[Q] Creating static frame videos for YT

[markanini]

I'm wanting to upload full albums of unsigned bands on youtube. just a static frame of the album cover. What is the simplest way to do this this with the highest quality? Can you make YT accept files that contain lossless audio?

[foxyshadis]

FLAC had been supported in the past but broke last year; maybe they stopped using ffmpeg as their decoder. The only things guaranteed to be supported now are H.264 HP+AAC LC, so just encode the audio to as high a bitrate as you want, like 256 or 320. It's going to be re-encoded to a maximum of AAC 256+Vorbis 128 anyway.

In pretty much every video editor you can add a single image to any length you want, along with scripts and command-line languages. Youtube likes standard framerates, so stick to 24fps. You can max out the bitrate and it probably still won't go very high at all. Since Youtube will also re-encode the video, it's kind of useless to make the absolute smallest possible file; as long as it's good looking and perfectly still it'll be fine.

Technically you could encode the entire video to a single frame this way, but Youtube doesn't work well with that.

[markanini]

I have one minor problem with Movie Maker, it only allows encoding up to 192kbps AAC. I would prefer to supply my own AAC file for passthrough.

[pandy]

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/YouTube

[Soulvomit]

What format and resolution are the raw files in for both album covers and songs, and at what resolution would you like your videos in?