How AV1 Encoding Quality Delivers Better 4K HDR Gameplay on YouTube
When I first uploaded a 4K HDR gameplay video to YouTube, I was disappointed by how much the final version had lost. The inky blacks of The Last of Us Part II Remastered looked washed out, and the fine detail in Ellie's animations turned into a blocky mess. At the time, I blamed the platform. But the real culprit was the codec. YouTube had been using VP9 and H.264 for years, and those formats simply could not preserve the high bitrate needed for a demanding title like this o