MCEbuddy rocks for YouTube!
I spent the weekend trying to get reasonable video quality playback on YouTube. After a lot of experimentation (using MCEbuddy as my conversion tool), I finally came up with a winner.
As some of you may know, YouTube has recently increased the video resolution they allow for uploading. The new limit is 640x480. In addition, they now accept H.264 encoded media which I'm sure you already know and love thanks to MCEbuddy. (I'm still amazed by the results I get when converting my DVRMS HDTV recordings using the "H.264 Best Quality" profile.)
I won't claim to have mastered this yet, but I am getting pretty good results by adding the following profile to the bottom of the mencoder.conf file which MCEbuddy uses. Note: You may have to read through this forum to understand how to modify that file in Windows Vista.
[x264-YouTube-TV]
profile-desc="H.264 YouTube TV (640x480)"
vf=pullup,softskip,pp=fd,scale=640:-2,crop=640:480,hqdn3d,harddup
lavdopts=threads=2
ovc=x264=yes
x264encopts=threads=auto:subq=5:frameref=4:me=umh:partitions=all:b-pyramid=yes:qcomp=0.8:trellis=1:8x8dct=yes:bframes=3:weightb=yes:bitrate=1000
oac=faac=yes
faacopts=br=192:raw=yes:mpeg=4:tns=yes
af=volnorm=2
#FileExtension=avi
It probably helps that my source material is of very high quality. I'm capturing video from my video camera to my hard disk in an uncompressed AVI format using Windows Movie Maker.
After capturing the content, I'm using the above profile to convert the video into a H.264, 640x480, AVI file. I've also used this profile to successfully convert a personal DVD (.VOB file).
Once the video is uploaded to YouTube, and you've clicked on the link to playback the video, you will notice a small playback window open in a web page. Underneath that window, there is a very important hyperlink that you must click on. It says, "watch in high quality".
After clicking on this, I was suprised to see the video quality increase considerably. A lot of the video compression artifacts just dissapeared. While the resulting video stream is still nowhere near as nice as local playback of the un-uploaded file, it was significantly better than most of the videos I see on YouTube.
It's possible that further tweaking of the profile's bitrate could yield a better result. But, I'm afraid that is currently beyond my level of knowledge.
I hope this has been helpful to you.
Solderman