
It produced few messages/warnings:

Error: 2pass curve failed to converge
target: 700.00 kbit/s, expected: 954.17 kbit/s, avg QP: 31.0000
try increasing target bitrate or increasing qp_max (currently 31)

Is this the way it should be?

[ricardouk]

Thanks!

You're welcome

And you should always use these settings?

its up to you, thats the ones that give better results to me

Audio: 96 bitrate/41000sample/LC/stereo - is this aac (Lib) or MP3 and what does LC stand for?

i use 128 for audio, LC stands for low complexity audio, its what the mp4 fmt=18 uses

Video: 640x480 with a bitrate of 700k

you have to take in consideration that this is the master copy that youtube will use for future conversions. if we think ahead 720 width would be good if the source allows it and 1000k for bitrate. but im happy with the rersults i posted earlier

Are higher resolutions and bitrate also OK? What about 448x252 for widescreen content?

i add black bars bottom/top for widscreen material, Avanti has a section where you can add black bars to widscreen sources

About the error messages, trythe avanti thread, are you using the h264 template? dont use the avisynth script and add black bars/resize with avanti, does the error still ocurr?
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic343287.html?highlight=avanti


in the next image i will add black bars to a 1280x720 widscreen avi source

[ricardouk]

Also ive done 3 more uploads using bitrates from 700k to 1000k, 640x480resolution, 128k aac lc and i got all 3 formats after 1 or 2 hours.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdQa8jbMO5w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdQa8jbMO5w&fmt=18

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdQa8jbMO5w&fmt=6

[dzvero007]

[bayme]

Audio: 96 bitrate/41000sample/LC/stereo - is this aac (Lib) or MP3 and what does LC stand for?

i use 128 for audio, LC stands for low complexity audio, its what the mp4 fmt=18 uses

Eeh.. I hope you know it's a re-encode to AAC LC by Google? So feeding it with AAC makes no sense. It's always best to keep the amount of transcoding to a minimum. You should use uncompressed wav audio instead.

[bayme]

also Bayme on another thread posted the following bat for mencoder but on running it it open a dos window and closes itself again.

"c:\megui\tools\mencoder\mencoder.exe" "s:\m_s448.avi" -o m_s.flv -mc 0 -ofps 25
-srate 44100 -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=2:q=8:aq=0:mode=1:lowpassfreq=16500
-ovc lavc -of lavf -lavfopts format=flv -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=300:keyint=200:
mbd=2:trell:v4mv:aic:cbp:last_pred=3:predia=4:dia=4:preme=2:vratetol=900:vpass=1

"c:\megui\tools\mencoder\mencoder.exe" "s:\m_s448.avi" -o m_s.flv -mc 0 -ofps 25
-srate 44100 -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=2:q=8:aq=0:mode=1:lowpassfreq=16500
-ovc lavc -of lavf -lavfopts format=flv -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=300:keyint=200:
mbd=2:trell:v4mv:aic:cbp:last_pred=3:predia=4:dia=4:preme=2:vratetol=900:vpass=2

what im i doing wrong?

By the way, just so you know:
This was meGUI's fault. It was using a wrong version of mencoder after the last couple of updates of MeGUI.
The only decent win32 binaries of mencoder (and ffmpeg) are always here (in my experience): http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php
( see also http://jthz.com/puter/software/to_flv.bat )

[vhelp]

Hi recardo,

You didn't say much about your last two upload sessions to YT, whether or not those videos
were treated by any of the hack methods. So, it seems we have a possible other alternative..
to encode intially to mp4 @ 640x480 w/ decent amount of bitrate and then upload those to YT.
In your first UL to YT, I liked the .mp4 version the best, obviously. It was very good, and i'm going
with the impression that you didnt' apply any of the hacks to them. Yeah, nice music video,
by the way. Thank you.

--> https://forum.videohelp.com/topic336882-810.html#1860796

-vhelp 4736

[ricardouk]

Sorry i forgot to mention, didnt apply any hacks.

just looking for the better upload format.

bayme i could use umcompressed WAV but it would take a better part of half a day just to upload the audio and that is if the intenet connection doesnt fail. If you have a really fast net connection it isnt a problem.

