I want to record video from games, therefore I cannot use very large video resolution, but I still want to make the large video view to look as sharp as the original encoded video before upload.

I tried to use YouTube's recommended 854x640 resolution, but it wasn't possible with h264 and the encoding software I used (Handbrake) converted it to a width of the nearest multiple of 4, which I think is a limitation of the h264 format.

The video I encoded was sharp and fine quality, but when I uploaded it to YouTube, it lost a lot of quality and the preferred large video view looks almost as bad as a 320p video. I tried to wait a few days but it never got sharper (in case it didn't process it completely yet).

So, which resolution and encoding options I should use, if I want the large video player to have the sharpest possible video, retaining the original video quality as good as possible?

I noticed that recording with 640x480, the video was sharper than with 1280x720, so I'm not sure what im doing wrong here; both were h264.

Is it anyhow possible to prevent YouTube from re-encoding the videos? I just wonder how people can make so sharp videos, while mine are all blurry after upload, but before upload they looked fine. I also tried YouTube's suggested bitrates with h264, but it didn't work any better.