I was on the weird side of youtube yesterday when I noticed a 1080p60 video that looked like real 1080p, rather then soft youtube version of 1080p,The version I was being served was VP9 (said to be almost HEVC level of compression) so I had a look at the various bitrates and this is what I found. H264 encode 2.379kb/s (normal) , VP9 3,332kb/s (unusually high)

I then searched for other 1080p60 videos that were around the same duration uploaded in the last few days to see if youtube had up'd VP9 bitrates for everyone now that apple devices decode VP9. I only found 2 videos, which were game capture encodes that had the same very high VP9 encode bitrates. The rest had the usual VP9 bitrate of being upto 50% lower in birate than H.264 with some being approx equal .

I thought it may be possible to trigger this high quality YT encoding via the right encoding setting either in vegas internal encoder or something like voukoder. There is nothing I can point to as to why this video has such high VP9 bitrate. Part of the trigger may be 1080p60 as her previous videos were 1080p30 and are normal bitrate, but it's more then that, some quirk engaged the ridiculously high bitrate. This is the link if anyone wanted to investigate further There is compression to be seen which makes me suspicious that it's a bugged encode and quality isn't actually better but I figured what was uploaded could have looked like that