Probably 192k for audio is a better choice for someone that has a slow connection

[ShinigamiHamster]

Sorry people, but I'm gonna have to ask this.

I'm either too stupid to understand the guide on the first page, or it doesn't tell me exactly what I need.

Either way, there's just no way I'm gonna read through all 29 pages.

It would just be way too much info anyway.



What I want to do is this:

I've got some finished videos in .AVI containers, with .WAV sound and XviD for
the video (very high bitrate, looks basically lossless)... The videos are in 480x360.

Now, what I want to do is upload them to YouTube, and keep the original resolution (480x360).

I would also want to convert the video to an .FLV first, so that it doesn't get re-converted
by YouTube later. That way I can have control over the quality, as well as the resolution.

I'd want the audio to be at the very least 128 kbps. But, preferably around 256 kbps.



Now, what's the easiest way to do this?

Remember, I'm 100% noob at this -- so throwing various command lines
and such stuff at me will most likely just bounce off. Talk to me like I'm a little child.

Help with this would be greatly appreciated...

[harmster]

Guys since Frifox has gone .... I think Im getting close as Ive had a video up for 20 hours and its untouched with no pixelated thumbnail XD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S7lfrKR6CU
Will have to wait 48 hours like many are saying to see if it goes untouched, but Im quite confident ive found out another way and testing that at the moment

Rajman... what's the status for your video the one with clear thumbnail? is it being converted as 3 of my video (keep private - without pixelated thumbnail) being converted after 48hrs... no luck.

[ricardouk]

Either way, there's just no way I'm gonna read through all 29 pages.

just upload the Xvid as it is if you have a fast connection, that way you´ll have a good source on youtube servers for future conversions.

[ShinigamiHamster]

just upload the Xvid as it is if you have a fast connection, that way you´ll have a good source on youtube servers for future conversions.

That's no good, if I do that YouTube will reconvert the files
and lower the res to 320x240, and also, the audio will suck.

Oh yeah, I don't care much for the "Watch in high quality" option on YouTube...
I want my videos to be 480x360 by default for everyone who may stumble across them.

I'm playing around with Avanti at the moment,
converting with the default UNI_FLASH_HQ.tpl template.

It seems to work. Only catch is, I want at least 128 kbps for the audio*,
so that leaves me with around 212 kbps for the video, so that the combined bitrate stays under 350.

*because the sound has already been reconverted, with lossy codecs, and the "source" probably wasn't of the best quality...

Is it possible to convert to .FLV with Avanti, and have a video bitrate of, let's say, 500, and audio at 224 kbps,
and then hexedit the resulting .FLV file to fake the bitrate - so that YouTube thinks it's below 350 kbps?

If so, could you - or someone - tell me how to do that hexediting? Or point to a page with that info.

I know Virtual Dub has an Hex Editor built in, but I got no clue how to properly use it.

[bayme]

I've got some finished videos in .AVI containers, with .WAV sound and XviD for
the video (very high bitrate, looks basically lossless)... The videos are in 480x360.

As Ricardo wrote; I would just upload them as is. With the wav audio and high-bitrate video. In any case, I would definitely NOT rescale the 480x360, or change the audio under the video. If you upload them as they are, you'll skip unneeded (quality degrading) transcoding and conversions.

Sure, you can try and bypass YT conversion for the 'low bitrate standard playable FLV1', but it would leave you with only a standard FLV playable file, in which case you might miss the option of later conversions and possibly even the fmt 18 and fmt 6 quality versions either way.

The above only applies if you *don't* think your video could use sharpening or any other filter *before* you want them online. If you do not yet have the video in a final format, and you have a fast upload speed, you could go this route:

Some hints for the highest possible quality file to give to YouTube:

- Use 25 frames/sec all the way. Try to *record* your video at 25 fps progressive, not interlaced, as well.
- If needed resize to 640x480, and if your aspect ratio isn't 4:3 use letterboxing (i.e. add black bars on top and bottom), VirtualDub lets you easily deal with that under the resize filter.

