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

[LordOfTheStrings]

Is there any way you can simplify this tutorial a bit?

I am completely new to advanced video editing techniques - I've never touched mencoder, and I cannot for the life of me understand Hex Editing.

All I know is that I created a very high quality video on my computer, and when I uploaded it to YouTube, it came out looking like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtiM-e3wiCc

Please help!

[45tripp]

Is there any way you can simplify this tutorial a bit?

It's simple enough.
Go through it step by step and you'll manage.

If you read through the thread you'll see nobody got stuck for long.

I am completely new to advanced video editing techniques - I've never touched mencoder,

Don't use mencoder.
Use ffmpeg and a gui. I've linked to Avanti.
It has a template ready.
Gui, template...
minimal input required.

and I cannot for the life of me understand Hex Editing.

It's simple.
Follow the steps. Use the program linked to, do what you see in the pictures...
I've even posted hex values for durations up to 11 minutes in single min increments.
It doesn't get easier than that.

gl

[Captain Satellite]

Almost nobody. I never could get my conversion to look as good as yours and didn't want to drag the Q and A on too long...

Is there any way you can simplify this tutorial a bit?

It's simple enough.
Go through it step by step and you'll manage.

If you read through the thread you'll see nobody got stuck for long.

I am completely new to advanced video editing techniques - I've never touched mencoder,

Don't use mencoder.
Use ffmpeg and a gui. I've linked to Avanti.
It has a template ready.
Gui, template...
minimal input required.

and I cannot for the life of me understand Hex Editing.

It's simple.
Follow the steps. Use the program linked to, do what you see in the pictures...
I've even posted hex values for durations up to 11 minutes in single min increments.
It doesn't get easier than that.

gl

[45tripp]

Almost nobody.

Nobody.
You completed the procedure successfully, yes?

I never could get my conversion to look as good as yours

That's filtering, a separate issue (beyond the scope of the guide).
I recall providing the exact filter parameters though.

but if you'd like to have another crack at it,
pm me with the specifics.

gl

[Captain Satellite]

45tripp,

My questions and posts can become very annoying because it takes me a while to comprehend what you're trying to convey. I didn't know how to load the parameters into avanti or am not even sure if that's where they go.

What I did upload to youtube had increased quality but the files were big and kept stopping to load up on computers that had not yet played them.

I thought I was doing really well until I asked somebody what they thought and they said they got impatient because the video kept hanging. I abandoned the whole thing and deemed my attempt a failure, not your procedure.

I appreciate your generous offer at helping me through PMs, but feel that your time could be better spent.

Here are my latest uploads. They need help no doubt.

Almost nobody.

Nobody.
You completed the procedure successfully, yes?

I never could get my conversion to look as good as yours

That's filtering, a separate issue (beyond the scope of the guide).
I recall providing the exact filter parameters though.

but if you'd like to have another crack at it,
pm me with the specifics.

gl

[45tripp]

pm me an untouched source.

[LordOfTheStrings]

Well, I decided to take a stab at it, and I have to say, wow. Incredible results. I can't post a link right now since I'm at work and I don't want to go on YouTube through their internet (you never know what might happen). Just check out my channel though, and you'll see it.

Awesome exploit though! Thanks for the tutorial 45tripp!

Now let's just hope that YouTube doesn't catch on and patch it up. =o

[halsboss]

[racer-x]

Great guide!!!

Ive never uploaded a video to youtube before, but this guide helped a lot. It allowed me to encode one of my brother's old music videos and upload it for him with good quality (for youtube), thank's!

Here's the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrVVtSIUXZ8

You may not understand the language, but the girls are pretty hot.

[hifipj]

Hi all,

I've been quietly following this thread and wanted to drop a quick note to thank everyone who has contributed. I have finally been successful in uploading HD videos to youtube without re-encoding, here's a sample of my work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xkJluPLrZk

As a content producer HD videos, I wanted to find a way to put some samples up on YT with the best possible quality, that's how I found this thread. I just wanted to add a couple quick things that might be of help to others looking to do the same thing, who haven't been successful yet.

First, again thanks to everyone who helped here, esp. 45tripp for his great guide.

here's what I would add to this knowledgebase:

First, the guide should be clearly delimited into 2 parts:
How to create a high-quality FLV that is in the correct format for YT pass-thru without re-encoding, and
How to modify the FLV using MediaInfo and Hexcellent to change the shown bitrate.

I know it is kind of divided this way, but at first when I started reading it, it seemed like ALL the steps were needed to have a successful result, and being not a big fan of using command-line software, I wasn't really excited about trying everything with mencoder or the other mentioned program. I am, however, very comfortable working/editing HDV in Adobe Premiere Pro (I use CS3), and Premiere has an FLV output option with the Adobe media encoder.

