I’m planning a huge playthru of a game, and I’d like to be able to look back at it years down the line. However I’m expecting it to be 100s of hours (maybe around/over 1k, but I hope not longer than 2k) and years to finish (I’m not planning on playing 8+h a day).
What are he most optimal settings for OBS to save as much video as possible, while it’s still watchable?
I could record in 1440p 165fps. I know that’s dumb, but idk how low I’m willing to go. 1440p sounds awesome, but lower than 1080p would lose too much information. Same with lower than 60fps. I don’t have a clue as to what bitrate would do well, and what encoding is best. For bitrate I have a clue that it needs to be as high as possible. As it can be a bullethell and there are way to many particles/effects on screen, while everything that matters is small. (I’m not trying to be secretive here, game’s modded Terraria)
I’d also state that I’d like to error on the storage side, I don’t mind buying another HDD, they really aren’t that expensive. And I’m also planning on editing the video down as soon as possible, so that I delete all the boring parts. Meaning I probably won’t have all of that lenght on my disk at once.
Thank you for any aid in my crazy endeavour.
Oh that’s a great tip, I set it to “indistinguishable” and it 3x-ed the (almost) same gameplay clip, but it does look the best so far. But if what you are saying is true, with the encoding the previous encoder’s artifacts, doesn’t that mean I should record in lossless?
I did try a video of my desktop doing almost nothing, and AV1 rf23 compressed it 1786x. That’s nice. I’ll now try re-coding this “indistinguishable” h264 preset video and to record a lossless one and to re-code that as well.
From a technical level you should use something lossless in this situation, but it really quickly becomes impractical. Actually lossless 1080p60 is going to be something like 500mbps, so if you’re playing for an hour I hope you have a spare 2tb drive laying around. The artifacts in really high bitrate compressed video are so minimal that they basically don’t matter. Often codecs do noise removal first thing so whatever minor artifacts still exist will get smeared over by that anyway.
Also when you are testing make sure there’s some movement in the video. AV1 especially has modes for presentations and things that basically make a PowerPoint, so sizes might be unrealistic if you’re just recording your desktop. I don’t think that gets enabled in handbrake but it’s been a while since I looked.
I settled for this:
ffmpeg -i "$file" -map 0:0 -c:v libsvtav1 -preset 3 -crf 23 -maxrate 85M -map 0:a -c:a copy "${file%.mp4}-av1.mp4" -yThe files is still very large, but you can’t notice any artifacts or any blurry parts, I transcode it with 7fps.