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.
That’s a good idea. I have a question tho, does AV1 lose some fidelity, or is it simply just a “better” encoding?
All video codecs are lossy, meaning you will lose some quality. AV1 and H.265 are modern video codecs with the best quality to bitrate ratios, meaning you can get better quality for the same bitrate, or the same quality with a lower bitrate. The downside the these codecs is that they are very complex and computational expensive to do in software. You’ll want to make sure your GPU supports hardware encoding for the codecs you intend to record with. The reason most people will recommend AV1 over H.265 is that AV1 is royalty free. With H.265, companies have to pay a royalty to use H.265. Because of this, most companies (Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, etc.) want to use AV1 going forward, meaning in the near future, it will probably be the dominant codec.
well I checked. My GPU does support AV1, but only decode, and OBS doesn’t support h265. So is my only (good) option is to use a SVT-AV1? How slow it that really?
are you sure about that? I’m pretty sure it should. maybe you’ll find it as _x_265, as that’s the name of the encoder it uses
I can’t find it and a quick google told me that neither do others
OBS allows you to use everything FFmpeg supports with the “Custom Output (FFmpeg)” recording type.
I was and am searching there I just can’t find it in the dropdown. I might be blind, but I checked multiple times.
Settings -> Output:
I’ve gotten that far, but no farther
if you’re planning on editing it, you can record in a very high bitrate and re-encode after the fact… yes, re-encoding looses some quality, however you’re likely to end up with a far better video if you record and 2x the h264 bitrate and then re-encode to your final h265 (or av1) bitrate than if you just record straight to h264 at your final bitrate
another note on this: lots of streaming stuff will say to use CBR (constant bitrate), which is true for streaming, however i think probably for re-encode VBR (variable bitrate) with multi-pass encode will give a good trade-off - CBR for live because the encoding software can’t predict what’s coming up, but when you have a known video it can change bitrate up and down because it knows when it’ll need higher bitrate