YouTube 4K60 gaming VOD (pre-AV1 era pipeline still in use). VP9 at 12 Mbps for 4K60 per YouTube recommended settings, tile columns for parallel decode, Opus/WebM. YouTube transcodes everything to VP9 anyway, so this avoids double-encoding.
| Video Codec | VP9 |
| Bitrate | 12M |
| Resolution | 2160p |
| Audio | Opus |
| Container | WebM |
| Framerate | 60 |
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 12M -r 60 -tile-columns 3 -frame-parallel 1 -c:a libopus -b:a 192k output.webmYouTube stores every video in VP9 (and increasingly AV1) regardless of upload format. Uploading VP9 directly can skip one generation of compression loss. However, YouTube still re-encodes VP9 uploads — there is no true "passthrough" mode.
A new FFmpeg encoding puzzle every day. Six tries, in the browser or from your terminal.