alright, if this is the best that can be done with youtube in 2010, i'm about to give up on it. i tried the wmv you suggested beatkilla -- the file itself has good quality and is around 213 MB for a 6 min video, which is high but is an acceptable size i guess. took about 2 hours to upload and the first time it got to 100% and said "upload failed due to an unknown error", so i tried again...another 2 hours and this time it went through. so after 4 hours of uploading, the video quality isn't too bad, a little degraded from the wmv file but acceptable i suppose. but the real problem is still with the audio -- it sounds terrible. the audio was 16/44.1 wav in Vegas, then rendered to 320 kbps/44.1 in the WMV file. i thought maybe youtube uses 128kbps/44.1, which usually sounds like a mostly acceptable copy of the original. but the audio in my youtube upload sounds nothing like the original -- now it sounds all muffled and poor, and all clarity on the high end has been lost. the cymbals now sound all gross and crunchy. this is even in 480p -- in 360p it sounds even worse. it sounds like youtube is compressing the audio to maybe, at best, 64kbps/22khz as well as adding some nasty dynamic range compression or something else. whatever it is, it's unacceptable and i don't see any way to get around it as youtube seems to provide lots of info and choices about video quality (concerning HD), but says nothing about audio. i find it ridiculous that they allow all this space now for HD video but they can't provide a few extra MB of streaming space for improved audio (say, 128kpbs or 192kbps mp3s?)
ETA: after digging around forums it appears standard def video has a max audio bitrate on youtube of 76kbps, and even for HD the best you get is 128kbps. screw that! my videos aren't in HD so i'm not going to bother 'up-converting' them and going through a whole shitload of extra time in rendering larger files and uploading larger files just to possibly improve the audio quality from 'total shit' to 'mediocre'. gonna try uploading to facebook and see what the quality is like there, as i've heard it's better than youtube. if it's better there, might just post everything to facebook instead.