YouTube


Recipes and general discussion about encoding videos for use on YouTube. (updated: Mar 30, 2010 12:02 pm)

Recipe from Andi Loor


Now that YouTube have started offering higher quality videos, the old settings for encoding your videos should be tossed out the window. This tip will walk you through the steps required to compress your video for YouTube so it will look great.

  1. Make sure your video is exported to the highest quality possible.
  2. Open Squeeze and expand the MPEG-4 presets.
  3. Click the "HQ" preset and copy the preset by finding copy under the audience tab or clicking the copy icon.¹
  4. Set your video data rate to 4000kbps, encoding method to 2-pass VBR and resolution to 640x480 (4:3) or 640x360 (16:9).²
  5. Set your audio data rate to 256kbps.
  6. Save the preset, apply it to your video, and click "Squeeze It."

Using the higher resolution and data rates will ensure that your videos look great at the current high quality options and be ready for any future increases in quality or resolution offered by YouTube.

Notes:
¹This will create a duplicate preset that you can title "YouTubeHQ."
²During testing I found that by increasing the data rate up to 4000kbps produced a higher end data rate with YouTube's high quality encoded version.


Recipe from Mark Rachall


  1. I output a Quicktime reference of the video. (You cannot do this in DS version 8.x or version 10).
  2. Using TMPEG I made a Mpeg-4 file with the settings below.¹
  3. Upload to YouTube

The video was about 5 minutes long and at these setting the Mpeg 4 ended up being about 79 MB. YouTube puts a 10 minute/100MB limit on their videos.

¹Note Settings should be:



Here are some of the YouTube help files.
Notice, near the bottom, that if you use the new YouTube Uploader, you are capped at 1GB instead of the 100MB that you get doing it the old way. That's a big difference.

What video file formats can I upload?

YouTube accepts a wide range of video file formats such as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG transferred from most digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones.

What's the best format to upload for high quality? + Video

We recommend the following settings:


Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your videos look better on YouTube.

How long/large can my video be?

There are two ways to upload your video: by using our Single File Uploader and the YouTube Uploader. Depending on which upload method you choose, your videos can be up to 100MB or up to 1GB.
Videos uploaded through YouTube's Single File Uploader have to be under the 100MB file size limit. The longer the video is, the more compression will be required to fit it into that size. For that reason, most videos on YouTube are under five minutes long and there is a 10-minute length limit for all videos.
You can compress your video using movie editors, like Windows MovieMaker or Apple iMovie. Programs like these allow you to edit your videos, add soundtracks, and compress file sizes.
If you choose to use the YouTube Uploader, your video can be up to 1GB in size. Learn how to use the YouTube Uploader to upload large or multiple files here.//


DT Notes:

  1. In my brief experience, the YouTube Multi-video uploader not only allows you to upload larger files and multiple files at once, it is a much, much faster upload.
  2. Because the multi-loader allows videos to be up to 1GB in size (although still only 10-minutes in length), you might want to think about your video in terms of encoding for a DVD instead of the web (ie. much higher bit-rates).
  3. In Tony Jover's experience, WMV's work better than MPEG4's. Although he says quality can be a subjective judgement, it might be a good idea to start there.





























Revised: Mar 30, 2010 12:02 pm