- Try encoding singlepass lossless with the x264 codec and upload the result using YouTube's uploader. As long as it's under the 1 GB maximum size, that'll give the highest quality result.
- Use uncompressed wav audio in it, because re-encoding (transcoding) audio from one lossy compressed format to another sucks, big time. Use 44.1 kHz samplefrequency, 2 channels (i.e. stereo), 24 bits, or 16 bits PCM.

- If you can't fit your video in 1 GB with a singlepass lossless x264 encode, use Singlepass Rate Factor based (i.e. CRF) encoding with the x264 codec. Start at Quantizer 1 (highest quality) and check if size gets you below the 1 GB limit. If it's still too big, use a higher quantizer value. You can easily go up to 10 and still get amazing video quality with x264.

By the way, contrary to popular belief, x264 and VfW are entirely up to date and perfectly fine these days. (Don't let Google hits about this fool you.) http://sourceforge.net/projects/x264vfw/

P.S. I recommend trying dailymotion or vimeo. They're more stable, reliable, and if your content is your own, you can upload AND embed video as HD, and longer than 20 minutes. Check this out:
http://www.dailymotion.com/faq#what_motionmaker
http://www.dailymotion.com/hd/video/x5hzav
http://vimeo.com/hd

[Koppel]

Uploading massive files to Youtube sucks. Youtube should develop a program that does the encoding in our own computers and then we could just upload the standard quality *.flv, and the high quality *.flv to them. Everybody wins! We have better quality, they don't need to encode.

Has anyone e-mailed the youtube staff about this?

Re-encoding over and over just isn't normal, nor is uploading uncompressed or lossless videos just so they could look a little less like crap.

[bayme]

Uploading massive files to Youtube sucks. Youtube should develop a program that does the encoding in our own computers and then we could just upload the standard quality *.flv, and the high quality *.flv to them. Everybody wins! We have better quality, they don't need to encode.

Has anyone e-mailed the youtube staff about this?

Re-encoding over and over just isn't normal, nor is uploading uncompressed or lossless videos just so they could look a little less like crap.

YouTube/Google staff is reading here now. We have written confirmation of that (see the other big YT-thread for this).

I actually agree with the essence of your idea, but it should be made optional. Just so 'the experts' can use it if they want to. And the formats they prefer should be really thoroughly described by YT/Google, so they can check for abuse of *their* websites and servers (which is of course still the case, we're not paying them a dime!).

As for uploading large files to YouTube;
For me that's not a big issue, I have 8 Megabytes/sec upstream connectivity at work, so a Gigabyte file doesn't really take that long to transfer. Also, you could argue that YT/GV are always 'in beta', so the fact that they can keep your source videofile is perfect in that they don't have to bother you if they decide to use a new video-technology, a new player, a new codec etc. Who knows what the future will bring us? H.265 video. Better to upload the raw file now than to have to do that later after all. It's not like Google doesn't have enough storage space to keep your backups. Last but not least:
Having your video viewable worldwide used to be a really BIG thing. For me it still is. I've spent hours to have to upload a 100 kilobytes file to a BBS 20 years ago, just so it would be out there and available for download. If you want to reach the world, a quality upload dedication is useful. Makes sense, to me anyway.

[ricardouk]

After 29 pages i see that some people still hold on to the idea of uploading a video that was hexefied, people are thinking about hopw the video looks now,.

The best way to get good quality videos is to upload a good source. Hexefying videos is a bad idea, since youtube can at any moment decide to recovert every single file hexefied or not.

For example, i started to upload flv videos under >350, yeah they looked ok and it didnt take long to upload them, all of sudden youtube starts converting them to mp4, so all my videos that i uploaded look like crap when converted to MP4.

Moral of the story:
Upload good sources.

if you want to show HD videos, and i mean HD not higher quality, use Blip.tv that wont reconvertr your videos or use Dailymotion like Bayme said.

