Youtube high quality video preference?

[letmein2k]

I've uploaded a video in 720 x 480 (4:3 - encoded through 3.5 Mbps CBR as bitrate), but when playing it on youtube, it doesn't have the "play in high quality" function.

Anyone the preference that we have to set in order to post give the high quality feature on youtube? And if possible keep the quality as it is without youtube conversion...

Thank you.

[linyx]

If you want high-quality, then upload somewhere else such as mediafire or rapidshare. Youtube's high-quality feature isn't even close to high-quality.

[Dark Shikari]

Add &fmt=18 to the URL.

But its hardly high quality. Its iPhone-compatible Restricted Baseline H.264, encoded using a rather mediocre custom in-house-developed encoder.

If you want high quality, use a better host. Zoome lets you upload up to 1.5 megabit (up to 200MB per video) H.264, and they won't re-encode it. Or just host it yourself like I do... (http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/Flash/extra.html)

[letmein2k]

I know youtube has a limited quality, but what I want to know is sometime, when I upload something, I can see a button with "play in high quality" and sometime not.

What's the preference or requirement to have that "paly in high quality"?

Does anyone have an answer for it?

[@MeGui]

@letmein2k...it is .MP4 file?

[letmein2k]

@letmein2k...it is .MP4 file?

nope. i export it in mpg (40 MB for 1.20 minutes)

as i've noticed, youtube limit the quality... so there must be a recommended setting and size when uploading it to youtube, so that i can safe bandwidth.

[Adub]

Taken from their website.
We specifically recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 640x480 resolution with MP3 audio.

Personally, I would upload in mp4 format using h.264 as my compressor, with 640x480 resolution, either mp3 or aac audio, and a bitrate that I would find suitable so as to reach the 100mb limit, and yet still not take me ages to upload on my connection.

Mpeg-2 is the wrong way to go. It is vastly in-efficient in comparison the h.264 for example, so it takes up unnecessary space for the same quality level.

Heck, with h.264, I have gotten a 2:10 clip at 720p down to 5mb before. You should have no problem with 640x480.

[Inventive Software]

I grabbed this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2pvMhF8BEI) using Keepvid, put them side-by-side in AviSynth (upscaling the FLV one), and even though the bitrate with the FLV one is almost half the H.264 one, it's much better! Here's the AviSynth script so you can see for yourself.

#320x240
flv=DirectShowSource("SennaHungary1992FirstLap.flv").BicubicResize(384,288)#.AddBorders(32,24,32,24)

#384x288
mp4=AVCSource("SennaHungaryFirstLap.dga")

StackHorizontal(flv,mp4)

The MP4 file was served via DGAVCIndex, FLV was done via a DirectShow FLV splitter and ffdshow with post-processing enabled as "mplayer > accurate deblocking", 100% processing strength, slider set to full.

[manono]

I've uploaded a video in 720 x 480 (4:3 - encoded through 3.5 Mbps CBR as bitrate), but when playing it on youtube, it doesn't have the "play in high quality" function.

Anyone the preference that we have to set in order to post give the high quality feature on youtube? And if possible keep the quality as it is without youtube conversion...

First, everything YouTube gets YouTube reencodes. There's no way around that.

Second, your 720x480 video will be reencoded and then play with the wrong aspect ratio. Do you notice black bars added above and below the video while it's playing? How about a link? And third, I think if you resize it to 640x480, 512x384 or some other 1.33:1 ratio, you'll get the button you want. This assumes you've already set playback to always play in high quality when available.

[Conquerist]

I was just about to make a new topic for this, but then figured I might as well post in this one, since it's very closely related.

Remember the buzz back when people discovered you can append the fmt=18 paramater to youtube URLs to access the "iPhone" x264+AAC version? Then there's fmt=6 for the "high resolution" FLV1+MP3 version, which after a few weeks got the "play in high quality" link below the video.

Well, now there's fmt=22. Example: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=22 . I found it at http://forum.videohelp.com/topic336882-1740.html and thought it would be worth sharing here.

Now on to the content:
720p x264, VBR 2000 kbps
2ch LC-AAC, 256 kbps

From media-info
Writing library : x264 core 54
Encoding settings : cabac=0 / ref=3 / deblock=1:0:0 / analyse=0x1:0x111 / me=hex / subme=5 / brdo=0 / mixed_ref=0 / me_range=16 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=0 / 8x8dct=0 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / chroma_qp_offset=0 / threads=1 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / mbaff=0 / bframes=2 / b_pyramid=0 / b_adapt=1 / b_bias=0 / direct=1 / wpredb=1 / bime=0 / keyint=60 / keyint_min=25 / scenecut=40 / rc=abr / bitrate=2000 / ratetol=1.0 / rceq='blurCplx^(1-qComp)' / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=10 / qpmax=38 / qpstep=4 / ip_ratio=1.40 / pb_ratio=1.30

I really expected more from google on this! Most options seem to correlate to the default command line, so I suppose they used something like x264 --bitrate 2000 -keyint 60 --bframes 2 --ref 3 --no-cabac --qpmax 38 --output "mp4" "avs" The average frame quantizer (this from before aq, so it's not meaningless like it is with vaq encodes) is 36.399231 for this video, so it's quite the blockfest. I'm sure processing power and time (money) are factors, but that command line doesn't seem like the result of an attempt to find the best speed/quality/bitrate trade-off for their purposes.

I hope youtube gets their act together when it comes to x264 before the HD feature goes live (if it ever does). But then again, youtube has never taken quality as a priority: they never used VP6, stuck with bitrate starved 320*240 FLV1 for years until introducing 480*360 as "High Resolution", Google downgraded Google Video from 640*480 to 320*240, etc.

Also worth noting is that the encoding date on this is UTC 2008-06-19 11:35:09, but I didn't find anything about this online that's more than a week old. Did Google just now add this "feature", or did no one discover it 'til now?

More on topic: There have been ways to avoid re-encoding in the past, such as video with a 16*12 resolution (for high bitrate audio), hex editing the length of the video in the header to fake a 233 average bitrate, all of it's in the videohelp thread I linked to, but that's outdated, all those loopholes have been fixed.

[audyovydeo]

... but when I uploaded videos, couple of months back, I didn't notice any choice about quality.
Could it be related to the Channel Type ? ie Standard gets low crap, Director gets quality ?


cheers
audyovydeo

[Dark Shikari]

Well, now there's fmt=22.According to Pascal, the guy who basically writes their encoder setup, fmt=22 is a "very very old experiment" that was activated on a "very very small number of videos." Its certainly not new, which is why it has a very old x264 version.