So I first tried that, first scaling the HDV to 448x336, then to 480x360. I tried a few bitrates, between 1500 and 4000kbps. Anyway, Adobe media encoder isn't the best downscaler in the world, the resulting video certainly looked good but had some jaggies on moving diagonal lines.

I ran into a problem when I tried to upload; I used the hex editor as instructed and checked the videos in MediaInfo; all the tests I tried to upload were between 300 and 345Kbps, and the other specs were in line with the suggestions. But whatever I tried, YT always insisted on reencoding. I was getting really frustrated, until I read the very fine print in one of 45tripp's replies, that you MUST use Sorenson encoding for the FLV, not VP6.

Repeat: you have to use SORENSON, any videos with VP6 will get re-encoded. This was a big bummer for because, in my opinion, Sorenson FLV encoding blows! Compared to VP6, using tests with HD source material, Sorenson consistently required about twice the bitrate to have the same quality of video (lack of pixellation, macroblocking, etc) as VP6. Encoding 480x360 FLVs for YT, I could get very good quality, with almost no macroblocking, at 2000Kbps using VP6. With Sorenson, I have to go to 3000-3500Kbps to get similar quality. I also tested both ways using Sorenson Squeeze 4.5, the VP6 videos still look better.

The next main thing I wanted to mention is that the suggested workflow isn't written in stone. You can do this quite easily if you are working with a nonlinear editor, like Premiere or Vegas, and can send out FLVs directly from the NLE. I ended up not doing that, getting better results by sending out a 1920x1080 AVI from premiere (via frameserving to TMPGExp), then encoding my FLVs in Sorenson Squeeze, using 2-pass VBR encoding. The quality was better this way than creating the FLVs straight from Premiere. So don't be scared if these directions sound daunting to create a YT-ready FLV, there are many ways to do it. I know the suggested method has the benefit of using free software, and this is definitely a big point if you don't have a NLE or Sorenson at your disposal.

Also, keep a close eye on that 27Mb maximum file size, it is right on. I ended up encoding my 1-minute videos at about 3700Kbps, then HEX'ing them to 10:59, which showed a reported bitrate around 340Kbps. And the file sizes are just under 27Mb.

Anyway, thanks again to everybody who posted on this thread, with a lot of trial and error I was able to come up with the workflow that's best for me, but I couldn't have gotten there without this thread.

Regards,
Patrick

[hifipj]

One other thing I forgot to mention:

Another side effect of the reported time being wrong, is that YT will give you a thumbnail image of your video ONLY from the first frame of the video. At least that's what it did for me, with several tests. Because when you think about it, if the reported time is, for example, 10 minutes, but your video is really only 1 minute, the sample images YT pulls from the middle and end will always be black. The only thumbnail that's usable will be from the very beginning of the video. So if you have a nice fade-in from black at the beginning of your video, like I usually do, your thumbnails will all show black once the video is uploaded.

Sorry if this was mentioned here before, I didn't see it and wanted to help those who may not know this.

[Captain Satellite]

hifipj,

I'm on broadband and your video is hanging/stopping A LOT. Same problem I had. Back to the drawing board.

[hifipj]

All the high-bitrate encoded videos do that. It's because you are downloading a 27Mb file, and unless your connection can stream 3700Kbps, it's going to hang while it is buffering.

Once the video is buffered completely, you just hit "replay" and it plays smoothly in real-time. I'm on a 56K connection and watching it play smoothly right now in real time.

I put instructions on my video's page to let people know they have to wait for it to load fully, then play. Also, you may need to right-click the video window, go into settings for flash player, and increase the amount of data youtube can store on your computer to Unlimited. This way it saves the entire clip in your browser cache and doesn't try to go and re-download it every time you play.

Regards,
Patrick


BTW--has anyone figured out a similar method that works for Yahoo! Video? I tried uploading a YT-ready high bitrate video to Yahoo, but it won't accept FLVs. Is there a way to get high bitrate videos onto Yahoo also, without re-encoding?

[hifipj]

Wow! I just came across this press release:

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/hughes/21018


YouTube to Stream High-Quality Videos Soon

Fri Nov 16, 2007 3:05AM EST

See Comments (2)

It's about time. YouTube co-founder Steve Chen told those attending the NewTeeVee Live conference today that YouTube will be streaming high-quality videos in about three months. Webware says the service is "testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer's Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if viewers want it."

Streaming video requires a lot of bandwidth, so in order to make the site's content available to everyone, they have to stream it at a fairly low bit rate. The resolution is not stellar, but for most of us, being able to watch videos quickly takes precedence over video quality.

