HN Explorer

Tell HN: Check your old YouTube videos

11 points by phendrenad2 ↗ HN
If you're someone who has uploaded videos to youtube in the past, and don't want to lose them, give them a quick look now.

Many older videos on YouTube have been re-transcoded to a abysmal bitrate that throws away 90% of the video content.

This is especially important if your videos contain text content.

(Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22lfCWA43Q8 )

Just a friendly PSA to re-check your old videos, check your backups, re-upload or leave them bit rotted forever.

5 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 22.0 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
fastily
To be fair YouTube isn’t “back up”. Everything that gets uploaded to YouTube gets re-encoded and that’s generally a lossy process
RGamma
IIRC YT used to store the original too, but that was many moons ago. They're probably feeling the pressure from storage cost...
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
wruza
Even recent 1080p+ videos are not 1080p bitrate-wise. You can easily see it by comparing with the same “vod” content on twitch. Youtube has its own perverted notion of p-scale and yes most old videos look like blurry crap on it, despite the fact that 480p is an absolutely watchable format.