YouTube offering higher quality video / Stage6 ends services!

[NiuuS]

The padded flv was rendered to divx in vegas platinum (was before bayme posted a link for x264 codec, which is more efficient & looks like a bigger colorspace!), 480x360 (4:3 YT player size), to flv in mencoder - only one resizing total. Was trying to hold the bit rate down so that it might not buffer in the player. There is also .2 quickblur (a small amount of blur in sony vegas). The scene with the headlights moving up and down where Leeloo is about to jump has blocking.

Will you share your DivX settings? (bitrate, maybe you used Multi-pass, Quarter-Pixel search, Global Motion compensation, quantization [H.263 or optimized], type of interlace, psychovisual enhancements, enhance i-blocks, etc.) and what were your settings in mencoder, of course (don't know the program so it will be my first time).

And a noob question: when you talk about "padded flv" you're talking about you own FLV encoding so YT doesn't reencode?

Thx in advance.

[bayme]

There is also .2 quickblur (a small amount of blur in sony vegas).

Do you mean the motion blur per track, or do you apply it over everything? Why would you want to? Is blurring required for DivX or something? Any encode by YouTube smoothes and blurs enough as it is.

@NiuuS:
YT does not require DivX for HQ in my experience. Probably depends on your (strange) resolution if YT does not post the HQ link. Black bars don't take up much extra in compression, so that blog you got that resolution from is actually not good advice at all. Always use 4:3 resolutions dividable by 16:

640 x 480
576 x 432
512 x 384
448 x 336
384 x 288
320 x 240

And because YT plays back at 480 x 360 you could argue that this is a good target size.

mencoder settings I've just linked to in several posts before this one.
These are copy-pasted from a recent bat-file I used:

"c:\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:\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

These should be 2 long lines of text in a .bat file. Change values to your prefs.
Audio used only 49 kbit/s with this video. It's no longer on YT by the way. Taken down by the sick infringement police.

[benrtc]

NiuuS wrote:
Will you share your DivX settings? (bitrate, maybe you used Multi-pass, Quarter-Pixel search, Global Motion compensation, quantization [H.263 or optimized], type of interlace, psychovisual enhancements, enhance i-blocks, etc.) and what were your settings in mencoder, of course (don't know the program so it will be my first time).

And a noob question: when you talk about "padded flv" you're talking about you own FLV encoding so YT doesn't reencode?

I looked at your video "Cortometraje - SombraS". What camcorder is it? I don't know anything about the source which I assume is interlaced nor the quality of the camcorder.

The uploaded flv fifth element clip is obviously high quality source from a DVD and encoded in vegas with mostly default divx settings at 480x360 (4:3 YT player frame size) 3Mbps, no deinterlace - it is 23.97fps progressive after ivtc. The longer version is in x264 and converted by YT.

In your movie I notice judder when there's panning. You changed frame rates when re-encoding at some point. If your cam is 29.97 fps, the rate can be 14.985 (half NTSC), but you used a frame rate that divides unevenly into the source frame rate, causing judder, or uneven temporal spacing between frames. Whether padded file flv (with sufficient bit rate) or YT's new h.264, they can handle your source frame rate.

Padded file: Say you have 2 minutes of video in your editor. Then you append the video with 1 minutes of text with solid color background having the same properties as the video, like frame rate and size. When you encode the flv, the resultant bitrate is higher for the vid and lower for the padding, lowering the overall bit rate. Yes, the goal is to stay below 350Kbps to avoid YT re-encoding the uploaded flv file. I use MediaInfo to check the total bitrate.

[benrtc]

bayme wrote:

Do you mean the motion blur per track, or do you apply it over everything? Why would you want to? Is blurring required for DivX or something? Any encode by YouTube smoothes and blurs enough as it is.

No, it's just plain blur for the track. The long fifth element clip is x264 and I used quickblur. It's an attempt to lessen the load on the codec. Blocking during fast action is more annoying to me than a little less sharpness. But blocking still occurs, like the the moving headlights on a light background. If there's little action then sharpening is fine but just too lazy to do keyframe controller entries every time there's action. I need to up the bit rate though.

