Youtube murders HD video quality

[waterjug]

So I've been shooting a lot of 1080 video on my T2i lately, and wanted to share it with family, so I upload it to youtube. I send out the links...then I go to check the video later to make sure it's up and everything...mother of pearl....it's not HIDEOUS but compared to the actual file on my computer...terrible.

I did some searching around and found this, but it's from April 2011:

What apparently happens during processing (as seen in AGrandt's test video*) is that the video is scaled to 1920x540 and then rescaled to 1920x1080, or interlaced to 1080i. Either way, every second line of pixels is removed, resulting in completely worthless quality.

Is this still true? I've heard Vimeo is much better for HD video, but the space is limited? Can anyone comment on this, or how to fix the youtube issue?

 

[Compman55]

I would love to know this as well.

Seems some of the music videos like VEVO are nice 1080 but others are not.

 

[wirednuts]

i wouldnt doubt it. ive never seen anything that great on youtube. i dont know if its just flash or what... i know anything silverlight based ive seen is excellent as long as you have fast internet

 

[Cattykit]

Please provide me a Youtube link. From there, I might be able to tell you if something is wrong or not.

What I know is that Youtube lowers bitrate quite a bit without using complex and process intensive encoder parameters. That results in lower quality. That is understandable since they have to make sure that their videos are playable in as many platforms as possible.
But, reducing 1080p to 540p only to scale back sounds strange. And, no, they don't interlace the video.

 

[Subyman]

Why host the files on youtube if only family will see them? Can you imagine the space it would take up if 1080p wasn't downscaled or resized for unpopular video? I would recommend uploading whatever quality you want to Amazon's S3 and have your family download it and watch it from their computer. It would at most cost a few cents.

 

[ElFenix]

this is why vimeo is around.

 

[sswingle]

How are you encoding to upload? I read that if you encode to H.264 that youtube will do minimal processing because thats the format they like. Here are settings I use. Obviously youtube will be lesser quality, but I've never had any really bad results:

Codec: H.264
1920x1080
59.94 fps
Square pixels
Profile: High
Level: 5.0

Target bitrate: 6 Mbps
Max bitrate: 9 Mbps

Audio:
Codec: AAC
Stereo
44.1 kHz
High Quality
192 kbps

 

[foghorn67]

Vimeo is your answer.
The streaming buffer is also tiered. Sometimes a 360p pauses and buffers on great connection. While a 1080p movie trailer does fine.

 

[allenk09]

Youtube just sucks, sometimes I can't even get 240p. I'd pay a small fee to Youtube if they'd give me some better bandwidth to be able to watch things without having it load and buffer every 3 seconds.

 

[Childs]

YT changes your video quite a bit. I recently put up a 1080p helicopter tour of Hawaii which had rich, vibrant colors, and YT butchered it. What they should do is post the actual specs needed to bypass a re-encode, so you can preserve your video quality. I have used the YT HD preset in FCP and Premiere, and the video is always looks relatively crappy after YT is done with it.

 

[Dulanic]

Youtube is a free service with something like 800 million videos. I would fully expect them to do something to shrink size, but I have had very few issues upload HD quality videos.

 

[Shlong]

Bandwidth is expensive, wasn't YouTube losing money before they sold to Google?

 

[jacqg]

Wow for a second there, I thought this was about Youtube murder videos in HD video quality.

But that aside, it always does seem that Youtube's 1080p quality is not that impressive :[.