Chen also told Webware that videos uploaded to YouTube have been stored in their native resolution, so once this new player rolls out, high-quality videos will be available immediately.

The video sharing site currently asks users to upload videos in MPEG-4 format, at a 640 x 480 resolution, even though videos are encoded into low-resolution Flash files and resized to a 320 x 240 resolution.

This is actually great news for YouTubers, and personally I'm glad the company isn't making us wait another year or two for this type of upgrade. Yay for YouTube!

[Captain Satellite]

45tripp accomplished results equal to yours without that problem, that is why I was so impressed. Others have done this as well. I uploaded a high quality video but it did the same thing as yours. Nice effort though.

Also, nobody is going to go through the trouble of reading instructions and configuring their computer to watch your videos. If they do, you've got some major fans out there.

All the high-bitrate encoded videos do that. It's because you are downloading a 27Mb file, and unless your connection can stream 3700Kbps, it's going to hang while it is buffering.

Once the video is buffered completely, you just hit "replay" and it plays smoothly in real-time. I'm on a 56K connection and watching it play smoothly right now in real time.

I put instructions on my video's page to let people know they have to wait for it to load fully, then play. Also, you may need to right-click the video window, go into settings for flash player, and increase the amount of data youtube can store on your computer to Unlimited. This way it saves the entire clip in your browser cache and doesn't try to go and re-download it every time you play.

Regards,
Patrick


BTW--has anyone figured out a similar method that works for Yahoo! Video? I tried uploading a YT-ready high bitrate video to Yahoo, but it won't accept FLVs. Is there a way to get high bitrate videos onto Yahoo also, without re-encoding?

[frifox]

WOAH, ive noticed that if you hex edit the duration, youtube's player on their page will misinterpret the duration... BUT their EMBED player, aka the one they give us to use for embedding our videos in external web page, interpret the duration properly!

9:06 HEXed to 11.00:
http://frifox.wordpress.com/youtube-hexed-duration/

25:08 HEXed to 10:32:
http://frifox.wordpress.com/youtube-25-minute-video/

[racer-x]

I like this method a lot. I've only joined Youtube yesterday and already posted 3 good quality (for youtube that is) videos. My latest is a sports clip I encoded @ 800 kbps and Hexed it from 1 to 3 min duration. It looks pretty good considering the high detail and motion.

Here's the 1 min clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOmP5F-RknY

[Captain Satellite]

That looks amazing, racer-x. My efforts have come nowhere near that.

[zoobie]

youTube has to take all those copywritten videos off once noticed.

I don't find any advantage in streaming vs downloading except you can see some of the footage and it's quality before finally viewing. Streaming seems to be more of a lame security technique to me than anything else.

[LordOfTheStrings]

If only there was a way to Hex Edit the bitrate itself. That way, we wouldn't have to mess with the duration, and we could upload longer videos with this type of quality.

I made a 3-minute video at 1250kbps, and used Hex Editor to bring the duration up to 11 minutes and the bitrate to 345kbps, but since 11 minutes is longer than 10 minutes, YouTube wouldn't accept it. =(

[frifox]

If only there was a way to Hex Edit the bitrate itself. That way, we wouldn't have to mess with the duration, and we could upload longer videos with this type of quality.

if i understood the process correctly, youtube CALCULATES total bitrate with the following function:

(FileSizeInKB / DurationInSeconds) * 8 = FinalBitrateInKbps

so as you see above, final bitrate is dictated by filesize and duration.... we can't fake file size, duh lol, but we CAN fake the duration 8)

[Neptuna_Fish]

Okay. Before I attempt to try this method out myself, I just want to be sure of a few things:

*deep breath* Am I correct in assuming that with this flv/hex hack we're creating a Trojan horse in that YouTube will interpret our videos as being within their limits (350k total bitrate, otherwise it'll undergo the dreaded re-encoding process), however the actual media info may reveal a video having a bitrate as large as 3600kbps and the audio with a bitrate of 320kbps and a sample rate of 48,000, BUT! the only real limitation on our part is that the video cannot exceed 25fps and must be encoded by the Sorenson codec? *wheezes*

About this Sorenson codec...I use SUPER for all of my encoding and transcoding or whatever, but when it comes time to encoding something with an flv wrapper (?...I'm total noob when it comes to terminology as well), there are no alternatives. Like, for example, if I were to select .avi as my container I would get a variety of output codecs to choose from (i.e., DivX, Xvid, H.263, H263+, etc), but when I choose FLV as the container, the only output codec option I have is FLV >_>; there is no vp6 or Sorenson or what have you to select.

