What video format to use on Youtube in 2022?

In 2022, what better format than a youtube video to share your content as a brand? Youtube has become the place to be to engage with your audience and build a community but first and foremost : Create a powerful brand!

Indeed the video format, especially on Youtube is today the most effective way to captivate your audience. According to a 2021 study run by global media insight :

• Youtube now has 2.6 billion active users per year. 300 million more than the year before.
• Youtube is now the 2nd most popular social media platform behind Facebook
• 81% of the 18-25 age group regularly consume Youtube video formats (video/shorts)

Youtube is clearly on a hype trend and the last of these number clearly shows it is the go to media of today but also tomorrow! Looking at these numbers, it’s hard not feel like you absolutely have to create Youtube video formats for you or your brand to be relevant… But how to do it? How to pick the right Youtube video format?

Don’t worry, we’re going to cover all of this together. Learn all there is to now about Youtube video formats and how to make them trend.

Which Youtube video format should you use in 2022

First of all, you have to know in which technical video format you want to create your Youtube content. Here, the video format is dictated by the video’s resolution. In other words, the number of pixels in the horizontal and vertical axis.

HORIZONTAL Youtube video formats and resolutions

The default horizontal Youtube video format is 16:9, which a height and width ratio of 16 by 9. Depending on the quality and the resolution you want for your Youtube video format, here are all the options at your disposal :

We recommend using the 1920x1080 video format, especially for short video contents as it still offers today the best compromise in term of image quality, file size and computing power required to edit videos in this format.

VERTICAL Youtube Video Formats and Resolutions

The vertical Youtube video format as gained a lot of popularity in the last 2 years thanks to the sudden rise of TikTok and the launch of Instagram’s Reels. Youtube has followed the trend by enabling the proper display of vertical video formats. But that’s not all! To rival for those 2 vertical video juggernauts, Youtube as launched what they call “Youtube Shorts”. To publish videos in those vertical formats, here are the resolutions you can use.

The vertical Youtube video format should clearly be a priority for you, especially the Youtube shorts format! 63% of Youtube video views come from mobile devices, on which vertical videos are much more enjoyable to watch. On top of that, Youtube as just launched it’s Shorts feature so everything suggests they could push those video format to users more than regular videos. In other terms, it’s the ideal timing to surf on the vertical video trend.

Supported file types and codecs for Youtube videos in 2022

Youtube supports almost every video format and codec. Note that Youtube heavily compresses your videos when uploading them. The do that in order to reduce the amount of data stored on their servers and streamed by the end users. This means it’s not necessary to choose a codec that ensures the best video quality as Youtube will compress it anyway. Here is a list of all the codec Youtube supports :

• .MOV
• .MPEG-1
• .MPEG-2
• .MPEG4
• .MP4
• .MPG
• .AVI
• .WMV
• .MPEGPS
• .FLV
• 3GPP
• WebM
• DNxHR
• ProRes
• CineForm
• HEVC (h265)

There you go! You know have all the tools in your bag to choose the right formats for your Youtube videos. Youtube is free and accessible to anyone so go ahead and launch your channel! Producing videos regularly can be quite time consuming but there are a lot of solutions out there to generate videos almost automatically. So no excuses, put in the work and you’ll se the results!