Frustrated with YouTube

I've been playing around with videos and YouTube lately and I'm pulling my hair out right now about it. Everything I upload ends up with the video and audio out of sync. That's OK if the movie is a coffee can with rocks rolling around in it like my DIY rock tumbler, but if it's a snippet of Gene Kelly or The Monkees, it doesn't work at all.

I thought I had the problem solved last night when I learned how to set limits on my videos' data rates. I'm using Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 as my editing software. I encode my files as Quicktime using the MPEG 4 encoder. It seems to work best. Anyway, for my experiment, I turned the data rate down to 200K/sec. That cut the file size way down so I figured I was on my way. I uploaded the video and it took until this morning for YouTube to digest it to the point where I could watch it.

No go. The only thing I can think of now is to unlink the audio and video in Premiere and then deliberately advance the audio a half second so that when YouTube distorts it, the audio will be in sync. What a pain! That can't be the right thing to do. I've seen plenty of videos there where the audio and video are in synch. It can't be that everyone else is having to do this, too.

After doing some research, I get this tidbit from DV Forums.

Issue:

YouTube recommends fixing audio sync problems by converting .mov files to .avi or .wmv before uploading, and using MP3 for audio. However, FCP doesn't give me those options. So with After Effects I used Cinepak to output an .avi file, but it looked horrible, even at 80 MB! My 6 MB .mov clip looked a lot better.

Response:

Does FCP let you advance the audio by 1/3sec? In my Vegas, I just ungroup the thing and drag the video back (delay).

Here's what YouTube has to say:

Out-of-sync sound is usually the result of using an audio codec that our system doesn't support. We're always adding new ones, but if this happens to your video, you can try re-encoding it with a different audio compression. We recommend MP3 audio for best results.

Mine is not compressed at all. How can you not be able to work with uncompressed audio?

What a kluge! This stinks. There's no excuse for this at all. Audio-video sync has been worked on since The Jazz Singer. There are lots of known solutions. This is pathetic.