The Big Picture


"Now watch what you say, or they'll be calling you a Technical,
a practical, academical, pedagogical."
- Not quite Supertramp, The Logical Song

YouTube sound is shit.

It's 64kbps (so grainy), 22.05KHz (so muffled) and 1ch (so mono). In 2007 it was possible to encode your video to certain setting in FLV (Flash Video) format, and YouTube's conversion (or reconversion) into it's native FLV settings would be bypassed. The video quality was really rubbish, but the sound was at least stereo. It was a bug, and they "fixed" it.

Now if you upload high resolution files, you're given the option to encode to high resolution FLV, and sometimes the stereo signal stays stereo. And sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it plays stereo when played in Internet Explorer but not other browsers.

It gets weirder. When you upload a stereo file, it gets recoded and stored on one or another of YouTube's servers - it seems to be random which server is chosen. Now, some servers recode your audio to mono, while others actually recode it to stereo, but stream it as mono...unless you add "&fmt=18" or "&fmt=22" to the end of the URL.

Or maybe this "bug" has now been "fixed", because I've spent the afternoon experimenting with uploading different formats - FLV and DivX for video, PCM and MP3 for audio, and no matter what I do, the result is mono and crummy.

There's no good reason for YouTube to stick to this policy. Their settings are adequate for speech, but YouTube is used extensively for music. Settings of 128kbps 44.1KHz 2ch are routinely used by internet radio stations, so bandwidth just isn't the issue it was when YouTube started out. But sticking to it they are, like shit to your shoe.

Here's what I found while researching the above.

If you want to minimise the amount of video you have to upload with your audio, the smallest resolution that most video making/converting programs can handle is 8x8. However, the FLV standard seems to have a lower limit of 160x120. I haven't done extensive tests to find just how low a resolution YouTube can convert from, but it chokes on 8x8 and is fine with 160x120.

Amazingly though, the difference between a minute of 8x8 black screen and one at 160x120, coded to either FLV or DivX, is a few dozen kilobytes. So, don't worry about it. And if the technology obliges you to use a resolution high enough to put a logo on, I'd say put a logo on it.

This is assuming the video is encoded at one frame per second - though there's no great reason why the framerate can't go even lower. There's obviously no reason to deinterlace a black screen, and FLV is happy with a video bitrate of 1kbps. YouTube was happy with DivX at 125kbps, but not at 1.

Did you know you can schedule blogger posts? Just set the timestamp for a time/date in the future, and blogger will wait until that time to post them. I found this by accident - after spending half a day unsuccessfully searching for a simple way to schedule email sending.

So I think I'll try using it. Instead of blocking three or four topics into one post every two or three days, there'll be smaller posts more often, staggered over the same period.

This will:
(a) make me look more prolific and
(b) make me seem to be posting from my computer at times when I'm actually somewhere completely different. Or more likely, in front of a different computer.

In the meantime, this post marks the start of a new label: Technical.

1 comment:

  1. You know, I do like YouTube for music videos and some clips, but some clips not only sound terrible but are very grainy looking as well.

    I found the automatic posting thing by accident a few months ago. I was working on a post, and I had set a time stamp for the post to be due by then. But it took me to a screen saying the post will be posted at such time--and I wasn't even finished by then! So I quickly went back and redid the time stamp to a past time so I could edit at my leisure.

    I think you're pretty much prolific when it comes to posting.

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