[Spritemoney]

Look! One way so the hacks can still work, we gotta stop putting HD or HQ in our vid titles, and more, then if youtube noticed, then they will block it, when VMuTube was around, i never said [hq] or [hd] i didn;t do that, cuz i don't want ppl to ask me, and i don't want the VMuTube hack to go away (now it's gone)

[vhelp]

recardo,

Funny, I was going to bring that up and mention it too, but you beat me to it

Yeah, I'm starting to agree.. that hexing is prob not a good thing to focus on nowadays. yeah But
don't let that stop anyone who believes differently. When I saw the last two files from recardo,
that was good enough for me to reconsider my position on this hacking stuff. (I still get ideas, though)
But I think that the YT encodings are getting better.. that is, at least with the MP4 versions.. those
that I've seen lately.

..more to say on this, but I'll save'em until I can finish up on something that I am sculpturing
up for the next wave in the hunt for 'preparing quality youtube videos'.

Until then..

-vhelp 4737

[Spartacomp]

if you are bad at HEX-ing, here's an alternative (which also does NOT produce gray-artifacts hehe):

• Make 16x12 black PNG image in Photoshop
• Save it as "16x12.png" to folder where FFMPEG resides
• Open CMD, and browse to the folder with FFMPEG and 16x12.png
• Run this command:
  ffmpeg -loop_input -f image2 -i 16x12.png -vcodec flv -r 25 -g 1 -t .04 -sameq pad-16x12.flv
  *** the code above, will make a 16x12 FLV video lasting only 1 frame (40miliseconds)
• combina that one 16x12-frame FLV video to your actual FLV video:
  FlvBind uTubeVideo-patched.flv pad-16x12.flv uTubeVideo.flv
  *** for the command above, you'll need "FlvBind" program... google for it and you'll find it, first link
• upload the produced "uTubeVideo-patched.flv" video
• uploaded video will have pixelated thumbnail, but it will stay HQ

Hi Frifox,

First of all, thanks for providing so much help!

I am a Dutch musician and since a few days I did not even know what ffmpeg was! After days of struggling I finally managed to get it working on my computer. I also managed to get a test clip in permanent stereo on youtube using the W16 or 16x12 method (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z283Neq6gUE), but now I would like to merge the 2 flv's to get a complete video clip. And this is where I get stuck.

In your comment above you present a command to change a png into a 40ms flv. When I use that command, I get this message:

$ ffmpeg -loop_input -f image2 -i 16x12.png -vcodec flv -r 25 -g 1 -t .04 -same
q pad-16x12.flv
FFmpeg version UNKNOWN, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --enable-memalign-hack
libavutil version: 49.7.0
libavcodec version: 51.57.2
libavformat version: 52.16.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
built on Jun 27 2008 12:04:17, gcc: 3.4.5 (mingw-vista special r3)
[image2 @ 0074FBD0]Could not find codec parameters (Video: 0x0000)
16x12.png: could not find codec parameters


Could you please help me out here, as I am nearly finished completing an utterly frustrating job!!

Btw: thanks for helping us musicians to be able to present our work as it should be, in STEREO !!

[ricardouk]

Spartacomp you dont need a hack to have music in stereo on youtube:
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic336882-810.html#1860606

Example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnhswI3xGKw

[rajman]

Spartacomp you dont need a hack to have music in stereo on youtube:
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic336882-810.html#1860606

Example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnhswI3xGKw

The only thing with this is that we can only have picture+audio in Stereo! I tried a few times encoding videos with this (all <350kbps) but they turn to LQ very quickly =(

[ricardouk]

Ive tried after and still works, did you use the settings that i posted?

[rajman]

Ive tried after and still works, did you use the settings that i posted?

Yehhh it works if you use a picture (jpg,png etc) as Source 1 and audio (mp3,wav etc) as Source 2! But Im on about actual motion videos, videos dont work with this program! Ive tried converting AVI,WMV,MPG,MP4 to FLV...which all convert yes but they all get re-encoded by youtube even if the total bitrate is <350kbps

[ricardouk]

rajman, Spartacomp was asking about music since he is a musician i thought he meant just audio, thats why i suggested that method.

if you want stereo, just view the mP4 version, if you have a site where you share your work just put the MP4 link instead of the normal one, all you have to do is upload a good source