YouTube Video Playback Quality VP9 or AVC1

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Since trying out different OBS settings I have noticed that YouTube videos uploaded seem to suffer from a very poor quality no matter what encoder settings I use. Some of my videos seem to pixellate every few seconds with a noticeable blur in 1080p@60. I spent some time trying to work out why and it appears that YouTube uses two different playback codecs when streaming the videos.

AVC1

  • All my videos are using the AVC1 codec once uploaded to YouTube, right mouse on the video and view stats for nerds. This encoder is what causes the poor quality with pixellation.

VP9

  • The VP9 codec is provided to videos that are above 1080p or channels that have a lot of viewers / subscribers / popular content.

So the only way to get better YouTube videos is to upscale to 1440p (2560×1440@60fps) then upload to YouTube and this is were OBS has once again proved to be better than nVidia shadowplay.

Within the OBS options you can set the Base Resolution and Output Resolution so recording 1920×1080 gameplay can be scaled instantly to 2560×1440, no need to use other software to upscale. Now my videos are 1440p 60fps and once processed by YouTube will use the VP9 streaming codec, if you want better videos it’s worth doing this. (EDIT: I now capture in 1920×1080 but use software to upscale, lowers OBS CPU usage)