YouTube playback bitrate limited?

[porina]

In the two images below, the first one shows a frame taken from a video I uploaded to YouTube. The source file is 2160p but I resized it to 1440p here for direct comparison. The second frame is what I get when viewing it on YouTube at 1440p. It doesn't look much better at 2160p. I think I got exactly the same frame to show the "problem". In the upload version while it is not exactly highest quality for a still image, you can make out the branches of the trees in the lower area. In the download version it's a low bitrate pixelated blur.

 

Is there anything I can do to make it look better? Given the detail seems to be destroyed after upload, I'm going to guess no. I suppose this example is near worst case for video encoding. There's a lot of intricate detail and when bitrate is constrained, some of it has to go.

 

 

 

 

[GuiltySpark_]

In the stats for nerds, what codec is being used on Youtube? VP9?

[Levent]

IIRC YouTube adjusts bitrate according to your connection. Then again it also depends on the source material.

[porina]

5 minutes ago, GuiltySpark_ said:

In the stats for nerds, what codec is being used on Youtube? VP9?

Looks like it. Note I grabbed this windowed, I got the capture full screen earlier.

 

2 minutes ago, Levent said:

IIRC YouTube adjusts bitrate according to your connection. Then again it also depends on the source material.

My connection isn't great at around 60Mbps, but that should be more than plenty for whatever YouTube ever delivers. Nothing else is active at the moment.

[DuckDodgers]

AFAIK, after the source video file is uploaded to YouTube, the service encodes separate copies for all available resolutions with the appropriate bitrate. Say you have 2160p source file, so YT will encode individual copies at the original resolution and then 1440p, 1080p, 720p and so on down to 144p is the lowest I think. And this is how the "bitrate" is adjusted during playback, by switching between the different video file copies on the server.  The only way to get higher bitrate, since YT doesn't expose such option, is to simply pre-encode your source material at the highest option (2160p 60FPS).

[podkall]

One question, did you encode the video before you uploaded it? Because I think there's a difference if you for example have a 30 second video that's 500MB and a 30 second video that's 900MB, and that the 900MB will probably get rendered/encoded into smaller file, and since YouTube does it basically for free, their encoding slider is more likely to be more lossy to save space and time.

[porina]

25 minutes ago, DuckDodgers said:

The only way to get higher bitrate, since YT doesn't expose such option, is to simply pre-encode your source material at the highest option (2160p 60FPS).

19 minutes ago, podkall said:

One question, did you encode the video before you uploaded it?

Camera file 110 Mbps 4k60. Re-encoded upload file to YouTube 53 Mbps 4k60, which is where I got the better frame in OP. YouTube recommends 53-68 Mbps and I intentionally picked the lower end of that for the upload since my internet is so slow. The upload file looks good enough to my eyes.

 

Given comments I'm guessing I didn't miss anything and the quality is what it is. This caught me out since I did a park video before and it didn't look this bad, possibly because the content was less contrasty thus didn't hit the bitrate as hard as this one does. I'm hesitating making this video go live because it looks so bad in parts.

[podkall]

3 minutes ago, porina said:

Camera file 110 Mbps 4k60. Re-encoded upload file to YouTube 53 Mbps 4k60, which is where I got the better frame in OP. YouTube recommends 53-68 Mbps and I intentionally picked the lower end of that for the upload since my internet is so slow. The upload file looks good enough to my eyes.

 

Given comments I'm guessing I didn't miss anything and the quality is what it is. This caught me out since I did a park video before and it didn't look this bad, possibly because the content was less contrasty thus didn't hit the bitrate as hard as this one does. I'm hesitating making this video go live because it looks so bad in parts.

could you send me/here the re-encoded file through some sort of website so either I or some video-encoding magician god could see if compressing it down further while trying to mostly maintain the quality would help it?

 

but I must say, I did notice that lot of content on YouTube is more often blocky than usual, not to mention when watching Shorts, sometimes the bitrate optimized upload is so visible the half of the video(short) is literal purple pixely mess

[porina]

15 minutes ago, podkall said:

could you send me/here the re-encoded file through some sort of website so either I or some video-encoding magician god could see if compressing it down further while trying to mostly maintain the quality would help it?

Thanks for the offer but I feel this is a lot of time and effort for what is unlikely to change what happens after the file is uploaded.

 

15 minutes ago, podkall said:

but I must say, I did notice that lot of content on YouTube is more often blocky than usual, not to mention when watching Shorts, sometimes the bitrate optimized upload is so visible the half of the video(short) is literal purple pixely mess

Guess video streaming costs are still a problem in general. On a parallel note just got e-mail from Amazon that Prime video will start including ads, and there will be an extra fee to remove them.

[podkall]

5 minutes ago, porina said:

Thanks for the offer but I feel this is a lot of time and effort for what is unlikely to change what happens after the file is uploaded.

I could try to find something high contrast and upload it in 2 formats (original and encoded)

[porina]

15 minutes ago, podkall said:

I could try to find something high contrast and upload it in 2 formats (original and encoded)

If you really want to play with it, here's a 13 second segment I just clipped out. I used a slightly higher bitrate than I did for the YouTube upload so there is potentially more data to play with. Note I used different software, here I used Handbrake to do a quick clip, normally I use Vegas.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12UXebMSs9kILto_pN8qY-FakgGdpa91Y/view?usp=drive_link

[podkall]

24 minutes ago, porina said:

If you really want to play with it, here's a 13 second segment I just clipped out. I used a slightly higher bitrate than I did for the YouTube upload so there is potentially more data to play with. Note I used different software, here I used Handbrake to do a quick clip, normally I use Vegas.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12UXebMSs9kILto_pN8qY-FakgGdpa91Y/view?usp=drive_link

I can see the difference when downloading too, the preview 1080p of the disk is pixelated, but the downloaded file is more crisp and the image has more detail

 

interesting...