Tired of Youtube robbing your videos of their original image and sound quality? Here are some easy steps to get stereo sound and crisp video back into your Youtube uploads!

Youtube compresses all video to 320 x 240 resolution and mono audio. This produces the familiar blurry looking, tin can sounding videos that you’ve come to expect from the ever popular service. Youtube also converts all video to the Flash video format

At the time of this writing, Youtube still knocks all videos down to these poor quality settings, but they are allowing some videos to be viewed in ‘higher quality’. This HQ option however, still doesn’t allow for stereo sound, and still isn’t all that great.

To beat Youtube’s regular output quality, your videos must be compressed to the Flash video format before being uploaded to the site. As long as your chosen video specs are within Youtube’s parameters, the upload will float past Youtube’s filters untouched (not compressed any further).

At the moment, the highest possible settings for a Youtube video is 480 x 360 resolution with an average bit rate of 350kbps (audio bit rate included). Such settings can result in quality like this:

Furthermore, as I stated, 350kbps refers to the highest average bit rate that Youtube will allow. Parts of the video, such as scenes involving lots of action (movement) may surpass 350kbps, so long as other scenes dip below 350kbps to average it out, overall. Thankfully, the video compressor automatically handles this adjustment for us. This concept has lead to the phenomenon known as frame stuffing, where video creators insert blank or static frames (which are shown at very low bit rates) at the end of their videos - often for minutes at a time - to greatly skew the bit rate in favor of scenes that actually show interesting content.

Here’s an example of using high quality settings with the addition of frame stuffing:

So how do you get these results for yourself?

If you run Windows, you can get started right away with VMuTube, created by Frifox. Look for the download link on this page, near the top. In fact, all the instructions that I am about to divulge are available in Frifox’s community group on the same page. I implore you to check it out.

To use VMuTube, start by having your video already in AVI format. Rename your video to ‘original.avi’ and drop it into the VMTube folder. Run ‘vmutube.bat’ and follow the instructions. Good video settings are: 128kbps audio, 480×360 resolution, 30 frame rate, 150 keyframe interval. After inputting these settings, a bunch of stuff will happen with text running all over the screen. After a few minutes (or more, depending on the length of the video and the speed of your CPU), it will produce the file ‘final.flv’. This is the file that you will upload to Youtube. To preview it on your PC, use VLC player. What you see in VLC is exactly how it should appear on Youtube. To improve image quality further, you can lower the audio bit rate or the video frame rate. This will leave more bits available for the video image. Experiment and see what works. 

To get even higher quality, you will want to try frame stuffing. To learn how to do this efficiently, Frifox has made an easy to follow video tutorial here. It will require the use of a video editor, however.

Mac users on OSX can use ffmpegX to do what VMuTube basically does, but with a bit more work involved. In the program, select video codec to Flash video (FLV), set video bitrate to 240kbps and video size to 480 x 360. In the audio tab, set bitrate to 96kbps with the Mode as VBR. This will fit your video under the 350kbps limit with a bit of room for error - which unfortunately happens to some extent using this method. Also, in the Options tab, I suggest check boxing High Quality, 4 motions vectors, Two-pass encoding and Quarter pixel ME for best results. Preview your ouput .flv file with VLC for OSX. 

I hope you’ve found enough information here to get started with your own high quality video uploads. It can be a little tricky getting things to work at first, and it takes real patience to get the best results through trial and error tweaking. But one thing to be mindful of is Youtube’s 350kbps bit rate limit. If you have exceeded this, you will notice that the FLV video file will not look exactly (or sound exactly) like the version shown on Youtube. In this case, lower the audio or video bit rate. Chances are, your output went beyond Youtube’s limit even though your settings indicate otherwise. Also, if you videos end up looking too blocky, especially during scenes of high movement, try reverting back to the default 320 x 240 resolution. Sometimes it is better to have a less sharper image than one that is just too awful to watch! Finally, great looking video must come from a great looking source. Invest in new gadgets to shoot high quality movies. Stop using cellphones and $10 webcams!

Good luck, and don’t forget to leave a comment if you wish to post a link to your latest video.