FIX: why your 1080p videos and streams look like 144p rubbed in Vaseline after uploading to YouTube

Playing the local file on your PC looks nice and crisp, but why do your 1080p videos look so bad, blurry, pixelated, etc once you upload them to YouTube? TLDW: you did everything right, it's on YouTube's end, you gotta force upscale your 1080p videos/streams to "false" 1440p. This forces YouTube to use their much better VP9 codec instead of their resource-cheap AVC1 codec, which is the default for 1080p videos and streams. I don't know of any way to retroactively force YouTube to use VP9 on a video you've already uploaded. If anyone knows, leave a comment and I'll pin it so others can learn. Samples are from my War Thunder streams, I had to learn all of this the hard way. good luck out there further reading:    • Is Youtube Destroying Your Video Quality? ...      • How To Fix: Loss Of Video Quality After Up...      • YouTube COMPRESSION - Tips and Tricks for ...      • Low Video Quality After Video Upload On Yo...   00:00 intro 00:09 basic explanation of what's happening 00:18 AVC1 1080p sample 00:38 VP9 "false" 1440p sample 00:49 how to fix 01:03 how to verify you're using the correct codec after you upload