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