As a note, if you can't tell the difference between the 6 videos in each test please say so.

1st test is imo pointless... dark clip, high picmip (?) so very hard if not impossible to tell

2nd test best quality is Quake Live: Encoder Test #7 closely followed by Quake Live: Encoder Test #12, the other 4 are considerably worse in comparison

Why wouldn't you just take screenshots from certain position and compare them?

2ez

Yeah, that would work as well. I don't really have a good way to extract a single screenshot from a render though, at least not after YouTube processes it.

I could figure out two ways to get certain position paused in Youtube video:

a.
1) Pause the video
2) press home to get to the start of the video
3) use right arrow once or twice
4) take screenshot

b.
1) Go to your video manager in Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/my_videos?o=U or go to some of your videos and click the Video manager button under the video)
2) Click little black triangle next to Edit button and select download mp4 (doesn't appear if your video has been tagged for third party content)
3) Use your player to go to some exact position and take a screenshot

Best encoding for YouTube upload is done by following these advanced encoding settings:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171

In short, you need h264 with specific command line

with MeGUI it looks something like this:
program --level 4.2 --tune zerolatency --bitrate 50000 --no-deblock --keyint 30 --min-keyint 16 --bframes 2 --b-adapt 0 --b-pyramid none --vbv-bufsize 78125 --vbv-maxrate 62500

with x264vfw it looks something like this:
--no-deblock --keyint 30 --bframes 2 --b-adapt 0 --b-pyramid none --no-weightb --ref 3 --weightp 2 --no-fast-pskip --range pc

That is assuming you're rendering for 60fps. 30fps video uses slightly different calculation for best results.

If you would like to know more refer to this tutorial for sony vegas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDPRokNN0Uc

saint

mother of god

50k kbps is a bit too much imo. but yeah, x264 is a must :)

The first link has some suggested bitrates for different connection speeds - 50,000kbps is the enterprise quality connection speed, 8,000 is what a slow connection is suggested to use.

In the end YouTube will compress the shit out of it whatever your bitrate, however using certain settings will ensure the maximum amount of quality remains.

These settings are best for doing a two-pass encoding for a video that is being downloaded,right?

They don't really make sense if you are uploading the video to youtube since it'll be reencoded there anyway. This is the situation I'm dealing with right now.

I'm currently using x264 and unfortunately I don't have more cores to dedicate to the compression process. Any thoughts on adjusting the key interval to something higher than 30 which would make compression better?

"They don't really make sense if you are uploading the video to youtube since it'll be reencoded there anyway."'

That's specifically why they make sense, they're encoded using settings that Google asks people to use for best compatibility with their encoder.

If you're uploading to youtube my suggestion is to use those exact settings with a variance on bitrate.

But that assumes that their encoder isn't compatible with videos that don't adhere to those recommended settings, which isn't true. That might have been true years ago, but definitely not now.

The zerolatency setting, for instance, probably makes your encoding slower, lowers compression, and duplicates what YouTube already does when they encode the video again.

You assume that, I don't. I'm promoting the guidelines that Google is asking people to use. I also have done my own rendering tests and have concluded that the YouTube encoder treats videos encoded with their proposed settings differently than others. Clearly you haven't bothered to look at the links I've sent and are intent on arguing in favor of your bias so there's little point to continue the conversation.

PS: Zero latency makes it so audio and video are in sync.

I've looked at all the links you have posted (I originally referenced the YouTube encoder options a year or two ago). I asked some of the devs on the ffmpeg irc channel however none of them agreed with what you posted here, hence my questions about why you are doing them. I'm only trying to validate settings and quantify the difference they make.

I'm further confused by "Zero latency makes it so audio and video are in sync." According to both the ffmpeg devs and the documentation, zerolatency forces i-frames to always occur reducing the delay someone would have to wait to start viewing the stream. It has nothing to do with audio/video sync. Am I misunderstanding your statement?

Ok I understand the confusion. I mention zerolatency on MeGUI, under assumption it is being used in junction with Debugmode Frameserver, in which case the setting serves to sync the audio/video. Notice it is not mentioned in the x264vfw config, as it is not needed. This same sort of logic should apply when looking at the values I suggest - if your system can encode with no audio desync using the same method then, by all means, omit it and share that information. The goals of my proposed settings are to come as close to those suggested by Google. If you think this is a worthwhile pursuit I welcome you to advance it further for common benefit. Also consider the circumstances under which the settings were tested: vegas/premier + frameserver + megui. There are core settings that make the best use of YouTube and there are compatibility settings to help those along.

I'm having a lot of trouble with artifacts and "blocks" after uploading videos to YouTube. But even using your preset the result on YouTube remains the same as before (I had the default preset with Preset set to slower and AVC level set to unrestricted). So I assume it's not a compatibility issue here.

And when I had used your preset for the AVC Script Creator my videos always came out way darker.

The frameserver thing is a real timesaver though.

Blocks happen during fast movement and there's little you can do about it as it is the effect of YouTube compressing 1gb to 100mb. If you're getting blocks during slow scenes - that's an issue and can likely get fixed. But if its during a scene where you spin around and the background textures get blocky - that's a YouTube standard.

In regards to the color, in x264 setting of MeGUI go to MISC and there will be V.U.I>Range (advanced setting must be enabled). It is set to "Auto", setting it to "TV" or "PC" should change how the colors look.

Look into VP9.

Oh yeah, and you have known hackers uploading cheats vids...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=daddy+quakelive