[Boulotaur2024]

Just did a test with a huge upload ~ 868Mb of a Huffyuv lancsoz4 resized video from 1080p to 480x272 :
I'm a bit disappointed because it looks very blocky especially on Rihanna's face (see screen below). I wonder if a bit of postprocessing/filtering on the client-side like Dailymotion does wouldn't be a good idea for YT too

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz6gOPMvp7A&fmt=18 ( you don't need sound )

.

Damn we have to find a way to upload our own encoded videos, just like we did before with the 350 Kbps limit. those artefacts shouldn't be so apparent (sorry for my bad english, oh and I just woke up lol).

EDIT : granted the source was very good but not perfect : see that ugly greenish line on the left side ? I should have cropped it before uploading :/ *But* it's not an excuse for that disappointing final result I guess...

[bayme]

Just did a test with a huge upload ~ 868Mb of a Huffyuv lancsoz4 resized video from 1080p to 480x272 :
I'm a bit disappointed because it looks very blocky especially on Rihanna's face (see screen below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz6gOPMvp7A&fmt=18 ( you don't need sound )

This one's very revealing of the current flaws in how Google encodes to H.264 'high quality'. Their compression is not quick in adapting, clearly. Not using enough predictions either. They've decided on encoding speed, rather than quality. Don't like it when people do that. I can wait 2 hours longer as long as the video is encoded with maximum quality in mind. Audio is also very much double-processed. Sounds like auto-rec-level from those cassette-decks back in the old days...

But let's not get cranky just yet, and give them some time to adjust things. It's amazing enough as it is, that they're offering the world in the vicinity of 40 petabytes of videodata each day, and don't ask for anything. I would just like to see more tech-posts, blogs from its developers, from those working on it, so we know some more about their intentions and plans.

Dailymotion is indeed getting quite good now. They had stereo audio at 96 kbit/s from the get-go. Their smoothing is too heavy in my opinion, and un-smoothed is too blocky. YT smooths as well, but is somewhere in between, which I think is fine.

[k.]

[NiuuS]

I looked at your video "Cortometraje - SombraS". What camcorder is it? I don't know anything about the source which I assume is interlaced nor the quality of the camcorder.

Hi! the cameras used in this shortfilm are: Canon XL2 for most of the film, and a Sony HDR-HC1 only in the 'hallway' and 'bathroom' scenes. All recorded@29.97, interlaced.

The uploaded flv fifth element clip is obviously high quality source from a DVD and encoded in vegas with mostly default divx settings at 480x360 (4:3 YT player frame size) 3Mbps, no deinterlace - it is 23.97fps progressive after ivtc. The longer version is in x264 and converted by YT.

I used 480*360, 448*336, and sadly they only give me a stretched picture when viewed in YT. The only one working for me is the one used in the link of the guide i posted before, which is 448*252. Only downside is that if i use &fmt=18 the picture gets a bit more squashed vertically! Damn my luck

Any suggestion in this particular field?

In your movie I notice judder when there's panning. You changed frame rates when re-encoding at some point. If your cam is 29.97 fps, the rate can be 14.985 (half NTSC), but you used a frame rate that divides unevenly into the source frame rate, causing judder, or uneven temporal spacing between frames. Whether padded file flv (with sufficient bit rate) or YT's new h.264, they can handle your source frame rate.

Well, i didn't changed any framerate settings, but maybe it's related to the two different cameras used, and it's different "24p" simulations? XL2 supposedly does 24p, but with the Sony we used the CineFrame mode to match the materials.

Padded file: Say you have 2 minutes of video in your editor. Then you append the video with 1 minutes of text with solid color background having the same properties as the video, like frame rate and size. When you encode the flv, the resultant bitrate is higher for the vid and lower for the padding, lowering the overall bit rate. Yes, the goal is to stay below 350Kbps to avoid YT re-encoding the uploaded flv file. I use MediaInfo to check the total bitrate.

Would the shortfilm credits suffice for that task?

