[Radar]

I'm trying to upload gameplay videos to YouTube, but YT seems to be compressing my videos significantly. They do not look this bad at all on my computer. The second video was even recorded with the lossless setting on OBS, and converted to MP4 using the placebo lossless setting on Handbrake, so it's a darn near crystal clear video on my local machine, yet it gets compressed horribly after uploading.






What can I do to improve upload quality?

[Radar]

Since I was limited to 2 media elements in my post, here is a video by another Youtuber for comparison:

Spoiler

[Ninety-Six]

As far as I understand, Youtube will just butcher your video quality until it decides it likes you. I've had a few of my own videos get obliterated despite looking perfectly fine on my machine, and as far as I could tell from the cursory research I did, it'll just happen unless Youtube decides you're worth having videos that are actually legible. There's no setting or anything to upload good quality vids.

[Jeff]

Youtube panders to the lowest common denominator.

[The Battlelord]

Looks like it does not matter if you upload the original version or a converted one, the final product/upload on YT result to be almost the same (indeed if you try to download both the versions from YT, the weight will be practically the same, unlike the basic/original files).

Indeed i wonder as well how the hell youtubers make their videos with a quality that looks to come from another planet.

[ck3D]

I'm under the (very possibly incorrect) impression that even though one might try and arrange things in advance to facilitate YouTube's processing by already submitting a perfectly fine mp4 file, the website will most often still go ahead and try converting said submitted file to some default, apparently specific format it seems to prefer handling. Basically I feel like unless one has figured out the exact right settings YouTube (semi?)secretly cherishes after some trial and error, more often than not the website will just shit on the upload. I have filmmaker/cinematographer friends who take so much pride in having figuring out the ones that worked for them by themselves, they just won't share their solutions just in case the next man might steal all their gold so here I am just like you stuck with YouTube videos of questionable quality, but I personally don't care much because it's YouTube. Can't be of any technical help, but just FYI your videos in their current state are more than watchable on my laptop, the quality didn't bother me till you brought it up with a comparison (and even then I had to focus to see the little flaws).

[ViDi]

As far as I know YouTube decompresses videos with two different codecs - better codec for popular videos and not so good one for not so popular videos. Like if you have 100.000 views (or something like that) then it's a good one and if you don't have the views, well, you're screwed.

[Mike Norvak]

As far as I remember you need to give it a day or two so it loads correctly. H264 Full HD should work without apparent compression.

[Mike Norvak]

As far as I remember you need to give it a day or two so it loads correctly. H264 Full HD should work without apparent compression.

EDIT: I watched your video at the maximum resolution available (720) and it looks good to me, at least in my phone, how do it looks in you end? I see no noticeable artifacts.

[Phredreeke]

You can also try scaling the video to a higher resolution before uploading, as higher resolutions are given higher bitrates

[Tea Monster]

Mike Norvak, on 25 November 2019 - 09:27 AM, said:

As far as I remember you need to give it a day or two so it loads correctly. H264 Full HD should work without apparent compression.

This. I had the same thing. Looks like garbage on first upload, then after a while YT gets it's shit together and it looks OK.

[Mark]

Yep, they look better now than the first time I watched them.

[Avoozl]

Ninety-Six, on 24 November 2019 - 03:50 PM, said:

As far as I understand, Youtube will just butcher your video quality until it decides it likes you. I've had a few of my own videos get obliterated despite looking perfectly fine on my machine, and as far as I could tell from the cursory research I did, it'll just happen unless Youtube decides you're worth having videos that are actually legible. There's no setting or anything to upload good quality vids.

I would've expected as much.