videos on YouTube they are strongly pixelated a few seconds

[Max Webb]

Thank you Francois for this very detailed answer, I will try all of this.

[Brock Suska]

Hi John, you seem to know a lot of video compression things, so I thought I’d reach directly out to you. I’m wondering if you had any insight into how to get YouTube to stop pixelating videos on transitions. I’ve been posting videos for my company for years, and this hasn’t always been the case. For years this was never an issue and actually it seemed fixed about a year ago for a short time. It just drives me nuts to spend so much time creating a piece only to have it look horrible from the YouTube encoders. I can’t believe YouTube has this issue when so many other sites (Vimeo, Facebook, SmugMug, our Corporate Intranet) do not. I can upload the exact same hi res mp4 file to this sites and they look perfect when posted. Furthermore, when I see a new video posted from big companies (like movie trailers) it doesn’t seem they suffer from the same pixelation issues? How are they pulling this off? Almost like they’ve figured out different settings for their uploaded videos that allows YouTube to not massacre it. I’ve tried everything, high data rate H.264 videos, videos encoded out of Handbrake, videos encoded out of Adobe Media Encoder, MPEG 2 videos, and ProRes videos. The ProRes codec seems to do a better (not perfect) job. As a plea, I’m just looking for some possible way to encode my videos so they don’t suffer this YouTube pixelation. Thanks in advance.