Editing & Post-Production
H.264
Also called: AVC, x264, MPEG-4 Part 10
H.264, also called AVC, has been the default video codec since the mid-2000s, and it is what YouTube's own upload guidance asks for, in an MP4 container with AAC audio. Everything decodes it, including hardware in phones and old laptops, which is how it survived newer and more efficient formats. Compression matters less on upload than people assume. YouTube re-encodes every upload into its own delivery formats anyway, so the aim is handing it the cleanest possible source at a generous bitrate rather than the smallest file. Uploading a compressed export of a compressed export is what produces mush.