YouTube Video Quality Bad after Upload? Here’s the Fix

Video quality means a lot to YouTube content creators. Nobody wants his videos to look fuzzy and blurry. But that’s the case many YouTubers are facing right now. The 1080P video could look like a 720P video or even worse after being uploaded on YouTube. “Why is my YouTube video low quality?” they wonder. Well, various reasons can make YouTube upload low quality, such as a poor internet connection. But the biggest culprit could be YouTube itself. Read on the following parts to know why and how to fix YouTube upload quality bad.

The short answer is, YouTube degrades video quality all the time. And for some kinds of videos, the quality loss is more severe.

What many people don’t know is that YouTube does its own compression. It re-encodes or re-compresses every video uploaded, resulting in a loss of quality. The only difference is that some videos have a minimal loss of quality that is barely noticeable to the naked eye, while others have a much greater loss of quality. For the latter type of video, YouTube makes the video quality very poor because

1. YouTube does not like the video encoding settings;

YouTube supports a lot of video formats and codecs. But it has its preferred video specs for uploading. It’s wise for you to comply with the YouTube standards, or you might suffer from low-quality YouTube upload.

The recommended upload encoding settings for your videos:

• Container: MP4
• Audio codec: AAC-LC
• Video codec: H.264
• Frame rate: 24, 25, 30, 48, 50, and 60 frames per second (other frame rates are also acceptable). No interfacing.
• Bitrate: 35 – 85 Mbps for 4K; 16 – 30 Mbps for 2K; 8 – 15 Mbps for 1080p.
• Aspect ratio: 16:9

Source from https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171.

2. YouTube re-encodes the video with the AVC1 codec.

Most high-resolution videos you see on YouTube use the VP9 codec. The other low-resolution videos, however, use AVC1 (aka. H264) instead. VP9 is a much more efficient encoder than AVC1. The video encoded by VP9 has a better and clearer image quality than that by AVC1. However, YouTube only uses the VP9 codec for 4K videos, 2K videos at 30 - 60fps, and 1080p60fps videos (There’s also a theory that YouTube will use the VP9 encoder for videos by big channels). If your video does not meet these demands, it will be encoded with the AVC1 codec and uploaded in bad quality.

Note: YouTube also uses AV1 (or AV01), a codec more advanced than VP9, to encode videos. But this codec is mainly used on popular videos now, and it is still unclear how to force YouTube to use this codec on your video. However, you can enable YouTube AV1 when you stream a video.

How to check the codec: Right-click on the playing video > Stats for nerds.

These two causes are the main reasons why your YouTube video quality bad after upload. Fix to the problem is simple. You only have to make sure your video uses the best YouTube video specs for uploading and force YouTube to always use the VP9 codec for your video. Look at the next part for more details.

That’s all for why YouTube video quality bad after upload and how to make YouTube videos better quality. I hope your problem gets solved with the solution provided here. Or if you got better solutions or have any doubts, please feel free to share with me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.