[SOLVED] Why is my Uploaded YouTube Video Such Poor Quality?
November 6th, 2018
I’ve recently been uploading videos to YouTube. Usually I’m waiting to send the link, so I upload the video then immediately view it on YouTube to ensure it’s good. Often I find that the video quality has been significantly downgraded, sometimes to the point where it’s unwatchable.
When researching this I found a large number of potential causes and solutions, but the actual answer is quite simple:
- Just wait for 30-60 minutes.
When YouTube first publishes a video it does everything it can to quickly make the video viewable and, as such, does the least amount of processing possible and starts with the format that can be watched on any device. So the initial format is the lowest resolution and bitrate. After publication, however, YouTube continues to perform processing in the background and subsequently adds higher-quality versions of the video. If you wait for a bit and then refresh the page, you’ll get a much better version of the video as the default.
