YouTube is hot these days, and even hotter now that it is viewable on everyone’s iPhones. But how do you encode better video for YouTube?

As we’ve talked about on the podcast and on this blog, the big problem with YouTube videos is that you have to encode a lower-res version of your video to meet their upload specifications (no more than 100 MB). Then YouTube grabs your video and re-encodes it to Flash. Yes, that’s 2 encoding passes . . . sometimes wreaking havoc on your video quality.

After reading Brian Gary’s article on the subject at Ken Stone.net — I came up with another alternate way of making my videos look better on YouTube. It’s using VisualHub — a very popular, powerful, and inexpensive video encoding application for Mac OSX.

I emulated Brian’s settings from Compressor in his article in Visual Hub (Click on the thumbnail below to zoom – this is my setting for Widescreen material).

As you can see from the picture, I’m encoding an H.264 video (best quality for the file size), in a widescreen size– 426×240. As you might notice, this is a little larger than the recommended 320×240 – this gives us a little “stretch” room. I also force the audio down to 44.1 Khz instead of the original video’s 48 Khz. This gives me a little more squeeze on the file with no perceivable effect on quality. The “Two Pass” box is checked, which will yield a better-quality (yet slower) encode. The engine will make one pass to “judge” how it will encode the video, and then another to encode it.

The key element here is the checkbox “Fit each video in” . . . which I’ve set to 98 MB. This allows me to use as much of YouTube’s 100 MB ceiling (with a little bit of buffer) as I need to get the best quality within the limit.

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I recommend VisualHub – it’s a great and inexpensive program. I use it as my “Swiss Army Knife” video encoder.

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