The Best Video Quality on YouTube: How to Force VP9

Roman 2019-08-01 Channel: Video Production Guides Linux

Abstract: some videos are also re-encoded using the VP9 codec. This is basically a much improved codec which requires less bandwith while also looking much bett

Video Production Guides Linux . Best-day-to-Upload-YouTube-Videos-to-get-More-Views

Web Development Guides Linux . How-to-add-lightbox-effect-for-images-in-WordPress

Linux . How-to-Install-KDE-Desktop-Environment-on-Ubuntu

One of the most important aspects of being successful on YouTube is the ability to produce content that looks and sounds as good as possible. In this blog-post, I will explain why videos from bigger YouTubers clearly look better than those from small content creators and how to replicate the great video quality that all the bigger YouTubers get by Forcing the VP9 codec on your YouTube videos!

Note that by 「bigger」 I refer to having more than a few thousand subscribers. However, even at zero subscribers you can get exactly the same video quality as someone with 100k+ subscribers!

VP9 vs. AVC

To get the best video quality on YouTube, you need to understand that YouTube re-encodes every video that its users upload. It does not matter if you chose the exact settings that YouTube recommends, they will ALWAYS re-encode your videos! This re-encoding occurs in two phases: First, any video is quickly re-encoded using the AVC codec and pushed as a live video to the site. Unfortunately, YouTube uses some rather poor encoding settings to generate the AVC version of any video which is why the video is re-encoded so quickly ii) the resulting video looks quite poor.

In a second phase, some videos are also re-encoded using the VP9 codec. This is basically a much improved codec which requires less bandwith while also looking much better (see images below)! The downside of VP9 is that the re-encoding process takes much longer than with AVC.

Clearly, VP9 get’s much better encoding parameters!At the same time, the resulting video looks much better

How to force VP9 on your YouTube videos

Currently, there are two ways to get the much superior VP9 codec on your YouTube videos:

Have a lot of views (more than 1000 on any video)
Upload your videos at the resolution of 1440p or 4K

You do not need to record at 1440p or 4K resolution to upload at these resolutions! You can simply upscale your videos, add a little bit of sharpener, and the video will look just fine! Below you can find a video which I recorded at 1080p and then up-scaled to 4K as an example!