With thousands of new videos now being uploaded to YouTube every day, there must be tons of people who go thru what I just did: upload a video to YouTube for the first time.  Despite one or two user forums, a quick Google search reveals that relatively little has been written about this process.  So here are a few of our thoughts on uploading video to YouTube:

1. the worst part about it is how long you have to wait after the upload is finished for YouTube to process your video.  We waited more than a day and half for our little 3 minute promo clip to finish processing and be ready to share.  I have a hard time believing that all these thousands of people uploading videos everyday are going to have the patience to wait around a few days for their videos to show up.  It certainly hurts the idea that user generated Internet video can cover any type of current events situation.  By the time the video is ready to share it's already a few days later!  I realize that YouTube is attempting to transcode thousands of new video clips a day to their own Flash format for streaming (which can't be an easy thing to do at that scale) but at some point they're going to have to figure out a better way do it or dedicate more resources to do the processing.  Waiting days for your video to show up stinks.
   
   
2. why does YouTube recommend that the optimal format for upload is 320x200 video when they seem to be transcoding the video to fit in the 425 pixel-wide standard viewing window?  They should suggest that directors encode video to a 425 pixel-wide (or higher) format video because whenever you transcode video from a lower resolution format to a higher one, you loose video quality.  Perhaps they have a good reason for telling you to use a lower resolution format than their viewer window, but I can't  figure it out.
   
   
3. it seems their transcoding process screws up the audio/video synchronization somewhat.  I noticed this before even uploading videos by watching other people's Steven Colbert clips captured from broadcast television.  I noticed the sound is usually a little off in them but I just assumed that it was the person capturing it that screwed it up.  Now that I've uploaded my own video, I can see that it's YouTube's transcoding process that's messing it up.  The original clip sound is perfect when played back locally on my PC but the sound synch is slightly off in the YouTube streaming version.  (I uploaded a few different videos to be sure.)
   
   
4. Their transcoding is stripping off the last few moments of the video.  We include a Creative Commons banner at the very end of all our videos (including the promo I uploaded to YouTube) and their processing step seems to have stripped it off.
   
   
5. It looks like by default YouTube takes a frame exactly in the middle of the video to use as the still screen shot icon that they display to represent the video.  It would be nice if there was some way to manually select another frame to use as the frame exactly in the middle of the video may not necessarily best represent what the video is actually about.
   

Besides that, the video and sound quality appear to be okay (for streaming video).  Hopefully you're not in a third-world country somewhere so your Internet connection is solid enough that it plays back in real-time without skipping.

As I alluded to on the front page, there are lots of cool things about streaming Internet video (especially what YouTube/MySpace/Google Video are doing) but video quality and playback performance aren't among them.  That's one reason that we chose to go with BitTorrent and P2P to distribute the mariposaHD episodes: we wanted the best video quality possible.

For Internet video to eventually eclipse broadcast video (which it eventually will) the video quality and playback performance has to be BETTER than broadcast TV, not worse.  The video capabilities of a typical PC are already far beyond most televisions.  The trick is simply getting the high-quality video to the viewers on a network that wasn't designed to work that way.  We think the BitTorrent/P2P/cached video method is what works.  Not getting video in real-time is a small price to pay for vastly superior video quality.  Most people don't need to watch something in real-time anyway.  DVD's, VHS tapes, Tivoed TV shows, video on demand, are pay-per-view are all not real-time delivery and they all seem to do pretty well.  Besides, the real criticism of YouTube's business model is the economic one.  It reputedly costs them more than half a million bucks a month to pay for all those servers and bandwidth to host all those thousands of streaming videos.  How are they going to make enough money to pay for all that?  The bigger their audience, the bigger their bandwidth bill. Their economics don't scale well.  Here at mariposaHD, we've had thousands of viewers download our first view videos (which are in HD!) from all over the world and we've distributed it all from a single 2.4 Ghz Celeron server that hosts our website and BitTorrent tracker.  That's the way that Internet video will eventually eclipse broadcast television.