After spending the weekend creating for you a new Salsa Timing video for the song “La Pantera Mambo”, I finally had a final version ready for upload this morning. So, I went to my youtube account, hit the upload button and went for a breakfast.
20 minutes later, when I got back, I was very disappointed to find a message on my screen saying that youtube has failed to convert the file. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to give up that fast, so I tried re-encoding the file and gave it another shot. Another 20 minutes, and another failure.
After trying again several times, I decided to change the encoding settings, bit-rate and play with the encoding quality presets – but in vain. Either it did not convert, either it ended up with a gray screen instead of the actual video. Finally, I tried to upload short snippets of the video – ranging from 5 seconds to 30 seconds. Funny enough, the shorter snippets were uploaded perfectly – but the full video didn’t.
Finally, after more than 20 unsuccessful uploads, google has found me the solution – it seems like youtube support for the video encoder I was using, x264, was incomplete. Some of the videos encoded using x264 will be perfectly converted for youtube, while other won’t. I couldn’t put my finger on the reasoning behind which videos will convert, but I did learn that I need to stay away from this encoder.
Equipped with this information, I went to google to look for an alternative solution – and found the new open-source WebM video format, developed and sponsored by google. I had a feeling that this was going to work: since youtube is actually google, they are most likely to support a video format they sponser. And so it did – After encoding the video in the WebM format youtube has successfully digested it and now it’s waiting for you to watch and enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0oC8h_1ehQ
Tags: encoding problems, ffmpeg, salsa music, timing videos, video, WebM, x264, youtube
You should use QuickTime to encode the video into YouTube format (I’ve never had any problems). Also, Adobe Media Encoder or VLC is great for this purpose as well.