x264 good encoding settings for youtube?

[tebasuna51]

Originally Posted by Katie Boundary

I've seen claims like this occasionally, or that x264 is "not well supported" by AVI, or whatever, but I've never seen anyone go into detail. Can anyone explain?

See Limitations here

[Katie Boundary]

I don't see anything in there about x264.

[nevcairiel]

This part is really key in the AVI Limitations for H.264 content, unless you want to encode without B-Frames, but then.. why?

AVI was not intended to contain video using any compression technique that requires access to future video frame data beyond the current frame (B-frame).

The consequence of that is that AVI does not like frames to be in a different order then the display order, but for bi-directional prediction (B-Frames), this is required. So if you try to do that with AVI, it screws up your timestamps.

[benwaggoner]

AVI is such a deprecated format! OpenDML, which was the last offical spec update IIRC, was from 1996. It doesn't support B-frames because they weren't invented yet. Video for Windows itself was supplanted by ActiveMovie back in 1996, which added support for B-frames along with MPEG-1.

I've not had much of a reason to use an AVI file myself for some years.

[De-M-oN]

Originally Posted by dilpill

Just use CRF 18 or don't transcode at all because YouTube recompresses everything anyway.

Keep in mind that you can "cheat" to get higher quality by upscaling the video to its appropriate 720p or 1080p resolution. Normally this is a big no-no because it's pointless, but on YouTube they give higher resolution videos more bitrate.

1080p is still garbage bitrate and on smaller channels only transcoded to h.264

Upscale to 3200x1800 and you get VP9 and 15 mbit bitrate by youtube.

edit: oh the thread is 10 years old. But the 3200x1800 info will be still useful ;D