The video looks bad because YouTube&#x27;s encoder butchers video content. Add to that the reality that video decoders typically apply filters to a video post-decode to compensate for the artifacts introduced by encoders. Those filters can add banding, and the encoder already quantized the video.<p>It would look better if the video had been uploaded at 1080p60 or something ridiculous, because that increases the bitrate budget, and the smaller video macroblocks cover less important image information. But that&#x27;s kind of an awful hack.<p>You can observe this clearly with youtube clips of classic games, like those at TASVideos ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UCFKeJVmqdApqOS8onQWznfA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UCFKeJVmqdApqOS8onQWznfA</a> ) the source games are 480i or 240p at best, but the quality of the youtube 480p bitrate is significantly compromised in ways you can see. If you watch it in 1080p it looks much closer to what you&#x27;d see in an emulator (or off the hardware when connected via RGB&#x2F;component.)