The key for YouTube to display your video the best possible way, is to upload the best possible quality video that meets or exceeds their requirements.

Two main reasons why your videos may look bad:

• Poor Transcoding - youtube converts videos to flash

• Scaled Up Resolution - youtube expands the video for viewing to 424x318

1. Your source video needs to be ideally high resolution. For instance: MOV or AVI file, NTSC 720x480 or VGA 640x480.
2. You need to get a high quality video encoder. Keep in mind that most video editing programs such as Apple Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Adobe Premiere Pro, Windows Movie Maker or Sony Vegas, come with an encoding engine so you can export your videos directly from the timeline.
3. YouTube resizes your videos to 320x240 pixels, encodes them to Flash 7 at a data rate of approximately 250 kbps and compresses audio to mp3 (22.050 KHz, monophonic).
4. It's very important that you keep an aspect ratio of 4:3, otherwise the quality of your video will be degraded. Flash 7 codec performs best when the frame width and height use multiples of 16. This is optimal for video playback.
5. YouTube (newest) recommended settings are: MPEG4 (DivX, Xvid, SVQ3) format, 640x480 resolution,64k Mono MP3 audio, 30 frames per second.