I have posted on Youtube several flute tunes I’ve recorded, however I’m finding that the sound
quality on some of them is degrading badly–this after only a few weeks.
The original videos on my hard drive are fine. Does anyone have
any idea why this is happening? Is there a way to talk to
Youtube about it (I’ll check on this too, but info would help)?
Howdy, Jim!
I have often suspected that youtube purposefully degrades sound and (especially) video quality to discourage pirating. Not a fact; just something I suspect. Most videos are of very poor quality.
Tom
Usually film clips on YT are compressed to reduce storage space of the files as well as speed up transmission. This usually results in severe loss of quality of audio and/or video. However, I had always thought that it was the owners of the files that were doing the initial compressing to meet YT’s upload restrictions.
djm
Are you viewing them in high quality mode?
Youtube automatically chooses low quality depending on your connection speed.
You can switch on high quality mode in your user settings or add &fmt=18 to the end of the url to force high quality.
It may help.
Mukade
Thanks, I’ll check out modes.
It’s kind of weird, cause the degrading is only happening
on a couple of videos–no changes on most of them.
Also it seems to get progressively worse, one video sounded
fine for a couple of weeks and then began to sound increasingly less good.
OK I’ve been typing in ‘&fmt=18’ but it makes no difference.
I’ve also uploaded again a tune that had slowly gone bad–the original is fine but once on Youtube
the flute sounds bubbly. Most of the videos I’ve uploaded are fine,
two of them have gone bad but I don’t know what will happen to
the others. Anyhow as this is selective it doesn’t seem related to
the speed of my connection or my user settings.
Has anybody had any experiences like this with Youtube?
Sorry to pester but I’d like to fix this, if possible.
I’ll see if I can find a way to post these questions
on youtube itself.
I would delete the videos with poor audio quality and upload them again as a new video. See if the same thing happens again to the newly uploaded videos.
Have you read through youtube’s help section?
especially “Getting Started: Optimizing your video uploads”
and “Getting Started: Uploading Higher Quality Videos”
It does a better job if you save your video as whatever they want.
BTW: I have no idea why yours would degrade.
Thanks, Denny. I’ll check that. I do think I conformed to that, but
better check again.
Doug, yes I’ve just uploaded for a second time one that
went bad after about a month. No improvement though the original on my computer sounds fine.
Also these were all recorded and uploaded the same way but so far only
two aren’t working. Gremlins! Rats!
By the way, it can take many hours to get a tune uploaded on Youtube.
I think it depends on how many people are trying to upload a video.
Sometimes I cannot manage to get one up in a whole day.
I’m losing my faith in virtual reality!
…and yer ISP doesn’t upload at anywhere near the speed it downloads either!
translation: it is more likely your provider that is slow 
they optimize for download