@NiuuS:
YT does not require DivX for HQ in my experience. Probably depends on your (strange) resolution if YT does not post the HQ link. Black bars don't take up much extra in compression, so that blog you got that resolution from is actually not good advice at all. Always use 4:3 resolutions dividable by 16:

640 x 480
576 x 432
512 x 384
448 x 336
384 x 288
320 x 240

Yep, i know DivX it's not a formal requirement, but it's the only one working for me if i want to use the &fmt=18. x264 just gives me the same video .

And with the resolutions, 448*252 shamefully is the only one respecting the black bars, at the cost mentioned earlier :P. I'll try using your mencoder settings and see what happens.


Thanks for everyone's help, hopefully i can keep learning from your tips and make that "miraculous" trick to upload decent quality video to YT 8)


EDIT: tried with Boulotaur2024 resolution, 480*272, it also works for me, respecting the black bars. Sadly, can't use &fmt=18 (no quality increase, and no "Low quality" link). I'm gonna try some extreme measures (like uploading a 720*480 DV clip) to see the difference. I'm also experimenting with "De-interlace source" option in DivX, would you rather use Vdub (if so, what deinterlace option, since there are a handful) or rather export the DV again out of Premiere using No fields (progressive) in the "Keyframe and Rendering" export zone?

[bayme]

I used 480*360, 448*336, and sadly they only give me a stretched picture when viewed in YT.8.

This can't be. So you're saying you uploaded a 480x360 video and it got stretched? This means you've set it to use a non-square pixel aspect or something. Be sure you render your video with no field order (progressive scan), ignoring interlacing, with a pixel aspect of 1.000 (meaning square, NOT rectangular) - Not to be confused with Aspect Ratio, which should end up as 4:3 with black bars.

[NiuuS]

I used 480*360, 448*336, and sadly they only give me a stretched picture when viewed in YT.8.

This can't be. So you're saying you uploaded a 480x360 video and it got stretched? This means you've set it to use a non-square pixel aspect or something. Be sure you render your video with no field order (progressive scan), ignoring interlacing, with a pixel aspect of 1.000 (meaning square, NOT rectangular) - Not to be confused with Aspect Ratio, which should end up as 4:3 with black bars.

Ok, gonna try right now. I'll post the results in some minutes.


EDIT: should i tick "Deinterlace Video Footage" or is selecting No Fields enough?
EDIT2: tried both, but GSpot is still reporting me Interlaced video. Oh well.
EDIT3: using 0.9 for aspect ratio works, now 480*360 is not stretched anymore, although is not giving me HQ option. Gonna try with 448*336 like you said below, which i agree.

[bayme]

EDIT: should i tick "Deinterlace Video Footage" or is selecting No Fields enough?

No fields. And I wouldn't even de-interlace, depending on how bad it looks (YT does enough smear and smoothing already..). Gspot isn't always trustworthy.
Either way, it's the pixel aspect that might stretch it.. (This could just be a 1 that needs to be a 0 somewhere in the header of the video.) If you do resize in Vdub, set it to Keep the original aspect ratio, only change size with letterbox bars, use Lanczos in the resize config.

By the way, if you encode to 349 kbit/s FLV1 with mencoder, know that the amount of pixels is crucial for quality. I'd recommend not to go larger than 448x336 with only 350 kbit/s on YT. If you create one at 480x360 chances are pretty high you'll see a lot of artifacts already.. the surface is just too large to compress for that bandwidth. It might work if you have black bars though..

[benrtc]

NiuuS wrote:

used 480*360, 448*336, and sadly they only give me a stretched picture when viewed in YT. The only one working for me is the one used in the link of the guide i posted before, which is 448*252. Only downside is that if i use &fmt=18 the picture gets a bit more squashed vertically! Damn my luck

Perhaps you might look into another editor? This vegas platinum, you just type in 480x360 (or whatever 4:3 frame size) and 1:1 pixels into the preview settings and the preview looks correct. The upper/lower black bars are supplied automatically. Do the same with the rendering template when time to encode.

Well, i didn't changed any framerate settings, but maybe it's related to the two different cameras used, and it's different "24p" simulations? XL2 supposedly does 24p, but with the Sony we used the CineFrame mode to match the materials.

