Question / Help Quality on Youtube is worse than it was locally

[Stefan Monov]

Hi :)
I first tried recording with x264 but at 720p I was getting lag. Well, that's understandable, since this is only a mid-tier laptop. So I switched to Intel QuickSync to take the load off the CPU. That way the lag went away, and the quality of the resulting mp4 file was great. But when I uploaded it to youtube, it seems it transcoded the video because in the YT player it was a bit blurry. I did make sure to set the YT player to play in 720p.

Any idea why?

I think it's because the OBS encoder doesn't use the precise settings that YT recommends:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

I made sure to use the recommended container (mp4) and bitrate type (VBR). I don't know how to feed the rest of the recommended settings into OBS. I checked the resulting vid in VLC though, and it said that the recommended chroma subsampling is used (4:2:0).

I can post the original and uploaded versions on request.

Log:

https://gist.github.com/6aca8a789df3c5f97e8d4442e6119926

 

[Harold]

recommended container (mp4)

Youtube may recommend mp4, but we don't. There's a big warning there for a reason.

Use simple output mode, indistinguishable recording quality, FLV format and software low cpu use encoder.

 

[Stefan Monov]

Youtube may recommend mp4, but we don't. There's a big warning there for a reason.

Use simple output mode, indistinguishable recording quality, FLV format and software low cpu use encoder.

Thanks, but that hardly improved quality in youtube, if at all.

 

[Stefan Monov]

A note which may provide a clue: I just tried with fraps and there is no blurriness. With fraps there's lag though - the animation isn't smooth.