Does uploading film to youtube degrade quality?

[johnharlin]

I have downloaded two of the same movies from youtube at different qualities. One was something like 1280 by 720 and the other was something like 1600 or 1800 by 1280. I'm not at home now so I can't check precisely.

From what I can see in a comparison of certain frames, the quality of the lesser 1280 by 720 is better than the higher quality one.

Does anyone know if the quality of a film you upload to youtube is degraded because of some kind of rendering youtube might do. I'm trying to make out something in a few frames. If there is a better quality film out there that hasn't been degraded by youtube, if youtube degrades film, then I will search for it or contact the people who put it there.

Secondly, (maybe someone has had experience with this), is there anything out there that would take something slightly fuzzy (in this case text in an item in the film) and sharpen the hell out of it so that you can make it out. I have increased the width of the frame and then used unharp mask in Photoshop and think I know what it says but I wonder if there is anything that is magnitudes better than Photoshop that does a super job on something like that.

[jagabo]

Youtube reencodes everything you upload. Photoshop has that advanced unblur filter that works with some kinds of blur (is this in the current shipping products or have they just been showing it?). But it probably won't work with over compressed video.

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/10/11/adobe-demos-incredible-unblur-feature-for-photoshop/

There are also super resolution techniques that use multiple frames to get more information and can sharpen better (under the right conditions) than single frame techniques.

http://www.infognition.com/articles/what_is_super_resolution.html