by mirkosp » Tue Feb 14, 2012 5:19 am
Well the problem with youtube is that it has to re-encode to fit into certain standard bitrate and parameters to be streaming compatible. This means that quality will get worse no matter what. If the video you upload is too sharp and detailed, then it's going to be worse because it has to cut even more to have it fit within its limits, so my suggestion is to actually try to apply a slight blur (a denoise or actually a lowpass filter would be better, but a blur is easier to do) for the youtube-friendly encode, which will make the quantizer of youtube's encode happier with your input and the quality should be somewhat more preserved, since you're basically making your video require less bitrate. You only need to do that for streaming purposes though (and only if the video is especially bitrate needy), do keep the distro copy with its original quality.