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I uploaded another gameplay video. Most of the time it takes an entire day just to upload a youtube video, so I thought if I set SNES9x to record the video using "Cinepak" compression format it would take a smaller time to upload. It did, but at abysmal quality. I tried looking around if there is a setting for uploading in higher quality but I couldn't find it. It could be that youtube is not quite done processing, and will look better later on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5l_Aft ... e=youtu.be

In order to help you upload files more efficiently, I need answers to several questions.

Your Internet connection: In which city are you located? Which company is your ISP? To which Internet plan do you subscribe?

The file: How large in megabytes is the file that takes all day to upload? What file format (such as .avi, .mov, or the like) does it use?

Your computer: What operating system does your computer run? Are you familiar with use of the command prompt?

My first guess is that you're trying Cinepak because the file you had been uploading uses an uncompressed codec. Cinepak sucks in the sense that unless you're making a game for Sega CD or a retro computer with not much more CPU power than a Sega CD (such as an old 68K Mac or a 386 PC), Cinepak has a decidedly inferior rate/distortion curve. When preparing a video for upload to YouTube, use either WebM (Matroska container, VP8 video, Vorbis audio) or MP4 (MPEG-4 container, H.264 video, AAC audio).

Once you answer these questions, I'll try to show you how to use FFmpeg (a command-line tool) to convert the uncompressed video. I may have other follow-up questions first.

1. Upscale it yourself to 720p or 1080p before compressing. If you upload it at its original resolution you will always get awful blinear resampling, and compression artifacts at the original resolution.

2. Use a better codec and/or higher bandwidth encoding. You can use common ones like H264 or Xvid, but personally I like Lagarith, because it's lossless.

Small caveat using Lagarith with YouTube: the YouTube version of its encoder can't handle solid black frames (they'll fill with the previous frame instead), but you can work around it pretty easily (e.g. a "dark grey" border of colour 1,1,1 instead of black 0,0,0 is sufficient).

Chicago suburbs, house computer, and DSL
1.68GB .avi
Windows Computer from either 2012 or 2013

Nothing you do w.r.t. codec or compression will make it look significantly better if you don't upscale it first. Compression by itself can only make it look worse than the uncompressed videos you were making before. Upscale before you compress.

You can use VirtualDub, or some other program for upscaling and video encoding.

1. Create your original video with SNES9X or whatever, and use a lossless codec (e.g. I linked lagarith above).
2. Open the video in VirtualDub.
3. In VirtualDub, go to the Video menu, choose filters, click add, create a resize filter, choose settings that you like for the upscale process.
4. Go to Video menu, choose compression, pick a codec and configure it.
5. Go to the Audio menu to select compression for the audio, if you want to make it smaller. (May need to select Full Processing mode to get the option.)
6. File > Save as AVI

For step 3, usually I'd pick something like "relative %" of 300, "filter mode" of nearest neighbour, "letterbox or crop" to 1280 x 720, "fill color" of (1,1,1) to avoid the aforementioned lagarith issue.

For ColecoVision, MSX, Master System, NES, and SNES, it's useful to enlarge the picture using three filters:

1. Resize to 300%x300% relative, nearest neighbor
2. Resize to 114%x100% relative, linear (this corrects the aspect ratio)
3. Letterbox to 1280x720

There's a billion variations on how to upscale, yeah. If I was trying to keep original TV aspect ratio instead of square pixels, I'd probably just do nearest neighbour vertical-only, then do the horizontal scaling as linear filtering. i.e. clear division of scanlines vertically but fuzzy picture quality horizontally; not an "accurate" NTSC approximation or anything, but it helps with the aliasing issue you get from doing that last bit of linear stretch on top of nearest neighbour.

1.6 gb? For a minute of video? Locally encoding would be really useful.

For some reason the quality improved by itself.

Youtube processes the video into multiple copies at different qualities. The lower-quality copies are available first, and higher quality ones will quietly become available once they are done processing.

Yeah, but in the case posted in the OP all I see is still the 144p version, so I'm not sure how it's possible that it would have improved on its own. We're well past the point of processing time by now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5l_AftMNMo

This is weird. Internet Explorer plays it in 360p, but Google Chrome only plays it in 144p. My phone plays it at about 360p too.

Well, that is truly odd, yes. I can't really speculate as to why IE or your phone might have access to different video resolutions than Chrome or Firefox, but I can say for certain that if you upscale before you upload to 720p or 1080p you'll have nicer resolutions available everywhere.

Just a guess, but IE might be using Flash (if it's an oldish version of IE), while Chrome is probably using HTML5 video. So that might have something to do with it. You can find out by right clicking the video display in IE, it should show something like "Flash version 1.2.3" in the popup.

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Using H-264 does the trick. I only had it set for 640x480 though, because I wanted to make sure it uploads fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe_NSqi ... e=youtu.be