*sigh*

There are other video sharing sites out there, like Blip.tv, that do not re-encode videos and impose time limits (total file size cannot exceed 1gig, though), but because YouTube will remain the most widely visited site of them all for some time, I'm willing to jump through all these hoops to upload the best possible quality that I'm able to.

Other great alternatives to YouTube that I know of:

- MegaVideo: 5gig max with no time limits (that I'm aware of) and no reprocessing (that I'm aware of).
- GUBA: I think videos can't exceed 500MBs, but there are no time limits (not that I'm aware of) and as long as the video is in .flv, no reprocessing...that I'm aware of.

[45tripp]

*deep breath* *wheezes* *sigh*

relax

Am I correct in assuming that with this flv/hex hack we're creating a Trojan horse

Yes.

however the actual media info may reveal a video having a bitrate as large as 3600kbps and the audio with a bitrate of 320kbps and a sample rate of 48,000, BUT! the only real limitation on our part is that the video cannot exceed 25fps and must be encoded by the Sorenson codec?

No
You can't have a sample rate of 48000 Hz in the flv container.
There are no framerate limitations.
The limitation is duration, or reported duration.

I choose FLV as the container, the only output codec option I have is FLV >_>; there is no vp6 or Sorenson or what have you to select.

That's the one.

vp6 won't work with this method.
I see hifipj mentioned that he thought vp6 was mentioned in fine print...
Well in the very first sentence of the guide I say this works with flv1, ie with nothing else.
I thought it specific enough but I'll edit and stress it.
And no super can't do vp6 anyway.

- GUBA:

Last time i tried GUBA, it's interface was exceptionally poor.

gl

[seven_deuce offsuit]

Is it possible to have DV video look as good? 10 minute DV video will suffer from the less than 350kbps method.

[Neptuna_Fish]

Wow. Pretty cool, 45tripp...but does the fps absolutely have to be below 25 or would the total bitrate be impossible to keep below 350k if it were any higher? Also, in YouTube, the video plays as though it has a lot of frames missing even after it loads. Do you have any idea why that could be?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=rrXlljXUdr8
The clip length is 55sec; Scale = 960x720; Aspect = 4:3; FPS = 23.976; Video bitrate = 3600kbps

The fuzz at the top is the fault of my dvd recorder (Panasonic DMR-ES15) or maybe there's something in the settings I need to tweak. It's a refurb that I bought from Fry's.

Edited to Add...

I guess I should include the copy of the clip should anyone care to compare the two and see what I'm talking about: http://www.flyupload.com/?fid=4518597

[Cornucopia]

...The fuzz at the top is the fault of my dvd recorder (Panasonic DMR-ES15) or maybe there's something in the settings I need to tweak. It's a refurb that I bought from Fry's...

That's not "fuzz", that's either VITC Timecode (SMPTE recorded in the vertical interval) or Closed Captioning, or both. And they're supposed to be there on broadcast clips. Your recorder is GOOD in that it is capable of capturing that as well as the picture (some strip it off first). This can be handy if you want to view CCs later on, or convert to DVD subtitles, or edit according to timecode, etc.

If you really don't want it on your web-distributed files, just crop it out (or mask with black to keep the rez the same) when compressing.

Scott

[Cornucopia]

Is it possible to have DV video look as good? 10 minute DV video will suffer from the less than 350kbps method.

As good as what?
__Original DV video? No.
__These other clips? Doubt it (most of those were from film sources). Depends on quality of your DV camera and your skill at shooting.
__Other GOOD uploaded files? Quite Possibly. Use good deinterlacer and resize algorithms first, and make sure you don't incorrectly mess with colorspace. (NTSC DV is 4:1:1, PAL DV is 4:2:0, IIRC). Apply NR filters as appropriate.

Scott

[bayme]

...

[pozole]

Hi everybody

I'm a newbie on all digital video stuff and this forum. I recently bought a Panasonic PV-GS320 3CCD camcorder that grabs great images and colors. I tried to upload some videos to youtube to show the quality of the image this camera renders, but all looked great on my computer, but looked like shit when uploaded to YouTube.

Then I came across this thread and followed the technique explained here.

This is the result of my first encoded video with this camera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FiMapmrr2s

Thanks to 45tripp for the technique.

[Captain Satellite]

That looks great. I'm using the same camera and mine looks like crap. I've officially given up.

Hi everybody

I'm a newbie on all digital video stuff and this forum. I recently bought a Panasonic PV-GS320 3CCD camcorder that grabs great images and colors. I tried to upload some videos to youtube to show the quality of the image this camera renders, but all looked great on my computer, but looked like shit when uploaded to YouTube.

Then I came across this thread and followed the technique explained here.

This is the result of my first encoded video with this camera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FiMapmrr2s

Thanks to 45tripp for the technique.