Ok, it’s true – I’m a typical guy and I only use “the directions” as a last result. When I first noticed the “Watch in High Quality” links on YouTube I was excited. Prior to this point, the only reason to upload to YouTube was for SEO, not quality video.
So about a month ago, I tried uploading a high quality “test” video and saw that it did not have the “Watch in High Quality” link. So I thought, “no big deal, maybe it takes a while”. Then I forgot about it for a few hours. When I went back and checked my video. Still no “Watch in High Quality” link. So I got mad and actually went to YouTube’s help files and searched. At that time I found nothing on how to get that magical “Watch in High Quality” link. I probably overlooked it, but none the less, the story continues…..
Recently, I went through the whole drill again. BUT, this time, YouTube (as of mid December) has data on how to get your videos to have that “Watch in High Quality” link.
Here’s the encoding low-down in a super short list taken from HERE:
•· MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format
•· Video resolution: 480×360 or higher
•· Frame Rate: 24fps or higher
I dug a little further and found a few newsgroups discussing this very topic and the general consensus was to also be using a bit rate around 1000Kbps.
Where was I missing the boat? I had it all pretty much right, but I render all of my video for widescreen at 480×270, so I was missing the minimum screen resolution for the “Watch in High Quality” link.
A lot has been written about how to Embed High Quality Video hosted on YouTube, (adding &fmt=18, etc) but I hope you found this info on Uploading for High Quality helpful. If “&fmt=18″ is foreign to you, it simply means that you can embed “High Quality” video from YouTube on your website, blog article, etc., and force the “High Quality” by adding the “&fmt=18″ at the end of the “embed code”. This assumes that the person who uploaded the video followed the procedure listed above.
So that’s it. Pretty simple, but as I found out, missing the smallest detail will just get you regular old poor YouTube videos.
I am actually looking forward to uploading videos for my clients to YouTube now. At least I won’t have to hear, “how come it looks so bad on YouTube” anymore!
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Amazing Video Tours offers photography and full motion video marketing solutions to Realtors, and other individuals with property to sell, lease, or rent. A departure from the old fashion 360 Virtual Tour, Amazing Video Tours takes online property marketing to the next level.
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