Kdenlive nvenc video settings for Youtube

After numerous tryings in to follow codec settings for youtube [1] in order to processing time after the video was uploaded, I've come up with the following Kdenlive settings for 1080p video using Nvidia hardware.

f=mp4 vcodec=nvenc_h264 acodec=aac ab=384k g=15 profile:v=high global_quality=21 -coder 1 vq=21 -r 29.97 preset=slow bf=2 movflags=faststart pix_fmt=yuv420p

The thing these settings don't have is bitrate limit, however in the videos I've encoded, I didn't notice exceeding bitrate it always seem to be under 15Mbps.

Here's my rationale for each of these encoding options.

  • f=mp4 use mp4 container
  • vcodec=nvenc_h264 utilize nvidia hardware acceleration
  • acodec=aac ab=384k use AAC audio codec with bitrate 384k
  • global_quality=21 -coder 1 vq=21 preset=slow following some of the recommendations from this stackoverflow answer on intricacies of nvidia encoder [2]
  • -r 29.97 use 29.97 FPS frame rate. This is the framerate I shoot the video with and this is the framerate I use to publish video. This will avoid recording light flickering effect in North America power grid.
  • bf=2 2 consecutive B-frames (youtube recommendation)
  • movflags=faststart youtube recoomendation (mp4 container), see additional discussion on superuser.com [3]
  • pix_fmt=yuv420p pixel format/color encoding to use (youtube recommendation)
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