This is a guide intended to explain how to create and upload high quality youtube videos.  I made this guide out of frustration with nearly everyone uploading poor quality youtube videos.

Software you need:

MediaInfo:

http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/

mencoder (get mplayer non-gui)

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

This guide will explain how to maximize the quality of a youtube video.  This does not exploit youtube in any way, it is completely legal and not a hack.  This process simply maximizes the data rate of your video so that youtube doesn’t automatically re-encode your video to a low quality video.

This guide will work for people running Windows XP or Vista (x86/x64).  I can see this working effectively on linux and mac as well though.

1. Preparing the source video

• First, you will need your source video.
• This should be your high quality, full size video.
• It needs to be in a 4:3 aspect ratio (i.e. if you divide the pixel width by the pixel height, you get 4/3).
• It needs to be a higher resolution (or equal) to 480×360 (if your source video has a smaller resolution than this, then certain parts of the encoding process will need to be changed, i’ll cover this if people want me to).
• You will use this video as the source for your high quality youtube video.
• (Note: Getting your source video how you want it is outside of the scope of this guide, however there are many other guides on the internet that will cover this.)

2. Preparing the utilities

• Make sure MediaInfo is installed.
• Install mencoder by downloading mplayer from the link provided, and make sure you get the non-gui version, as the gui version does not contain mencoder (which is what we need). (At the time this was written, this is version 1.0rc2)
• Once mplayer is downloaded, extract the zip to its own folder.
• In that folder, right click somewhere in the folder (not on an icon) and click New->Shortcut.
• For the location of the item, type in “cmd” and hit enter.  Hit enter again for the name of the shortcut since it doesnt matter what you name it.
• Now right click on the cmd.exe shortcut in the directory you just created.  You should see a textbox that says “Start in:” or maybe “Working dir” or something.  Delete everything in this text box then click ok.  This will change the working directory to its home directory so we don’t have to navigate to this directory when we run it.

3. Prepare the video for encoding

Now, we want to make sure our source video is in this directory with mencoder; so move the source video into this directory.

4. Encoding (and maximizing)

Encoding can be quite a time consuming process, depending on the throughput of your processor.  If you have a core2 processor and are running Windows Vista x64, I don’t believe this mencoder was compiled for 64 bit instructions, so this won’t take advantage of your awesome machine.  This shouldn’t be too big of a problem for just youtube videos, but if you intend on doing larger scale encoding, I recommend using something else if you’re worried about speed.

• We’re going to use both mencoder and MediaInfo sequentially and iteratively to get the maximum quality that youtube will allow for.
• First, we will use mencoder.
• Open up the cmd.exe shortcut we created, and paste this in: (but make sure to change SOURCEVIDEO.EXT to the filename of your source video, and OUTPUTVIDEO.flv to whatever you wish to name the output video, but make sure to keep .flv on the end)
  

  mencoder SOURCEVIDEO.EXT -o OUTPUTVIDEO.flv -af resample=22050:0:0 -sws 9 -vf scale=480:-3,expand=480:360 -of lavf -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=300:trell:v4mv:mv0:mbd=2:cbp:aic:cmp=3:subcmp=3 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=48:mode=3

• This will take a little bit of time to complete, depending on your computing power.
• Once it is complete, open up MediaInfo.
• Click File->Open and select the OUTPUTVIDEO.flv file you created.
• Click View->Tree and look at the General tab.

If the bit rate is greater than or equal to 350Kbps, then we need to reduce the encoding bit rate and re-encode (Check below).

If the bit rate is really close to 350Kbps, but just slightly lower than 350Kbps (like 340kbps or something), then you have a near-maximum quality youtube video you can upload.

If the bit rate is much lower than 350Kbps (like 200kbps or 300kbps), then you want to increase the encoding bit rate and re-encode (Check below).

