We’ve made some sample training videos about using WordPress, recorded them using Adobe Captivate, which creates Flash SWF files.

But to upload them to YouTube, we had to convert them to .AVI files, as YouTube won’t let you upload .SWF files.

And then the actual encoding process used by YouTube is pathetically low quality, traditionally 320×240 pixels. Which makes everything so blurry that you can’t read the text.

I experimented with recording my training sessions at 640, 800 and 1024, to see if it made any difference. They were all still blurry.

YouTube has recently increased the quality slightly - up to 480×360, which is still pretty poor.
Initially you could only view the higher resolution versions of newish videos, by appending a parameter to the end of the address - &fmt=18. However they have now placed a link underneath videos that have the higher resolution version available, so that if you have a slower connection you can view the old 320px version, but with a high speed connection you can view the improved Beta version.

Still not really good enough for use in training though. For clients we will probably stick with hosting Flash videos through Adobe Connect, and avoid the double conversion process.

Or investigate other free video hosting solutions.