Ohrenschmalz on Youtube
Yesterday, I spent hours on waiting for encoding and uploading a video containing my techno track Ohrenschmalz to Youtube.
I really appreciate it now being widescreen format 16:9. So I tried to get up in the new resolution of 640 x 360 pixels. Youtube recommends AAC audio and H.264 video compression.
After uploading a video, Youtube is going to process the file. I think they do some re-encodings to the flash format file which is playbacked afterwards. The power of the Youtube servers gained really much, because this is quite fast with just waiting about only about 10 minutes for about 400 MB to convert.
If you provide a good quality video, then you have a high quality version and a standard quality version. In my opinion the standard resoultion is really bad and only useful for low band internet speed connections.
Now, the bad thing which really costed me nerves and endless time!
The audio is only playing normal in standard quality. When using high quality, it was jumping, crackling, noisy and no music anymore, at all.
The only thing I could to was to experiment with the resolution and encoding by try and error. My results say, that if you want a HD video which will work properly on every Youtube resolution you need to upload with following parameters I used in Quicktime:
- Video size 1280 x 720
- Video Codec H.264 with high or best quality
- Audio Codec AAC stereo, 160 kbs average
Note that the files will get really big about 600 MB to 1 GB and the upload will take long time on a standard 16.000 DSL connection. My average speed is approximately 100 MB in 15 minutes.
Use the beta uploader enabling you to upload multiple files at once. Start the upload first, and then you have the possibility to edit the tags, options and description during the upload! It also gives you a upload progress bar which is quite useful to have some information about the status.