
We can use the handy command-line-based tool FFMpeg to follow these recommendations. YouTube has an official encoding guide, which if you follow correctly, will result in the video not having to be converted by YouTube once you upload it. This way you might save some time waiting for the video to get ready and you will have more control over the visual quality of the video. If you have the hardware for it, you can convert the video yourself before uploading it. This can take some time, and you really have no control over how YouTube converts your video. When you upload a video to YouTube, YouTube will convert that video to an appropriate video format for streaming.
