If you are a novice Youtuber, then you must have stumbled across the problem of uploading a huge video file to Youtube. It is very common problem. So many yotubers have made videos complaining about this and how they have to spend hours sitting in a restaurant or café waiting for the upload to complete. This is because all the better digital cameras save the captured videos into very large video files. It takes forever to upload these huge videos to your Youtube account. If you want to save your time, then you should compress the videos using some open-source tools that are specially designed to encode the videos for Youtube. Here is a list of some of these open-source tools:
HandBrake
This is a very popular tool that can do all kinds of encoding of videos among other things. You can add or replace audio streams, you can add subtitles, add filters and more. For preparing your Youtube videos, you have to add your video and then select the preset – “Youtube 720p”. There are many more Youtube related presets that you can choose from.
Depending on the type of camera you use for making videos, you have to experiment with different presets and change various parameters to get the best possible quality and a smaller video file size. It is suggested that you use Matroska container for output videos.
You can download HandBrake from https://handbrake.fr/.
VidCoder
VidCoder makes it very easy to transcode videos, add subtitles or audio streams and more. In fact, it appears to have almost the same features as HandBrake but provides a slightly easier interface. You can add your videos and then select a preset designed for Youtube from the Encoding settings in the toolbar.
If you want to skip a few frames then you can choose a time range from which the video stream is to be selected. After this, you can simply click on the green Encode button to prepare your video files. If the files are still large, then you can experiment with encoding settings and presets.
You can download VidCoder from https://github.com/RandomEngy/VidCoder/releases.
FFmpeg
This tool is for the advanced users who love to use command line tools. FFmpeg is able to do everything that HandBrake and VidCoder can do. In fact, FFmpeg developers have some advice for the creators who use Youtube which can be paraphrased into – “try to upload as high quality video as possible”. So you can simply use the command ffmpeg -i source.mp4 -c:v libx264 output.mkv which will do everything needed to compress the video file and still maintaining a good quality.
You can then upload the MKV video file to your Youtube and it will be re-processed by Google servers to finally publish the video. MKV container is used because FFmpeg selects x264 and Ogg Vorbis automatically for this, both of which give really good quality.
You can download FFmpeg from https://www.ffmpeg.org/