In other words, don't worry, it may not be you. I earlier lauded YouTube HD quality, but like so many other things YouTube before it, there's enough dirt in your pie to ruin your enjoyment. That being said, YouTube HD is free (unlike other services like Vimeo and SmugMug), so here's what you need to be aware of:
Even if your video qualifies for YouTube HD, it may take hours to encode. Some have reported "up to a day", and in my experience, "up to half a day" is true. The sad thing: unlike Vimeo and blip.tv — both of which have status indicators showing you when your vids are being encoded — you won't know whether a video will go YouTube HD it actually happens. Factor that into any scheduling plans you have.
Some speculate that motion plays a role in whether your video becomes HD'ed, which is to say, screencasts with a relatively static display may be out of luck. However, I haven't been able to confirm this: I recently uploaded a number of short, 10-sec. clips with the same constant-bitrate encoding format, and some of the still-ish ones made it to HD while some other motion-laden ones didn't. There was no definite rhyme or reason. I've asked to get further info.
That being said, YouTube themselves disclaim:
Please note, we are currently experimenting with this feature and optimizing it accordingly, so we can't guarantee that your videos will always be transcoded into this format with this user option present.
A service like Vimeo is more consistent for getting HD videos, altho in Vimeo's case, quality is somewhat lower and embeds aren't free after you reach a certain limit (1,000 or 5,000 if you came later) on a Plus account.
Also (web video can be confusing, I know), a bug if you use TubeMogul and Vimeo Plus: videos in HD resolution may get recognized as SD. And even SD videos aren't 2-pass encoded as they should be on a Plus account. I'm asking TubeMogul about this as I'm unable to find who's the point of contact at Vimeo.
In addition, to make matters more complex, Vimeo's fallback for HD videos is worse than YouTube's regular SD. The clarity is crufty and text is illegible, as shown here:
Compared to YouTube:
I'm surprised, because Vimeo's SD is otherwise much better than YouTube.
Thus, HD video on the web is pretty spotty in terms of getting guaranteed quality, even if you've done your homework. One would assume the dominant player, YouTube, would get it right. But no. For example, "Torley Show 01" went HD while "Flickr Set Manager" hasn't yet — it's shorter, contains a fair bit of motion, and it's hours later. I'd advise against counting on YouTube to guarantee you HD quality based on the above.
In the meantime, I'm testing other services like Facebook's HD, but again, there's a caveat: I can't seem to find an "embed in HD" option for Facebook. "Embed in HD" appears to be a holy grail for web video (since it's considerably more bandwidth-intensive and offsite, meaning a commercial risk).
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Facebook?
Could non-facebook-users watch at your videos if you put them on Facebook?
Yes, they can be embedded offsite like any other Flash video.
Facebook tests didn't yield great promise for me.
It seems a lot of people have been talking about the poor HD management of YouTube lately. Hopefully they notice. A day for HD encoding is horrible.
@Kyrros: They do disclaim it's experimental but they could state expectations like that more clearly. For how people-powered it is, I'm surprised YouTube's own staff aren't more visible outside their blog and some vids. They have the power to use their personalities to educate and inform when problems are amuck.