YouTube

SOURCING: every row above comes from a page I actually fetched on support.google.com. Rows marked "unverified" are gaps where YouTube does not publish a number — I left them empty rather than filling them from an SEO blog. WHAT I COULD NOT GET: 1. Shorts safe zone / UI-overlap dimensions. There is no first-party YouTube Help page publishing safe-zone pixels or percentages for Shorts (unlike Meta, which does publish Reels safe areas). Every "Shorts safe zone" number in circulation traces to third-party blogs or community measurement, not to Google. Marked unverified, left unfilled. 2. Shorts-specific max file size and min resolution — not stated on 10059070, 12779649, or 15424877. Only the max resolution (1080p) is published. 3. My WebSearch budget for this session was exhausted (200/200) partway through, so I could not do broad discovery for additional first-party pages. I worked around it by pulling the outbound link list off the Shorts hub page, which is how I found the two canonical Shorts articles (15424877, 12779649). There may be further first-party pages I did not reach. NO CONTRADICTIONS between official pages, but two things look like conflicts and are not: - 1722171 (encoding settings) gives bitrates and codecs but NO pixel dimensions; 6375112 gives the pixel-dimension table. They are complementary, not disagreeing. Do not cite 1722171 for resolutions. - The thumbnail size limit is device-dependent on a single page: 2 MB mobile vs 50MB desktop. The near-universally cited "YouTube thumbnails max 2MB" is only the mobile limit and is now wrong as a general statement. Published verbatim as "50MB" (no space) and "2 MB" (with space). CHANGES WORTH FLAGGING: - Shorts 3-minute limit: effective Oct 15, 2024 for standard channels, and Dec 8, 2025 for Official Artist Channels — the OAC date is inside the last ~12 months, so OAC catalogs uploaded before it still behave as long-form. - "Eclipsa Audio" now appears in the recommended audio codec list on 1722171 alongside AAC-LC and Opus. This is a recent addition; older copies of this spec list only AAC-LC. - The thumbnail desktop limit of 50MB is a substantial recent increase over the long-standing 2MB. I confirmed it on both the Desktop and Android platform variants of 72431, so it is not a rendering artifact. PRECISION CAVEAT: WebFetch summarizes pages through a secondary model. Values in quotation marks are reported as verbatim, but for anything you are going to hard-code into an encoder preset or a validation gate, re-read 1722171 and 6375112 directly — particularly the SDR/HDR bitrate tables, where I received the SDR table in full but only a description of the HDR table's shape rather than its cell values. I did not transcribe HDR bitrate numbers for that reason. SURFACE MAPPING (practical): long-form = any aspect ratio accepted, 16:9 is the norm, do not bake in padding. Shorts = square or vertical only, ≤3 min, ≤1080p. Thumbnails = 16:9 at 3840x2160, except podcast playlists which are 1:1.