Quick & dirty lossless YouTube song+picture uploads

[Otto Halmén]

This is a slightly hackish approach, but I came across a cheap (as in money, time and disk space) way to do simple song+picture uploads to YouTube.

There's a freeware program called VirtualDub. Basically, it is to video editors what Audacity is to your everyday DAW.

All you need is a master .wav file of your tune and a picture in 16:9 format (1920x1080 pixels, or 1280x720 pixels, etc.).

In VirtualDub,
1. Go to File -> Open video file... and select the picture file.
2. Go to Audio -> Audio from other file... and select the .wav file.
3. Go to Video -> Frame Rate... and select Change so video and audio durations match (x.xxx fps). Also select Convert to fps: and enter a value that is ten* times the x.xxx value.
4. Go to Video -> Compression... and make sure it's set to uncompressed.
5. Make sure Audio -> Direct stream copy is checked.
6. File -> Save as AVI... and upload the resulting file to YouTube.

*This is the hackish part. You'll end up with a video file which has barely the amount of fps for YouTube to accept it. Ten times the x.xxx value was the smallest value with which I managed to get it working consistently when I tried this out. Larger values (such as 1 fps) result in more frames and increase the encoding time and file size.

This usually takes only a few minutes to encode and typically results in a file that is only a couple hundred megabytes. As an (arguably redundant) bonus, YouTube's own converters now get a lossless file to work from.

[Otto Halmén]

And here's some proof of concept.





For this, the encoding took mere seconds on a bootcamped early 2011 MacBook Pro. The resulting file was 244 megabytes. Could have pretty much posted it from the middle of nowhere using a mobile connection if I had been forced to.

[Paul Battersby]

(09-15-2016, 01:23 PM)Otto Halmén Wrote: The resulting file was 244 megabytes.

That's an interesting tip you've provided. I've wondered why YouTube doesn't seem to recognize that people want to upload audio with a static image (perhaps a pod cast or just a song), BUT are you sure about that 244 Meg size? A 1 hour T.V. show (40 minutes without commercials) can take up less space than that and when I downloaded your video in 720p format to check, it was only a little over 13 Meg.

p.s. I like your waltz.

[Otto Halmén]

Yes. YouTube videos themselves are always encoded lossy. If you do the above with a png+wav, the file that hits YouTube's encoders is lossless. That was the idea.

Now, I haven't actually checked out a typical h264 upload and a lossless one side by side in YouTube. Might be that you wouldn't even notice the difference in the final YouTube video. They've probably tweaked their video processing tech to the maximum, anyway. Heard it was a quite popular website.

Still, when lossless is this cheap and fast, why not? At least if you're doing simple song+picture uploads.

EDIT: Oh, thanks for the like!