That's interesting. I have a DCR-SR100 and am looking at the HD cams out there. Do you mean the Cinematic mode on the Sony? I don't know if it's causing problems. Their literature says "the HDR-HC1 Cinematic mode lends 24 frame film-like effect to your recordings." - you should run some tests. Some encoders with too low a bit rate really chop up or drop frames if they just run out of bits and looks like judder. You're using good cams so it's just making sure the editor and encoding is set right and that all cams are shooting at the desired frame rate depending what want to do with it in the future.

I tried a small clip from a canon HV20 demo H264 9Mbps 1888x1062 29.97fps. Uploaded x264 480x360, gspot says 3409Kbps, no effects added, no blur etc. source frame rate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcaYgZoVIOE&&fmt=18 (edit: deleted)

[NiuuS]

Perhaps you might look into another editor? This vegas platinum, you just type in 480x360 (or whatever 4:3 frame size) and 1:1 pixels into the preview settings and the preview looks correct. The upper/lower black bars are supplied automatically. Do the same with the rendering template when time to encode.

I fixed that with a tip given, i just had to use 0.9 for the Pixel Aspect Ratio and BAM! instant widescreen trapped in 4:3 . Many times one ends up forgetting simple/stupid things like that :P

That's interesting. I have a DCR-SR100 and am looking at the HD cams out there. Do you mean the Cinematic mode on the Sony? I don't know if it's causing problems.

Yep, in some models it's just called "Cinema Mode". Haven't had any problems so far using it (Sony HDR-HC1 to avoid any confusion). There's even a trick to extract 23.976fps, but only if you use the HD mode also. Haven't seen the same trick with DV only.

I tried a small clip from a canon HV20 demo H264 9Mbps 1888x1062 29.97fps. Uploaded x264 480x360, gspot says 3409Kbps, no effects added, no blur etc. source frame rate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lbhTnKaObI&fmt=18

Looks very nice. I'm uploading an x264@3000 kbps as a result of watching that vid . I'm waiting for it to be ready in YT, but to be honest i'm pessimistic, everything i upload gets incredibly fugly & blurry. So many tries...

[benrtc]

NiuuS wrote:

fixed that with a tip given, i just had to use 0.9 for the Pixel Aspect Ratio and BAM! instant widescreen trapped in 4:3 . Many times one ends up forgetting simple/stupid things like that

I just now tried 0.9091 in vegas (to refresh my memory) with the preview size as 480x360 and it indicates a 436x360 preview. Set it to 1.0 and it's 480x360. At 0.9 the vid frame size is no longer 16:9 (480x270), has slightly blurred top and bottom bars, is something like 480x245. It plays on a typical player as 4:3 but with taller black bars. When I was starting out I noticed something slightly wrong with the aspect ratio so I shot some vid of a round coffee can lid and fooled around with the settings. 0.9 and 1.0 are kinda close and the former produced a slightly ellipticall lid.
Here's a pic of the two different settings in the player. The neck of the shaker on the 0.9 is slightly out of round, but without a round object facing the camera it might go unnoticed. http://www.geocities.com/alpha2alpha21/compare.jpg

[NiuuS]

0.9 and 1.0 are kinda close and the former produced a slightly ellipticall lid.
Here's a pic of the two different settings in the player. The neck of the shaker on the 0.9 is slightly out of round, but without a round object facing the camera it might go unnoticed. http://www.geocities.com/alpha2alpha21/compare.jpg

Well, i selected 1.0 at first but it would fallback to 0.9 anyway, since that's what DV NTSC (4:3) uses.

Oh, and the last x264 i uploaded, looks... like $h1t. This one gets the crown of blurriness. I even uploaded DV material, and looks incredibly... BAD.

I really don't know what else to do. Almost 28 hours encoding and uploading stuff, i'm starting to give up.