• To re-encode at a higher or lower bit rate, change the value labelled “vbitrate=300″ in the mencoder command to either higher or lower, depending on what you need. (Probably lower is what you want)
• For example, if MediaInfo tells you that your file is about 400Kbps, we should compensate for about 50Kbps and run mencoder again like this:
  

  mencoder SOURCEVIDEO.EXT -o OUTPUTVIDEO.flv -af resample=22050:0:0 -sws 9 -vf scale=480:-3,expand=480:360 -of lavf -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=250:trell:v4mv:mv0:mbd=2:cbp:aic:cmp=3:subcmp=3 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=48:mode=3

• Notice how “vbitrate=300″ went to “vbitrate=250″ and everything else stayed the same.
• Keep repeating this iterative process until you get a bit rate of less than but almost 350Kbps.

5. Uploading

Now that your .flv video is encoded, you can upload the video to youtube.  You’ll need an account to do this!

When I uploaded my video, it wouldn’t let me upload it normally, I had to click “‘Click here’ if you are having problems with the uploader”. (This might be necssary to make sure youtube doesn’t reencode your video, not confirmed though)

6. Post a link to your video on the comments to this post!  I want to see your high quality videos in action :)

Temp: I will be adding pictures to this post to make it more clear. If you would like to see the videos I’ve made for an example of the quality that is possible, please go to my youtube page here.

You can buy Ghosts for $5 or download 1/4 of the album for free.  The album is purely instrumental.

Get it here: http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home

I just downloaded the free album, and oh my god I love it so far.

Once I can get my hands on the full 36 tracks I’ll post a more detailed review.

(Note: if you can’t download it, NIN is hosting their own torrent on TPB here)

 Edit (12:35am Monday): Bought the full CD, listening now.

 Edit (2:53pm Monday):  This CD rocks. Many of the tracks are underdeveloped, but I think they were intended to be that way.  The remix potential for this album is infinite.  For only $5 it’s a hell of a deal.  I love instrumental music, and Reznor making an entirely instrumental CD is a dream come true.

I’ll have to see how it grows on me but so far I’m enjoying it very much.

Welcome one and all to the mystifying world of Fudgepudge.

I’m very excited about this project and will wholly use it as a medium for self-improvement. I’ll try to write a lot, to draw a lot, to design a lot, but mostly to think a lot. Most of my posts will probably be in reference to contemporary feminist issues, and the beautiful thing about that is that it encompasses…well, everything.

But rather than begining with something complicated or subverted, I’d like to start with something a bit more formulaic (but nonetheless important). Upon my adventures traveling through the internets, I happened upon the blog of someone who had a bad experience with a cesarean birth; she and the baby are alive and relatively healthy but she has a lot of mental and emotional issues regarding the unnecessary procedure. What worries me about the blog is not the inaccuracies she displays as a form of cathartic healing to get her rage and hurt out, but that she blatantly perpetuates dangerous misinformation under the guise of wanting to educate people from her experience. She believes that all women should have home-births and that any woman who chooses to have a medicated hospital birth or unnecessary cesarean is by default relinquishing her maternal responsibilities.

She claims that she will not stop screaming until the medical world releases women from their avaricious grip of scaring and guilting expectant mothers into making childbirth a medical procedure and claims she wants all the”womb pods” to be unplugged; she then goes on to post a comic stating that the female body was meant to give birth. I don’t know about you, but my body was made for a hell of a lot more than just giving birth.

I’ll post a link and a detailed response, which I will be e-mailing to the author, in a future post.

Hello, and welcome to FudgePudge.

Blank pages are the most terrifying things in the entire universe.

Atalia and I have created this blog in which both of us will be contributing to.  We intend to make this site as personal as possible, with no specific theme except that all of the content will be about subjects that are meaningful to each of us.  From me you can expect lots of physics, mathematics, politics, music, gaming, and internet culture.  I’m excited, to say the least.

So today, I’m going to be brief.

There is a game called Dwarf Fortress that rocks my world; it was created by just one man, and this man’s name is Toady.  I have made a few video tutorials on how to play, you can find them here.  The quality of my youtube videos are exceptional and pretty much as high as you can get without cheating the system (like uploading high resolution videos that make youtube believe a 2 minute video is really 8 minutes).

I will be making a post sometime in the next week that will explain how to maximize a youtube video’s quality.  Be there, or be square!