I just uploaded my first video clip ever to YouTube today.

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The video is made in a digital signage software I'm developing and shows a nice scrolling text. The video I created was made for 60 Hz and looks smooth and nice when played locally, but when uploaded to YouTube it is jerky.

Does anyone know what frame rate that videos are converted to by YouTube or how I should proceed to get a smoother look in the future? I don't think that YouTube makes justice to my video.

YouTube re-encodes all uploaded videos to quite low bitrates and I don't think it preserves 60hz either. You might try Vimeo, I like their re-encodes better. But neither will really do justice to your source material.

Right-click, "Show Video Info" gives 30 fps.

30 fps is likely a reasonable limit for Flash-based video anyway, especially considering various embedded or small notebooks.

but when uploaded to YouTube it is jerky.[/quote]

That would be likely due to dropped frames, see info above. It will also depend on the browser, Firefox has historically had great difficulties with stuttering of Flash content.

Less powerful machines will have trouble playing at 30 fps anyway, most won't have hardware acceleration.

You can try experimenting with HTML5 playback to avoid Flash issues:<iframe width="720" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TS_N6tKtC6Q?html5=1"></iframe>

Then there is the inherent h264 decoder problem. Even if video above is downloaded, playback may not be completely smooth. Choosing proper IBP frames, buffer lengths and such is a science in itself, even under ideal conditions.

IMHO, mpeg1 is about as far as one can go to reliably present video, but one is stuck with 320x240 resolution. MPEG2 will likely work as well, since DVD decoding is fairly optimized these days for software playback, there's only the royalty issues so it's not a good universal choice.


But simply put, web video is cheap first, nothing else second. Fortunately, almost nobody will notice it. Test have shown that even for games, few can tell difference between 30 and 60 fps, so the latter is simply redundant. For video, 60fps is even perceived as worse.

If you intend to target large audience, author your content at 30 fps. Jitter cannot be reliably solved.

Thanks for the input.

I guess I chose the worst ever material to make a video out of. Horizontally moving things at consant rate is what the eye is most sensitive to.
Maybe I should apply a motion blur filter on the 60Hz content and get it down to 30 Hz just to make it look a little bit better on web playback.

Set the video to HD and it'll look much smoother. If you want to share your video in HD, just add "&hd=1" to the end of the URL