Youtube tricks?

[furtech]

I've been trying to figure out why my YouTube videos look so grainy and dark, while other videos (not the sponsered ones) look so much cleaner and with fewer artifacts (like that mosaic-like compression). Here are two examples:

Nice and clear-- no mosaic artifacts


My video-- blurry and lots of mosaic-artifacting.

Is there some technique for taking a regular AVI and tweaking it before uploading so that it is more clear and easier to see?

And just because I love my stupid dog:

The Dog Paddle Mystery!

Watch on YouTube

Even Apache was curious-- Rondo was so desperate and whimpery!
And then... And mystery solved!

Comments

[okojosan.livejournal.com]

I dunno, your videos look pretty good to me!

Was Rondo going after the foam? At first I thought you said "phone" and I thought he could see a phone under the water.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he was fascinated by the little rafts of foam on the water (you can see him biting one of them in the second video). Eric figured it out! I love the way he tries to paddle things in water towards himself-- he'll do that with toys in the pool, too.

[martes.livejournal.com]

Laugh! I can hear myself calling Rondo at the end of the first video and distracting him.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Yor famouse!

[karisu-sama.livejournal.com]

Morwyn sometimes whines and wants to go after things that she can spot and track easier than we can (ie: tiny flying bugs. She has super-sharp eyesight.)

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Rondo is very sight-oriented: he goes nuts trying to track and capture reflections from CD's and anything shiney, especially indoors.

[karisu-sama.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Morwyn is Ms. Shiny Reflection Hunter too. ^^ She is also our "laser-pointer" chaser. And she likes to growl at the "dog in the skylight" at night.

Kaiya's eyesight appears to be much less acute... ah well... in dim lighting she appears to sometimes fail to recognize us from a distance until we talk to her.

[foofers.livejournal.com]

Just learned a trick for this today...

Any videos uploaded in the past year or so are also available in a higher-resolution format. Just append "&fmt=18" to the URL to see the crisp version.

Let's see if it works with embedded videos. Traditional:


and Extra Crispy:

[foofers.livejournal.com]

Argh...can't get this working with embedded videos. Ah well...go to the YouTube page for the video in question and add the "&fmt=18" bit to the end manually.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Oooh...I'll have to try that later-- Thanks!

[karisu-sama.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I don't really see a diff., even when I go directly to YouTube and add the extra bit...

[vlen.livejournal.com]

god that video is so adorable :D silly puppy

[fishbliss.livejournal.com]

I think the problem is that you're posting an avi file.
That's not the native format for youtube - it's an old crappy
microsoft proprietary format.

YouTube used to use the ON2 codec exclusively, I think they're now moving
(thanks to the iphone, among other things) to the open standard H.264 format.

So I think the problem is in the source material you are providing.
The closer you make it to what YouTube will present, the less mucking
with it they'll have to do, and the nicer it will look.

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=55744&topic=10523

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Oooo...knowledgeable answer *plus* a link! Fantastic!

I'll have to see if there's a good .avi to ON2 or H.264 format converter out there for the Mac!

Thanks!

[fishbliss.livejournal.com]

Forget ON2. That's yesterday's news.

Better than converting is getting a camera that takes H.264 (aka, MPEG4) video
directly. Get away from avi all together.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Yup... I see the compression issue too.. thank goodniss for bliss fish!