> that's probably the best quality version in the wild
Probably not, would be my guess. Uploading the very same source video to somewhere else than YouTube (and ideally a place that doesn't do heavy compression at all) would lead to an higher quality version easily, someone somewhere must have done just that.
That's what I meant, that the source video for that YouTube upload is probably the best version out there, as you say the second-hand re-encoded version served by YouTube is inferior. I didn't word that clearly, sorry.
Probably not, would be my guess. Uploading the very same source video to somewhere else than YouTube (and ideally a place that doesn't do heavy compression at all) would lead to an higher quality version easily, someone somewhere must have done just that.