Would you be willing to list these sites? Several users here seek high-quality sharing options and might be interested in them.
To be fair, I did say “virtually all streaming services” to leave wiggle room for niche providers such as these. But their market share is nowhere close to the streaming giants that use industry-standard transcoding ladders. My statement remains true as it reads and is not nullified by one or two small counter examples.
As for the current discussion of YouTube in particular, yes, the process I described is the way YouTube works, as do most large-scale streaming services. You proved it yourself when you ran youtube-dl.exe and got a different file than you sent up. There is no avoiding transcoding with them. They are quite public about this. Here are two of many explanations by Google/YouTube itself describing the process in simple terms after a video is uploaded:
Static videos:
Live streams, transcoded even if you perfectly meet their spec:
For a deeper dig, here’s a Medium article from February 2019:
Except it doesn’t. They still have to transcode for lower resolutions. These streamers are not going to receive a 4K master and then try to cram it down a cellular connection for display on a phone screen. That would burn more network costs than they ever saved on transcoding and storage, not to mention annoying their mobile users with huge data bills and buffered viewing experiences. They’re going to transcode a phone version and every other resolution in between except the master resolution. Savings from not transcoding the master are minimal at best.
Basically, they provide an “uploader” (a program) to check user’s video, if the video doesn’t fit, it will “help” user to convert it (using user’s computing power), otherwise it directly upload it.
The server will do another video parameters check, if it doesn’t fit, the server will do the converting (using server’s computing power, the website disencourage this)
When you upload a video meet their exact encoding requirements, what you upload is what you watch (when watching the highest quality)
I said in my post, lower quality copies will be generated anyway. But all those low quality versions uses less than 50% computing power compare to the HD to HD conversion <== this is a lot of money.
They enforced the max-allowed-bitrate for users who want to avoid the server transcoding. Something like no more than 3000kbps for 720p and 6000kbps for 1080p etc., go more than that the video will be converted. So there will be no extra cost in network and storage.
The point of the server transcoding is all about GOP alignment, thats right.
We don’t have many (if any?) streaming providers like this in the States, but I see the benefits of this model and like it a lot. I hope it catches on.
Oops, so that is what “copies” meant in your earlier post. I thought “lower quality” was a reference to an uploaded file that didn’t meet the specification. Reading comprehension error on my part, sorry.
The only point I was trying to make in all of this is a clarification around YouTube and how it worked. Exporting for YouTube is a very frequent topic and people are always searching the forum for a way to get the highest quality export or to beat the transcoding system. So we strive to keep each thread as accurate as possible for the searchers.
The problem of SEE-SAWING is caused by the BETA YouTube Uploader not being able to cope with the format of the file produced by Shotcut, its data rate or some other quality that is not easily discernable, because it does not display an error of any kind - it simply restarts the upload.
If you use the classic YouTube uploader, this does not happen.