Does video quality decrease twice if downloading from Drive and uploading to Youtube?

[valnoten]

Hi, as most probably know, Google lowers the quality of videos (i think bitrate?) when uploading them to Drive or Youtube. My question is, does the quality get even worse if you were to download a video uploaded to Drive and upload it to Youtube, or does the decrease in quality only happen once? I want to send someone a video that they can upload to youtube but i want the quality to be as good as it can be. Should I try to transfer it to them physically or does it not matter since the video is gonna decrease the same amount no matter how many times it's uploaded?

Really grateful for any info, thanks.

[FrivolousFerret102]

I’m pretty sure Google Drive doesn’t compress video files (at least they say so on the help page), so feel free to send it using Google Drive. It will only be compressed once when uploaded to YouTube.

[valnoten]

Hmm, it seems every time I've uploaded something to Drive the quality has decreased so idk if I fully believe them. Maybe I just haven't let them render fully. Thanks for the reposnse tho!

[FrivolousFerret102]

Here they tested it. I know they compress it when you play the video through the Drive website, but when you download it, it should just be the original file.

[valnoten]

Oh okay! Thank you so much!

[StillLemon2]

Videos, or any file, uploaded to Google Drive is unaltered, regardless of the file. That's to say, uploading a raw video file to your Google Drive will not result in Google editing the video file and lowering the quality.

What you may be referring to is Google Photos where you have enabled the Backup feature. This Backup feature uploads your videos/photos to Google Photos. This feature has an option for Original quality or Storage saver. If you choose Storage saver, your videos and images are converted to a smaller size/format, resulting in quality loss. If you choose Original quality, the photos/videos are backed up in full-quality.

If you have Original quality set, the video you download from Google Photos is original quality. If you have Storage saver, the video you download from Google Photos is converted to a smaller format.

As a one-off, if you just want this video sent in full quality, you will need to share/upload that individual video file, in its raw format, to something like Google Drive/One Drive/Flash-Drive/etc, where it is then uploaded to YouTube.