YouTube HD vs Facebook HD
pile:
There’s been some discussion lately over which video sharing site has the best HD service. There are lots of features that differentiate video sharing services now beyond the HD compression quality, but since I couldn’t find it anywhere on Google and I know how hard it can be to find practical x264 encoding settings, here’s YouTube and Facebook’s HD profiles compared:
YouTube / Facebook
- x264 version: “core 54” / “core 65 r1019”
- file format: MPEG-4 / FACE (?)
- profile: Main (level 5.1) / High (level 3.1)
- video bitrate: 2000 Kbps VBR / ~2253 Kbps VBR
- audio bitrate: ~160 Kbps / ~128 Kbps
- cbac: no / yes
- analyse: 0x1:0x111 / 0x3:0x113 (not sure what these map to yet)
- ref frames: 3 / 4
- deblock: 0,0 / 0,0
- me: hex / hex
- me_range: 16 / 16
- subme: 5 / 6
- mixed_ref: no / yes
- chroma_me: yes / yes
- trellis: no / no
- 8x8dct: no / yes
- chroma_qp_offset: 0 / -2
- decimate: yes / yes
- b_pyramid: no / yes
- b_adapt: yes / yes
- wpredb: yes / yes
- keyint: 60 / 150
- keyint_min: 25 / 30
- rc: 2pass / 2pass
- ratetol: 1.0 / 1.0
- qcomp: 0.6 / 0.6
- qpmin: 10 / 10
- qpmax: 38 / 51
The verdict: Facebooks video’s will look better with lower audio quality and seek-ability. Facebook took the time to slightly tweak the color (darker) and increase visual fidelity while YouTube tweaked more defaults and is trying to decrease encoding time. YouTube’s videos are slightly more compatible if you’re not playing them on a computer (ie. in an XBOX). Both look pretty much the same, and HD video is now a commodity.
Vimeo doesn’t use x264 (yet!!!) so it’s not really comparable here.
