Please throw some money my way either directly VIA PayPal or with my Ko-Fi maybe don’t do my Patreon until I fully set it up.

What Codecs Uploaded to YouTube Give The Best Quality?

That’s what I’m here to find out.

I recorded some gameplay in lossless MagicYUV AVI format and exported the video out to a couple different common formats that are accepted by YouTube. The gameplay was recorded in 1080p60 and scaled up to 3840x2160 with point scaling. I used point filtered scaling to preserve the hard edges for easier comparison. 4k videos are generally given more bitrate by YouTube so I considered 1080p uploads would be out of the question.

WebM VP9 Source

• 70 quality encoder setting
• 1.77 GiB

MP4 H265 Source

• 50mbps CBR
• 1.53 GiB

DNxHR UHD Source

• automatic quality settings
• 53.4 GiB

MP4 H264 Source

• 50mbps CBR
• 1.47 GiB

MOV Cineform

• 5 quality setting
• 55.7 GiB

AVI MagicYUV

• Max Compression
• 36.2 GiB

Conclusion (PENDING)