What is codec?

Well any video needs to be encoded, and there are different technologies for that, the usual goal is to achieve the best quality with the smallest file size.

What are the differences?

If you are new YouTube channel, until you grow you will be forced upon AVC1 which stand for Advanced Video Codec 1 which means h.264 low bitrate which stand for bad. The other formats are:

• VP9 – Standard for most >10k views channels, also used for higher resolution videos.
• AV1 – Fresh new format which better quality, only for most popular videos, on very popular channel still kinda random

How to get it

As I wouldn’t hope for AV1, VP9 is easily achievable by everyone, even for channel made 2 minutes ago. As I wrote before, it’s used for higher resolution video, meaning there is a threshold, usually it gets applied for 1440p videos, but not everyone records in such high resolution. You could just upscale render to it, but it will create unnecessary huge files, so the solution is to render in 2k (2048×1152) instead 1080p (1920×1080), you can render 1080p recorder video with higher resolution in any software.

It’s all about this threshold resolution for single axis.

• Vertical – 1152px
• Horizontal – 2048px

So even video with resolution 1×2048 will get an VP9, so it can be applied for others like 1:1, 3:4, 9:16 as well.

And that’s it 2x better quality for YouTube videos free of charge!

Shorts

No need for such things, all of them getting VP9