zlacker

Actually, when I uploaded stuff on YouTube I’d notice sometimes that it was best to, even if the source footage was 1080p, upscale / upload it at 4k or 8k resolution so that people with sufficiently good internet could view it without as much compression. (In fact, when the original video uploaded is upscaled to 4k, even the 1080p version of the final video looks closer to the source footage)

These were unlisted videos, so I’m not a YouTuber or anything, but I’m pretty sure this is one thing some people do to make their videos appear better sometimes

>>odo124+(OP)
This definitely works. I've uploaded 720p drone footage (which already looked pretty crappy), and youtube avc1-encodes it with low bandwidth settings. The video looks like absolute garbage. If I upscale it to 2k (it has to be above HD for this to work), youtube will vp09-encode it and use a significantly higher bitrate, and the resulting video retains most of the original detail. I consider this a requirement for all of my uploads.

>>odo124+(OP)
I've done this. For example, here's some handycam HI8 footage of STS-106 and a launch tower tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq2eye32EA8

Filmed in HI8 480p, but YouTube's 480p looks like mud and doesn't do the uncompressed analog source justice. You can see this when you select 4K