[Guide] What are the best settings to encode videos when uploading game play videos to YouTube?

I have uploaded a lot of game play videos in the past. I have almost always used Windows Live Movie Maker to add a starting and an ending to the videos because it is a very easy thing to do.

 

But the issue is, regardless of the quality of the video file that I upload to YouTube, the final output after YouTube does its thing is very low quality. Now that I can easily record videos at 1080p all thanks to NVidia ShadowPlay, the file sizes can get pretty large.

 

Here are two videos I recorded using ShadowPlay and edited using Movie Maker. The first one was saved using YouTube profile. The second one was saved using the High Definition profile. The file size of the original save file with the High Definition profile is about 4 times larger. That video is perfect when watched locally. But after uploading to YouTube, the final quality is about the same as the one using the YouTube profile.

 

Windows Live Movie Maker - YouTube profile

 

 

Windows Live Movie Maker - High Definition profile

 

 

As you see, the quality of those videos totally SUCKS!

So what the best settings for YouTube?

I went on the internet to see if there are recommended settings to use with HandBrake when uploading to YouTube. Windows Live Movie Maker isn't flexible enough to fine-tune the settings. After reading few articles that got me nowhere, I came across a guide posted by Google themselves.

 

[Rant] OMG! My iPhone 5S' SoftBank LTE speeds got so slow!

Yesterday, while I was at work, I felt the browsing speeds of my iPhone 5S had gotten terribly slow. So slow, that it was way slower than my iPhone 4S which itself was terrible on the crappy SoftBank network. At first I thought it had something to do with the SoftBank's LTE network. I saw so worried that it was becoming like the 3G network.

I rebooted the phone. That was the first time I had rebooted the phone manually. But it didn't fix the problem. I was worried that it was because I updated the 7.0.3 the previous day and there was a bug in it. With a lot of effort (because of the slowness), I googled to see if there was such an issue. No such issue was reported. 

Worse case would be having to restore the OS. But before that, there was a simple thing I could do. I could reset the network settings and see. I did that, and it seemed to fix the issue. I couldn't use the phone extensively, but it seemed to have fixed. On my way home, I tried to download an app from the App Store. I do not remember how big the app was though. I entered the elevator while it was downloading, and the download halted mid-way. I couldn't resume it though. Luckily, I could watch the PC Perspective stream on the AMD R9 290X's release. But when I got off the train, it stopped working again. I mean, it became very slow. 

Resetting the network settings didn't fix it this time. I knew I had to do a restore. I restored the factory settings and restored the backup. It still didn't work. Then restored it again, but didn't restore the backup. It still didn't work!

Just to be sure, I ran Speed Test from the phone. I was baffled by the results. The download speed was a mere 30Kbps!!! The upload speed was not affected. It was doing well above 5Mbps. 

Then it struck me! Could I have exhausted the 7.5GB monthly download limit before the speeds got capped? But when I checked the status from the SoftBank website, it said I had another 3.66GB left before the speeds got capped.

I didn't know what to do. I called SoftBank's customer support. I explained the situation. He checked how much GBs were left for me this month. There obviously was no issue. But then he said that there was another condition! I was not supposed to download more than a total of 1GB in 3 consecutive days or else the speeds would get capped until the 4th day dawned!!!! But even then, your download quote for the 4th days was 1GB - (day 1 + day2)'s download. So basically, if had downloaded 100MB, 100MB, 800MB, I'm screwed for the next couple of days because 800MB of the quota is already filled!!! Oh dear! 

SoftBank doesn't show the daily downloads though. I wonder if there is a free app for that. If there isn't, then the whole App ecosystem is a worthless pile of crap!

Anyways, I'm going to stop the phone from downloading app updates automatically when I'm connected to the internet via LTE. I can wait till I got home to do that.

[Article] My ASRock Z68 Extreme4 motherboard having bios issues

With a lot of testing, I was able to finally find the settings that made the CPU overclock stable. It took a lot of work, to be honest, and I came across some weird issues with the BIOS of my ASRock Z68 Extreme4 motherboard during that testing.

 

The biggest issue was that the settings that I set in the bios being not saved when I told it to save and exit. I even misjudged it as a corrupted Windows installation once and almost reinstalled Windows. Luckily, I got a BSOD while booting into the setup and I knew something else was at work. I had set 4.8GHz in bios, which was not stable, and even when I set it to 4.7GHz, it remained at 4.8GHz. However, resetting the BIOS using the Clear CMOS button on the back panel worked.

 

Yesterday I was reading some forum posts about Haswell overclocking and I wanted to check how my CPU compared with the 4770K. When I ran Cinebench on my PC, I only managed to score 8.30 points. That's a pretty low score for a 2600K @4.5GHz. I ran it again and I got the same score. I felt something was not right, so this time I ran it with CPU-Z running by the side. I could see what was wrong. The CPU multiplier would drop to 44x and even 42x during the test.

 

So I went into bios and I found out that the settings had been reset to the defaults on the overclocking section! But I didn't understand how it ran at 45x multi in the first place because according to what was shown on bios, it should have run at 34x. Weird! What actually caused the multiplier to throttle was TDP limit which was reset to 95W.

 

So I loaded the overclocking profile I had saved for 4.5GHz and checked Cinebench again. This time I got a score of 8.72 which is about right.

 

Now, I wanted to play with the RAM timings because I was running them at SPD timings (i.e. 9/9/9/24 2T). I set it to 9/8/8/20 1T and booted back to Windows. When I checked the timings on CPU-Z, it still showed me the SPD timings. I tried several times to set the timings in bios but nothing worked. So I cleared CMOS settings again. The first time it booted to UEFI environment, it was unusable. The mouse movement wasn't smooth. The display was like a slide-show. It felt as if running Crysis 3 on decade old hardware. (But you cannot so that even if you want to because Crysis 3 needs DX11)

 

So I cleared the CMOS settings again. This time it worked and when I set the RAM timings as 9/8/8/20 1T, CPU-Z could see them. I don't know if those settings are stable though. I know for a fact that I cannot run these RAM at CL8.

 

Anyways, I don't know if the mobo is dying or if the cause was something else. I've seen some people say that pressing the Clear CMOS button alone is not enough; you need to remove the battery and put it back after few minutes. I will try that too. If it doesn't fix it, I will have to make a decision. I wonder if it has some warranty left. I've had the motherboard for 2 years now.