Apex Legends Live Play - And YouTube Problems (Patreon)

Hi everyone, Rich here!

It's been a while since my last post - we've been working seven days a week for most of January owing to the various betas going on during the weekends etc. 

We've had a lot of issues with YouTube recently - issues which thankfully our Patrons can bypass. First of all, 4K video encoding seemed to stop working , leaving us with 360p content (!) we couldn't share. The only alternative was to downscale our content to 1080p and get it published that way - in the end, 4K versions did resolve behind the scenes and our YT rep cloned in the 'proper' versions over our 1080p uploads, but still - not ideal :/

Now, we're having problems with 1080p encoding on the YT backend. So here's the thing - speedy encodes at 1080p60 resolve quickly with YT but these videos are encoded with a rough and ready iteration of the h.264 codec. Quality on demanding content isn't great, but a lot of the time it does the job. However, behind the scenes, YT works on re-encoding the video with its own VP9 codec. It takes longer to resolve, but it's a much more advanced system and provides far superior image quality on demanding content. Right now, VP9 encoding is offline.

All of which is INCREDIBLY frustrating as we've put together our own spin on the let's play concept. John, Alex and I played Apex Legends on three very different PCs last Friday. We captured our gameplay and VO, then edited it together, comparing notes, talking about the tech etc. Up to three split screens running at 60fps isn't great for h.264 and so right now, we have a YT video that I'm not sure I can publish.

Obviously though, our Patreon supporters can bypass ALL of these quality issues by having access to our sources files, so I've opened up this video for you to check out exclusively. You can also see how badly the YT version presents at this moment too (I'm trying to sort it out behind the scenes so we can get the vid out there!). Anyway, this video is something of a departure from the usual stuff we do, we had a lot of fun making it and we'd quite like to do more. It's a bit of an experiment and we're keen on getting some feedback!

Here's the link: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/2019-02-12-apex-legends-live-play-ryzen-3-2200g-vs-rtx-2080-ti-vs-gtx-1060