[bayme]

I just now tried 0.9091 in vegas (to refresh my memory) with the preview size as 480x360 and it indicates a 436x360 preview. Set it to 1.0 and it's 480x360. At 0.9 the vid frame size is no longer 16:9 (480x270), has slightly blurred top and bottom bars, is something like 480x245. It plays on a typical player as 4:3 but with taller black bars. When I was starting out I noticed something slightly wrong with the aspect ratio so I shot some vid of a round coffee can lid and fooled around with the settings. 0.9 and 1.0 are kinda close and the former produced a slightly ellipticall lid.
Here's a pic of the two different settings in the player. The neck of the shaker on the 0.9 is slightly out of round, but without a round object facing the camera it might go unnoticed. http://www.geocities.com/alpha2alpha21/compare.jpg

The important thing here, which you may overlook;

You have to set the source pixel AR, as well as the render/save/target pixel AR, in editors like Vegas and Premiere. The source one needs to really be set correctly to what the used video-material was recorded/stored as, before rendering it to 1.000 pixel AR, or you'll mess up somewhere guaranteed..

Square 	       1.000 <- what YouTube wants..
D1/DV PAL        1.064
D1/DV PAL 16:9   1.4587
D1/DV NTSC       0.9117
D1/DV NTSC 16:9  1.2121
1280x720         1.000
1440x1080 (HDV)  1.333
1920x1080        1.000

all of the above :1

[benrtc]

Yes. To get the 0.9 on purpose, I had to set the source preview and the render template as well. When I didn't do it in the preview it was 1:1 when the render was set 0.9.

[benrtc]

I thought the ar was a little off in the Cortometraje - SombraS vid. which is why I brought it up but it really doesn't apply. I've been watching the 6 and 12 versions and they are fine - their vid size is 480x270. the H264 is really off, way more than the difference I was pointing to. Yeah, just to be sure the letterbox should be in place for YT.

[T-Kimura]

i have a question, what video codec/settings do you need to use to get youtube to automatically display your video in high quality if the user has his or her options to view high quality videos if they are available? i want to make all my vids available in high quality without people having to add &fmt=18 or &fmt=6 at the end of the video link all the time.

[benrtc]

YT is at the experimental stage. They have options on your account page but it appears they haven't enabled them yet. If you have good bandwidth the HQ would play automatically. I hope they go with the stereo audio format.

[Boulotaur2024]

Another attempt with a BBC HD video sample :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0hf8Q-UX-M&fmt=18



Looks a tad better here I think, with a polished sharpened source like this.

edit (27/03) : real laggy playback since the beginning I've noticed, bayme told me it was a "connections alive" Youtube related issue, which explains the laggyness and also the fact it abruptly stops in the middle of the video sometimes. Doesn't get better since the day I uploaded it unfortunately.

@ benrtc : x264 1 single-pass lossless and ac3.

[benrtc]

It looks real good. Real sharp coming from HD. Quite a load on the encoder. I prefer to blur slightly to lessen the blocking. Was the upload in huffyuv? Was it PCM or MP3?

[Denizzje]

Another attempt with a BBC HD video sample :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0hf8Q-UX-M&fmt=18

Looks a tad better here I think, with a polished sharpened source like this.

edit for benrtc : x264 1 single-pass lossless and ac3.

It is evident that Youtube should increase its videobitrate with another 100/200kb/s. Some of the scenes in your sample are just plain ugly. Alot of smearing in the background for example. Though the opening looks very nice (only some compression artifacts around the mountain edges).

[Boulotaur2024]

I agree but I don't think YT will bring more finetuning from now on; Last night I was browsing through my favorites and 80% of them has a fmt=18 version, it looks like they've already encoded a great deal of videos, hence my conclusion that you shouldn't expect much more from them in the codec quality department.

I'm not complaining, like I said yesterday I was rediscovering my favorite video bookmarks with a better video quality and a pleasant audio quality, I'm really thankful to YT for what they've done, and I mean really.

As for the artifacts around the mountain edges, yea but it may also be my fault, I followed bayme advice and applied some adaptative sharpener (by MarcFD) just below the Mplayer lanczos resize filter. And yes, it may eventually put too much load on the codec as opposed to a light blur, but I'm just learning you know.

