Tag: YouTube

My Quest For Good Quality YouTube Video Uploads

Posted by Inferno – April 3, 2009

The Internet's most popular video sharing site.

The Internet's most popular video sharing site.

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of my day trying to find the best settings, format and codec for the best quality Youtube videos.  The good news is I think I found the right recipe, the bad news is Youtube’s quality still sucks.

Over my experiment I probably uploaded the same video  twenty-five times or more, in a range of sizes, the largest being 400MB for a 13 second clip!  Just to see if there was a point of overkill.  So in order to let you know how the testing worked, let me explain the clip.

For testing I used a 13 second clip of my wife feeding a pigeon by hand.  I did this because it’s very small compared to the 10 minute limit set by YouTube so it should be easy to upload multiple times to test quality.  It also shows a range of motion from tilting to the flapping wings in decent outside lighting.  The original format was a DV AVI file for the most quality out of my Sony DCR-HC52.

The first thing I did was upload the clip in it’s original uncompressed format (DV AVI) with a total size of a little less than 400MB.  This being completely insane considering the max filesize for YouTube is 1GB and to upload at this size, the max length would be less than a minute.  Either way I tried it, and the quality wasn’t so great to be honest.  I think mostly because of the tools Google uses isn’t optimized to convert from DV to their MP4 and FLV.

I think did twenty or so conversions to FLV, Divx, Xvid, MPEG 2 & 4, WMV H.264 and many more on the advise of many forums and guides.  I don’t want to bore you all with the details (I’m sure I’ve lost some people already) but the important thing to note is that Google states H264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are preferred.  Unfortunately they drop the ball by not giving the best settings (bitrate, resolution) to get the best quality videos.

So, what is the best way to encode your videos for youtube?

Use the H264 codec with a bitrate of 2000 (although you can play with this, but 2000 seems to be the sweet spot from what I can tell, more is better, but you probably wont notice).  You can probably get away with less bitrate too, but I want the best bang per MB.   Also set the resolution to the highest native resolution of the source.  For example DV from MiniDV tapes has a max Resolution of 720×480, so I use this.

This was a lot of work for such a simple idea.  The higher quality you give YouTube the better it’ll look.  However the goal I was looking for was where the diminishing returns sets in, and I feel I’ve have found it.  However I’m still unhappy with the quality of the video, and it seems comparing my videos with others that it’s now the fault of YouTube not the source video quality.  This is now setting me on another quest to find a better place to host my web videos.  Which of course is something I’ll touch on after I have an answer.

P.S.  I really wish I had more information to give you guys, especially considering how many hours I spent on this topic.  I hope it’s useful to someone, and it’s definitely a good reminder for me, so I don’t attempt such a thing again.

Burn-E or How Pixar is Awesome

Posted by Inferno – March 16, 2009

Whether you’ve seen Wall-E or not, and whether you enjoyed the movie or not you probably agree that some of the best movies of the last two decades came out of Pixar Animation Studios.

When Pixar was bought out by Disney, I among many others were worried that like so many takeovers, the larger less creative company will absorb the smaller one and thus break up the team and thought process and kill all the skills and talent they had.  However Disney did a great thing, they pretty much let Pixar do it’s own thing like they did before, and it’s treated them well because they’ve come out with some great movies since then.

However, I wanted to state how Pixar was awesome, because even after Wall-E was made and ready to ship out Pixar made a few extras including a short which introduced us to BURN-E.  Whether it was intentional marketing move, or whether some employees were just playing around with the renderfarm I don’t know.  The fact that they actually made additional content just for the release is awesome.  It’s a shame you don’t see that more often, and it’s one way to tell that Pixar is going to be around for quite some time.

Without further delay, here’s the BURN-E short on Youtube.

Review: Atheist Experience

Posted by Inferno – March 28, 2008

The Atheist Experience is a live weekly call-in public access television show broadcasting from Austin, TX that has been taking up a lot of my time as of late. Mind you since you only really need the audio, you can turn it on and go about your business while still fully enjoying the program.

While the show is geared towards explaining the atheist stance to theists, a lot can still be learned and entertainment is to be had as a hoard of religious and non-religious callers alike call in to explain their stance on the whole “debate”. Week after week, all the callers failing to provide any proof or substance to the reasoning behind their blind faith.

The show generally begins with a brief overview of material of the day’s topic from a variety of co-hosts. Then the phone lines are opened for rebuttals or just general chit-chat and usually hilarity of some sort will ensue. However don’t be fooled, this show isn’t completely about entertainment but for education for those who don’t understand the atheist stance (Simply: Atheists don’t BELIEVE in God). It’s also a great tool for atheists who wish to learn more about holding ones ground when debating with a theist (as if it wasn’t easy enough already).

Although the circular reasoning and the never ending barrage of the same questions over and over can become tiring, it’s all made up for by the people who call in to honestly ask why is it that we don’t all die when the sun goes down, and the fact that we don’t is adequate proof to justify the existence of a God. Another gem from the same caller is why we don’t get electrocuted when we take a shower if in fact our body creates energy from the food matter we eat, as he believed we were powered by God.

I’ve decided to include a YouTube clip of just one caller who seems to believe that it takes just as much faith if not more to not believe in God, than it does to not believe. We’ll see what happens, I might also note that the YouTube Comments are quite entertaining as well.

All in all it’s a great show, and after just a few episodes I’m sure you’ll be just as hooked.

Website: http://www.atheist-experience.com/

Blog: http://atheistexperience.blogspot.com/

Edit:

A lot of people viewing this post ahve been looking for the clip of the caller who tried to argue why we don’t all die when the sun goes down, and also brought up why we don’t get electrocuted in the shower because our bodies store energy in them:

Review: Portal

Posted by Inferno – January 8, 2008

I have finally finished Portal which is one of the five games included in Half-Life 2′s Orange Box. If you haven’t picked up a copy, I strongly urge you to either buy it, or at very least rent it. It’s unlike any game you have played and has quite unusual gameplay that makes for a very entertaining experience.

For those of you unaware of the plotline it goes as follows:

You awake to find yourself in a room, a computer talking to you stating that you have been selected to run through some tests. Once the tests are completed you will be bathed, then there will be cake. You are then given a gun, that allows you to shoot an entrance and exit portal, and you proceed to solve increasingly complex puzzle rooms.
Pretty simple, and although the plotline is not very deep and you can guess that everything doesn’t go quite as planned, it makes for a very memorable game. Who doesn’t like delicious cake after all?

One of my favorite parts of this game however is the end credits. I feel that the way they display them and give a sort of epilogue at the same time is genius to say the least, and what makes it even more awesome, is that it’s all expressed in song. It really shows Valve had fun making this release.

I have included a video of the end credits, however it does contain spoilers, and although I don’t feel that they ruin the gameplay experience at all as the plot is so transparent, you may want to decide to play through the game to see them, as it’ll probably make them seem that much better.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.