Preparing videos for YouTube?

Tek7

Tek7

CGA President, Tribe of Judah Founder & President
Staff member
I have a few test videos from my recent experiments with my TV tuner that I'd like to upload to YouTube.

Problem is, a two-minute video weighs in at 150MB.

What programs and settings should I use to prepare the video for uploading to YouTube?
 
Odd, 2 mins at 150MB...

You may need to change the video settings.

My videos use MPEG-1/2. Much less than AVI.

And if you have 10+ mins, you could split them to lessen the size.

My 7+ mins is over 300MB.
 
Hauppage card's hardware encoder outputs a mpeg2 stream at 2MB/sec. That format basically sucks, but you make up for it in not needing to encode on the host machine. (when I had my card installed, recording video was just a mater of streaming from /dev/video0 to the filesystem).

http://www.youtube.com/t/howto_makevideo said:
We specifically recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 640x480 resolution with MP3 audio. Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your clips look better on YouTube.
Click to expand...

I would try H.264 and MPEG4 and compare the quality. I think youtube has gone to storing all videos in MPEG4 in the background since flash added support. So you might be able to get past youtube's encoder all together (each additional re encode looses quality), IIRC they use mencoder or FFMPEG so you could see how they behave when the target format matches the source.
 
150MB is super small...just upload the thing...

EDIT: My AVIs I upload to youtube are HUGE...

EDIT 2: MPEGs stink for heavy video editing...if you are concerned about size, simply drop it in (shutter) Windows Movie Maker (shutter) and put it out in a WMV that is smaller...
 
Last edited:
XionTawa said:
150MB is super small...just upload the thing...
Click to expand...
The upload on my connection is only ~56Kb/sec. Uploading a 150MB file takes...well, I'm not sure exactly how long, but I know it's too long. :p

XionTawa said:
EDIT 2: MPEGs stink for heavy video editing...if you are concerned about size, simply drop it in (shutter) Windows Movie Maker (shutter) and put it out in a WMV that is smaller...
Click to expand...
That's what I did last night and it turned out pretty well. The video went from 150MB to 17MB and the quality still looked good.

VK: Thanks for the recommendations. I'll try them out once I record more gameplay videos.
 
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