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Tell HN: Check your old YouTube videos
If you're someone who has uploaded videos to youtube in the past, and don't want to lose them, give them a quick look now.
Many older videos on YouTube have been re-transcoded to a abysmal bitrate that throws away 90% of the video content.
This is especially important if your videos contain text content.
(Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22lfCWA43Q8 )
Just a friendly PSA to re-check your old videos, check your backups, re-upload or leave them bit rotted forever.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fastily 2y agoTo be fair YouTube isn’t “back up”. Everything that gets uploaded to YouTube gets re-encoded and that’s generally a lossy process
- RGamma 2y agoIIRC YT used to store the original too, but that was many moons ago. They're probably feeling the pressure from storage cost...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wruza 2y agoEven recent 1080p+ videos are not 1080p bitrate-wise. You can easily see it by comparing with the same “vod” content on twitch. Youtube has its own perverted notion of p-scale and yes most old videos look like blurry crap on it, despite the fact that 480p is an absolutely watchable format.