![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Episode 8 Is Up
Episode 8 of my series of Minecraft videos is now up.
It's been bothering me that even though I record my videos at the exact same resolution as YouTube's large player (854x480) they end up fuzzier than the original after being uploaded. Clearly YouTube is compressing the hell out of them, to the detriment of visual quality. So I tried an experiment. I recorded a short test video at 854x480 in the usual way, then used a video editor to scale it up to 1280x720, the lower end of the "High Definition" range. When I upload that, the resulting image is much crisper, even when played back at 854x480. Because it looks like it's "HD" YouTube uses less compression even though the content really isn't HD.
That's kinda dumb as it means that I end up wasting more of my bandwidth and YouTube's uploading an inflated video just to ensure that the quality doesn't get mangled. I know that YT does it so that users on slow links can still view videos in the smaller formats, but they could at least put in an option to allow viewers to watch the smaller formats at higher quality if they think they have the bandwidth for it.
In any case, I've used this trick with Episode 8 and while the quality still isn't as good as the original (hardly surprising given the additional processing it's gone through) it is closer than the previous episodes.
Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze a bit more performance out of the MineVideo tool at some point which would allow me to start recording my videos at 720p natively.
It's been bothering me that even though I record my videos at the exact same resolution as YouTube's large player (854x480) they end up fuzzier than the original after being uploaded. Clearly YouTube is compressing the hell out of them, to the detriment of visual quality. So I tried an experiment. I recorded a short test video at 854x480 in the usual way, then used a video editor to scale it up to 1280x720, the lower end of the "High Definition" range. When I upload that, the resulting image is much crisper, even when played back at 854x480. Because it looks like it's "HD" YouTube uses less compression even though the content really isn't HD.
That's kinda dumb as it means that I end up wasting more of my bandwidth and YouTube's uploading an inflated video just to ensure that the quality doesn't get mangled. I know that YT does it so that users on slow links can still view videos in the smaller formats, but they could at least put in an option to allow viewers to watch the smaller formats at higher quality if they think they have the bandwidth for it.
In any case, I've used this trick with Episode 8 and while the quality still isn't as good as the original (hardly surprising given the additional processing it's gone through) it is closer than the previous episodes.
Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze a bit more performance out of the MineVideo tool at some point which would allow me to start recording my videos at 720p natively.