YouTube Video Processing Problems - Stuck at 360p

Arts & Media
1

I have a large 4k video I’ve been struggling to get processed on YouTube. I’ve uploaded it several times in h265 & h264, scaling down bitrates and resolution each time. Even 1440p at recommend youtube specs isn’t processing past 360p resolution now…

Here’s an article showing many others with this same problem.

And a gaming channel talking about it.

Normally YouTube video processing can take a while, especially with 4k, but if nothing happens after 24-48 hours then it’s really stuck if still at 360p. When this happens YouTube recommends deleting the video and uploading it again.

Is anyone else facing this problem? I’ve seen reports of it happening from 720p and above. I wonder if it’s an issue of video file size, the complexity of the codec, google servers getting overwhelmed or just bad luck.

2

Whohoo! My 1440p video just showed signs of life after about 12 hours… So that was about 12 hours from the initial 360p version to 1080p. It went from 360p to 1080p all at once.

For reference this was 3 hrs. and 12 mins of h264 with CRF 18 quality and uncompressed 16 bit audio. File size was 48 GB.

3

This is why creators will upload their videos privately first and then wait for it to be proceeded before listing it.

Because the most crucial time is the initial week the video is released, it is bad to have the momentum killed by poor quality, where applicable.

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4

Be patient, this type of uploads takes time and at times serves take more than usual to render the quality also depends on your region and connection settings.

5

Right on @Dynamic_Gravity, no serious youtuber is going to auto publish their video. Unpublished or Private should part of everyone’s default upload settings. The key time window for view velocity on a video is generally the first 48 hours.

@raunoy patience is the right approach 99% of the time, but YouTube video processing does fail. I’m approaching 300 videos and this is my second time. For example, here is a video from last year where the VP9 encode didn’t initialize (https://youtu.be/7oZvQxte1Ak).

As a creator it’s important to know when things are going sideways. Hopefully other YouTubers will find this thread when they face this issue.

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6

Thanks for sharing. :slight_smile:

1 Like
7

I ran into another YouTube “stuck at 360p” type encoding failure today. This was on a short 10 minute 4k video, about 4.8 GB in size. I was surprised it was still at 360p after three hours and rendered a second version of the exact same video with a slightly lower CRF rating.

This proved to be a wise course of action. The second video processed like normal and reached 1080p within 40 mins.

YouTube_Encoding
YouTube_Encoding.png1150x340 31.6 KB

Given the similarity between the two video files, I’m going to chalk this up to random YouTube encoding failure somewhere at a google data center.