I have been recording videos at 1080p resolution on a Gopro, then uploading to Youtube. The video quality looks very good (clear and crisp) when the MP4 file is played on my computer with 27" HD monitor. However after the video is uploaded to Youtube at 1080p the video quality is badly degraded when it is played from Youtube, looking blurry in comparison.

The bad video quality after upload to Youtube has been very frustrating, after all the effort to record and edit good quality video. After investigating the problem I discovered Youtube compresses the video using AVC codec for low quality videos and vp9 codec for high quality videos. The same 1080p video looks much better on Youtube if vp9 is used. However by default Youtube uploads all videos at 1080p and lower resolutions using AVC, and only uses for vp9 for 1440p and higher 2160p(4K) resolutions.

To get videos to upload to Youtube using vp9 the best solution is to record the video using 1440p or higher resolution, which results in much better looking videos after upload. Another (not very good) solution is to upscale videos at 1080p or lower resolution to 4K before uploading to Youtube.

I also tried uploading the same 1080p video to Vimeo which uses a different codec version of H.264 to Youtube, which results in slightly better quality than AVC but not as good as vp9.

You can check if a video is AVC or vp9 by playing the video and right click Settings, then click Stats for nerds.

YouTube is garbage when it comes to video quality whichever way you look at it. Take some footage shot in 4K HQ or Raw on a Red camera or Canon R5 with good lens and put through the YouTube compression... it makes you question why you spend all that money.

I guess they aimed it at the lowest common denominator.... 15 year old kids watching on their $200 smart phone.

I use a Garmin Virb camera which offers 4k, uploads to youtube look great in 1080

Choco, agree your recent Youtube videos look great quality. I think its because it is 1440p and vp9. I will be using 2.7K or 4K from now for my Gopro videos, which upload to Youtube using vp9.

Yes Vimeo compression end video quality is waaaay better end result than PooTube.
If you want to share really high quality vid with people, better saving and sending it to them than using the media share sites. But then only the people you send it to see it, not the world, so depend on your target??? Friends and family in max high quality 4K or the world wide web in HDisshhhhh.

With PooTube etc, you have to remember it also depends on the end user as well, if they have gone all tight a$$ and bought low speed NBN in a high volume area and also have their settings on "standard", then they are going to be watching a low grade quality of your 4K HD vid, which has already lost quality after compression..

I was so upset to realize this... most of my videos, including how to forward loop, etc., were affected by this.
It ended up being user error! When exporting your video you need to choose the youtube option which is QuickTime and H264 for me.
Crop a small piece of video and try it out. Also, there was some time were a low view video would default to a simplified codec and have lower quality until the number of views reached a certain level.

Before I realized the problem:


After: