Videos longer than 12 hours?

[James Doppler]

TL;DR: I want to upload a ridiculously long video for the sake of uploading a ridiculously long video. I don't care if it gets watched or not. Is there a way to upload a video longer than 12 hours?


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I spent the last month working on a massive let's play video and then I found out about the 12 hour limit that evidently only applies to some people. People say that's the limit, anyway, but there are 500 hour videos and I really wanted to do this. It was Star Wars The Old Republic level 1-65 all in one video, and I'm at 62 and have countless hours (around a TB) of footage that is pretty much wasted if I can't do this. I only found out about this limit when I looked to see what the current longest let's play is. I even had easter eggs and things for people to post in the comments to prove how far they had watched.


Is there a way to bypass it? Like some special loophole where YouTube will allow it?

 

[FearTheReaper]

I spent the last month working on a massive let's play video and then I found out about the 12 hour limit that evidently only applies to some people. People say that's the limit, anyway, but there are 500 hour videos and I really wanted to do this. It was Star Wars The Old Republic level 1-65 all in one video, and I'm at 62 and have countless hours (around a TB) of footage that is pretty much wasted if I can't do this. I only found out about this limit when I looked to see what the current longest let's play is. I even had easter eggs and things for people to post in the comments to prove how far they had watched.


Is there a way to bypass it? Like some special loophole where YouTube will allow it?

First of all, you need to keep in mind that if you upload a video that long, chances are very few people will watch the whole thing. I would suggest breaking it down, but that may be out of the question at this point. I've never uploaded a video longer than 2 hours. The longest was about one hour and a couple minutes. It didn't do too good. I've seen some very long videos that are +15 hours long, but they're usually memes on a loop. When you think about it they probably didn't do much editing to them and just copied and pasted the same clip multiple times. Which could mean the file size wasn't that big. I don't know if that has anything to do with why you can't upload your video.

 

[James Doppler]

First of all, you need to keep in mind that if you upload a video that long, chances are very few people will watch the whole thing. I would suggest breaking it down, but that may be out of the question at this point. I've never uploaded a video longer than 2 hours. The longest was about one hour and a couple minutes. It didn't do too good. I've seen some very long videos that are +15 hours long, but they're usually memes on a loop. When you think about it they probably didn't do much editing to them and just copied and pasted the same clip multiple times. Which could mean the file size wasn't that big. I don't know if that has anything to do with why you can't upload your video.

I never upload videos longer than 30 minutes unless it's a live stream. This is an exception for no other reason than I could say I have one if the longest ones on YouTube, I don't expect everyone to watch the whole thing, but there are Easter eggs if anyone does.

 

[JesusGreen]

Honestly I'd still split up the video. I like watching really long videos like that myself from time to time, but the issue is that it's rare that someone has enough time to watch the whole thing in one sitting.

Now we all know that if you leave and come back to a video, YouTube remembers where you were at - but sometimes people clear their caches/cookies/etc and lose this, and with a 12 hour video it's a pain in the a** to try and find where you left off.

Also, since videos buffer in the background, if someone pauses the video say 30 minutes in, then the video is going to keep using their bandwidth etc until the whole 12 hours is downloaded. Again not ideal for everyone.

You don't have to make it into short segments, but perhaps split it up into 2-3 hour videos. That way someone who has 12 hours to spare can watch the whole thing in one go, and someone who only has a few hours can watch 1 or 2 segments, and come back later for the rest.

 

[CMTXRATED]

I spent the last month working on a massive let's play video and then I found out about the 12 hour limit that evidently only applies to some people. People say that's the limit, anyway, but there are 500 hour videos and I really wanted to do this. It was Star Wars The Old Republic level 1-65 all in one video, and I'm at 62 and have countless hours (around a TB) of footage that is pretty much wasted if I can't do this. I only found out about this limit when I looked to see what the current longest let's play is. I even had easter eggs and things for people to post in the comments to prove how far they had watched.


Is there a way to bypass it? Like some special loophole where YouTube will allow it?

No one is going to watch a video that's like 12 hours.. to long

 

[James Doppler]

I'm aware of the odds of someone watching it in it's entirety. This isn't the point . The Easter eggs are there for those (if any) that do, but this is about length for the sake of length. I want to have one of the longest let's plays on the Internet. I don't care if the only view it gets is me testing the quality, I just want to have this project that I put so much work into over the past month on my channel. It's supposed to be ridiculous, that's the point. I could have a million subs and maybe two people would watch the entire thing, but I still want it up in it's entirety. I usually break them up into thirty (more recently closer to 15) minute segments, but I felt the urge to make a reeeeeeaaaaaally long video.

So is there any way to get it up? Phrasing. Boom.

 

[HaileySimone]

You can, yes. If the filesize is less than 128GB

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/71673?hl=en

 

[Hendrik Kapp]

I would split the video up into parts and then make a playlist series of it that way, when viewers watch the video it plays automatically from the beginning and when they are tired watching you don`t lose out on view time and viewers will know from where they should continue watching. 12 hours is extremely long.

 

[James Doppler]

You can, yes. If the filesize is less than 128GB

Awesome, thank you. I just checked and I have 971GB of Bandicam recordings, so maybe I'd better try a test render to see how much that shrinks. Usually a lot with Bandicam, but we'll see. Also, thank you for actually reading what I said instead of just posting to get the YTTalk money.

I would split the video up into parts and then make a playlist series of it that way, when viewers watch the video it plays automatically from the beginning and when they are tired watching you don`t lose out on view time and viewers will know from where they should continue watching. 12 hours is extremely long.

Please take 30 seconds to see what I have said repeatedly in this thread and even edited the original post to say so people would stop telling me that. I've been on YouTube for three years now, I'm well aware of the attention span of the Internet. This thread is a good demonstration of said attention span.

 

[Hendrik Kapp]

Then upload a 12 hour video, as simple as that.