Grrr. This post is about why F is for Film is late this week. It gets a little technical.

Imagine playing a baseball game wherein, from the third inning onward the bases are now invisible and the third baseman has a high powered sniper rifle. It would seriously change the face of America’s greatest pastime. Now imagine, that same game from the fifth inning onward; the pitcher’s mound a twenty foot high mini-mountain and the grass replaced by lava, whee.

This is what it feels like to work with YouTube if you want to get any kind of quality out of your uploaded videos. If you’re like me, you’ve found the perfect formula time and time again, only to have the rules suddenly rewritten and your hair suddenly go grey.

Well, I guess it’s time for another bottle of Just for Men because they’ve rewritten the rules again.  Imagine my surprise when, after hours tweaking my settings to get that magic High Quality button, I found this.

We made improvements to standard quality for video uploads! Unless there is a large difference between standard quality and HQ , the upload will produce standard quality by default (and not HQ as before).

They informed their users of this by way of carrier pigeon and when that failed, by way of their lengthy “Sorry YouTube is all fucking kinds of broken” help section.

The infuriating thing is that they simply deactivated the “Watch in High Quality” button on videos that landed in this murky nether realm. The actual videos can still be viewed in high quality if you attach the usual codes to the end (but we can’t expect viewers to do this even if prompted). The latest episode of F is for Film is late because me and a handful of intrepid YouTuberians are working to find a new standard that will pop up with the high quality the way our old settings did and not distort the aspect ratio.

YouTube, since its purchasing by Google, has been a hot mess. As much as I hate the word, they lack synergy between their departments. If they were going to change their own definition for what constitutes a high quality upload they should have rolled it out knowing full well that their users would need a new definition immediately.

But YouTube has the eyes which Vimeo and DailyMotion, sadly, do not. If they keep up this shit though, it may only be a matter of time before we see mass migration.