Youtube Videos Are Pixelated And Blurry

[PhantomFuryJP]

Hey Everyone!
I have been making Youtube videos for a while, and have just had this problem recently occur.
My videos have been blurry and pixelated, and bad quality even at 1080p 60fps, with OBS at 50,000 Bitrate. I thought that a possible solution would be to upscale the video to 4k to to make use of that 50,000 Bitrate, but I have not found a free to use one, that does not loose quality and make the video pixelated. Also, I have heard that the quality will increase over time, but it has not. And this is happening for OBS and Nvidia Shadowplay which is weird because it only used to happen some of the time for Shadowplay. So if anyone knows a possible fix to this I would really appreciate it! Have a great day!

 

[why_wolf]

So the quality is good from your source capture but then degrades once uploaded and played from youtube? It's likely just the youtube servers, they take time to transfer your video at its full quality across the network. Sometimes hours.

Upscaling will not improve quality, you can't add quality to a video that isn't already there.

 

[PhantomFuryJP]

Yes, the quality is amazing from my capture source, but it degrades once uploaded. And the upscaling thing, I have heard that if you render it at a higher resolution, it uses a higher bit rate, and makes all the resolutions higher quality.

 

[why_wolf]

Higher bitrates help but upscaling the video wipes that out as you're introducing information into the video that didn't previously exist. If you can adjust the bitrate at your capture source do that. Youtube has a recommended listing for what bitrate it likes for each resolution source, https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

You don't have the auto stabalize feature turned on do you? That can F up video quality.

 

[PhantomFuryJP]

Thank you for the info! And what is the auto stabilize feature?

 

[PhantomFuryJP]

I tried lowering the bitrate and it just made the quality worse!

 

[Phil Doyon]

I am having the same problems and i use Shadowplay as well... i record it from my games in 1080p 60 fps, the video looks really good before i upload it to youtube and then on youtube even with the 1080p and 60 fps, it looks like a low res video...

Here is my video so you guys can understand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFcX8dcqeL8

From what i have read on the forums, it looks like youtube does not like Shadowplay's videos at all.. a solution might be to record with fraps but OHHHH MY GODD the file sizes are so huge..

 

[James Mason]

Your bitrate is too high.
Youtube does take time to get the higher quality of videos processed.
The more youtube has to compress a video down to match it's standards the worse it will look. You have to make your video similar to what Youtube wants, not what the output of the video will be.

Here's how to set OBS up for local recordings, start at the recommended crf 15, and lower the number for higher quality and higher file size recordings, or raise it for slightly lower quality and smaller file sizes.
https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/how-to-make-high-quality-local-recordings.16/

 

[Phil Doyon]

Thx James, i will try that out,

Can i do this in windows movie maker ?

 

[AlonsoJr]

why_wolf is right. I uploaded a gameplay video and it was really downgraded. Came back a few hours later and it was full quality.

 

[Rufinoman]

Same here. They definitely look much worse on YT.
I read an article about VP8 and VP9 codecs which Google uses and those codecs don't use hardware acceleration. An extension is available H264ify for Chrome and Firefox which will force YouTube to use H264 and hence the GPU.
I'm trying it now.