Best Export Settings for YouTube, Straight From YouTube's Own Guidance

The official values, in one place

YouTube's help article on recommended upload encoding settings lists the following. These are recommendations, not upload requirements: YouTube processes many other formats, and the page itself says no bitrate limit is required.

Container

MP4, with no edit lists and the moov atom at the front of the file (Fast Start)

Video codec

H.264, progressive scan, High Profile, 2 consecutive B frames, CABAC, 4:2:0 chroma subsampling

Keyframes

A closed GOP of half the frame rate, so a keyframe every 15 frames at 30 fps or every 12 at 24 fps

Bitrate mode

Variable bitrate

Frame rate

The frame rate the content was recorded at; interlaced footage should be deinterlaced first, for example 1080i60 to 1080p30

Audio codec

AAC-LC, Opus or Eclipsa Audio; stereo, stereo plus 5.1, or stereo plus Eclipsa Audio

Audio sample rate

48 kHz

Audio bitrate

128 kbps mono, 384 kbps stereo, 512 kbps 5.1

Colour space

BT.709 for SDR uploads, with primaries, transfer and matrix all tagged BT.709

Recommended video bitrates by resolution

YouTube's SDR table, at standard frame rates (24, 25, 30) and, in brackets, high frame rates (48, 50, 60):

2160p (4K)

35–45 Mbps (53–68 Mbps)

1440p (2K)

16 Mbps (24 Mbps)

1080p

8 Mbps (12 Mbps)

720p

5 Mbps (7.5 Mbps)

480p

2.5 Mbps (4 Mbps)

360p

1 Mbps (1.5 Mbps)

HDR uploads have a separate, higher table on the same page (1080p is 10 Mbps, or 15 Mbps at high frame rates), and HDR isn't offered below 720p there. The page also lists 8K values for both.

If you're unsure what bitrate actually does to a picture, video bitrate explained covers rate control and why a busy scene needs more data than a static one.

What's official and what's opinion

Most "best settings" articles quote the table above and then add their own rules. Some are sensible, but they're not YouTube's:

• Loudness targets such as −14 LUFS don't appear on YouTube's encoding page. They come from guides that measured or estimated how platforms adjust playback volume, so treat them as a choice rather than a spec.
• "Export at double the recommended bitrate" is a judgement call. A higher bitrate gives YouTube's encoder a cleaner source, at the cost of a bigger file and a longer upload; the help page gives the numbers above for reference and doesn't ask for more.
• "Upload in 4K so YouTube gives you a better codec" is a claim about YouTube's internal processing that the encoding page doesn't make. It may or may not hold for your video; don't treat it as a rule.
• Readers sometimes notice a line at the top of the help page about features for partners who use YouTube Studio Content Manager. The encoding recommendations themselves are written as general advice for uploads, and they work as a target for any channel's exports.

Setting these values in a typical editor

Labels differ between editors, but the same handful of controls appear in most export dialogs:

1. Choose H.264 in an MP4 container. Some editors call this a format and a codec; others offer a YouTube preset that already selects both.
2. Keep the resolution and frame rate of the timeline. If you shot at 25 fps, export at 25 fps; converting to 30 duplicates frames rather than adding motion.
3. Set the bitrate mode to variable (VBR) and the target from the table: 8 Mbps for 1080p at 30 fps, 12 Mbps at 60 fps.
4. If the dialog has a keyframe interval, set it to half the frame rate. If it has a profile option, choose High.
5. Set audio to AAC, 48 kHz, stereo, 384 kbps.
6. Look for a Fast Start, "optimise for web" or "web optimised" option and turn it on, so the moov atom sits at the front of the file.
7. Leave colour at the default Rec. 709 for ordinary SDR footage unless you're deliberately delivering HDR.

If a clip came from a phone with variable frame rate, some editors drift audio against video on export, so convert it to a constant frame rate before editing. To change the frame rate of a finished file, the free change video frame rate tool re-encodes in your browser; it drops or duplicates frames and doesn't interpolate motion.

When the export is too big to upload or share

YouTube accepts large files, but your connection may not, and the same export often needs to go to a collaborator by email or chat first. Two routes:

• Re-export from the editor at a lower bitrate or resolution, which keeps quality highest because you encode once from the original.
• Shrink the finished MP4 with the free compress video tool. You pick a target size in MB; it works out the bitrate from the duration, shows the resolution and video kbps it plans to use before starting, and steps the resolution down if the budget would look blocky. It runs in the browser tab and doesn't upload the file. A 10-minute video squeezed to 300 MB gets about 4 Mbps in total, about half of YouTube's 1080p recommendation, so expect a softer picture.

Every re-encode costs some detail, and YouTube re-encodes again after upload, so compress from the original export rather than from a copy that's already been shrunk. The video file too large guide covers trimming, splitting and other ways around size limits.

Subtitles: upload an SRT or burn them in

How you deliver subtitles changes what happens to them in YouTube's processing.

Uploaded SRT or VTT

Drawn by YouTube's player as text, so it stays sharp at every playback quality. Viewers can turn it off, and you can add one file per language

Burned into the picture

Part of the video, so YouTube compresses the letters along with everything else. They look the same everywhere, including embeds and downloads, but at low playback qualities thin text softens

For an uploaded track, create the SRT with the AI subtitle generator at 1 credit (0.1¢) per minute with a 5-credit minimum, so a 12-minute video costs 12 credits (1.2¢); only the audio is uploaded for that job. Uploading subtitles to YouTube walks through YouTube Studio.

If you burn subtitles in, give them a fighting chance against compression: a heavier font, a size that reads on a phone, and a background box or outline rather than thin white text over a busy picture. The free subtitle editor renders an MP4 at the clip's own resolution with those styles, and burning subtitles without losing quality explains how to keep the re-encode clean.

What these settings don't guarantee

• YouTube re-encodes every upload. Matching the recommended settings gives it a good source; it doesn't mean viewers see your exact file.
• Higher resolutions may take longer to finish processing after upload, so a 4K version can appear a while after lower qualities.
• The page lists AAC-LC, Opus and Eclipsa Audio for sound. It doesn't promise a particular playback bitrate, and notes that audio playback bitrate isn't tied to video resolution.
• None of these numbers covers the content of the picture: a dark, grainy or fast-moving shot still compresses harder than a bright, static one at the same bitrate.