[benrtc]

I have found sharpening OK on video like slow shutter mode at night, or encoded in FLV at 600 or more kbps w/letterbox. One I encoded with the so-called goyomora method at 757kbps (Caldecott tunnel); it was also in slow shutter mode. The drawback is player buffering.

This one works well for YT. Except for that blocked lap dissolve at the beginning, Canon HV20 demo has little movement in it. I've read that the camcorder's codec doesn't handle motion as well as the prosumer HD cams. The demo carefully avoids this weakness. In this case no blur was added. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcaYgZoVIOE&fmt=18 (edit: deleted)

[bayme]

It is evident that Youtube should increase its videobitrate with another 100/200kb/s. Some of the scenes in your sample are just plain ugly.

This has very little to do with the videobitrate. What they do is use encoding speed as the most important factor (maybe to lighten the load on the systems that do the encoding for them, or to please impatient users, I don't know..) while what they should do is put quality above that (and don't care about how long it takes to encode the video).

I'm pretty confident YT/GV will finetune the encoding quality as time goes by, and they will do many re-encodes whenever they feel like it. They did this with the first 320x240 batches as well. The first ones in 2005 looked like crap. This changed drastically over the first months.
Also noteworthy is that encoding quality for all H.264 codecs is still improving on a daily basis. Just see this and you'll know what I mean.

What really is evident is that they have two totally separate systems active now. The old one, for which you can bypass by encoding your own FLV under 350 kbit/s, and the new one, for which they use other server-addresses and create the new big flv and h.264 versions of your video.

By the way, YT is terribly slow again. Even the old small vids stream in like 1 second each 3 seconds, YT seems horribly overloaded right now.

Oh, and I almost forgot, did you see this? -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1zgFlCw8Aw&fmt=18

[benrtc]

Heh, and it's still up there.

bayme, I tried adding blank padding to the end of an upload. So far it helped the # 12. Still waiting hours to get the 18 version.

[rajman]

Is Youtube only letting certain people have the new 'Watch this in high quality' feature on theie videos? I mean I have tried to upload many videos using the settings that Marina (Hotforwords) uses without any success...even tweaking little bits of settings but still nooo...she said she upload her vids at 640x480, H.264 at 2MBs, 128kbs AAC etc I checked her vids and she had a video that just went 'Live' 20 mins after I checked it and it already had the 'High Quality' link...is Youtube making sure she gets the link as she gets alot of views of her vids? Also we all seen the 'Corey Mr Safety' video by now...that also has the 'High Quality' link, where all his other videos dont...is that beacuse Youtube knows how popular that video is and made sure it had the new feature? I still cant get around it, so Ill just stick to the olf FLV method for now

[ricardouk]

Hi everyone!

Altough everyone is talking a bout HD video on youtube (HD? lol), im still happy with sticking to the 350 bitrate rule with flv.

i'm currently using Mencoder/Automen to encode to flv, has anyone managed to squeeze more quality on their encodes by using other mencoder scripts other than the ones posted on the first page of this thread?

ive tested the "script with mencoder but i can still see some clips that look better when the source clip was the same.

"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

These should be 2 long lines of text in a .bat file. Change values to your prefs.
Audio used only 49 kbit/s with this video. It's no longer on YT by the way. Taken down by the sick infringement police.

im not "fluent" with command instructions, where is the command to resize the video? or do i need to encode the avi with the correct size already? What does "lowpassfreq=16500" mean?

Thanks

[Boulotaur2024]

No point in converting to HQ flv anymore imo, you'd better stick to a _good_ 2 pass x264 encode if you want to reduce the size of the uploaded video (I guess size is your main concern right ? I mean... size of the uploaded vid...) or upload the vanilla video file if you don't mind the uploading time.

But if you still want to go the old custom encoded flv way, check out this thread instead.

@rajman : I believe the HQ conversion is random, I checked most of my YT bookmarks and it appears that 80% of them are converted now. It may be out of complete superstition, but I always attach the tag/title "HQ"/"HD" tag to my freshly uploaded video in order for them to be converted quickly. So far the mp4 version has only taken a couple of hours to appear.