Question / Help Passing the video through a third-party compressor?

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Rydian

New Member
Is there any way to pass the video through a third-party encoder instead of the built-in one? For example the list of codecs installed in Windows that shows up in other video softwares (Virtualdub, etc.), though I'm not sure what that window/selection is called (googling info on "codec selection" tends to get you info on decoders-only well before proper codecs)...

I mainly want this to use "lossless" encoding (via ffdshow or whatever works), to free up my computational resources (with I/O as the tradeoff) so I can get the smoothest recording for the times when I just want to record locally ahead of time.

Yes, I am aware this will result in files that are tens of gigs large, and yes I am fine with that. I would much rather spend extra time after a recording session recompressing the input than to have it done live, sacrificing program speed and heavily sacrificing video quality.

And yes, I just want this for recording locally.

EDIT: Small grammatical correction.
 
dodgepong

dodgepong

Administrator
Forum Admin
You can do lossless encoding in OBS by going into the Advanced options and entering "crf=0" into custom x264 options.
 
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R1CH

Forum Admin
Developer
The VFW codecs (which is what show up in virtualdub etc) cannot handle variable frame rate, this is a limitation of the VFW subsystem so they are really not suitable for use in OBS.
 
R

Rydian

New Member
Dopefish said:
Just use Fraps then. Record locally and encode it however you want when done.
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FRAPS only records hardware-accelerated games (or the whole display with AERO since it's hardware-accelerated), whereas this software will record a number of programs (with different display methods) and composite them the way I like.

Unless FRAPS can record+composite multiple inputs (webcam included) like this program can... and I've seen nothing for that in it's settings.

dodgepong said:
You can do lossless encoding in OBS by going into the Advanced options and entering "crf=0" into custom x264 options.
Click to expand...
Thanks, that makes the resulting per-frame quality perfectly usable! Recorded framerate suffers, but my system's an older mid-range anyways (Q8400, HD5770) so I'll try some settings tweaks (game and OBS) to try to at least get 720p usable. If not, this seems to work great scaling down to ~600p (youtube will downscale to 480p anyways) as it is.

R1CH said:
The VFW codecs (which is what show up in virtualdub etc) cannot handle variable frame rate, this is a limitation of the VFW subsystem so they are really not suitable for use in OBS.
Click to expand...
Damn, I don't suppose there's any other way to get mostly-raw?
 
R

Rydian

New Member
coopmine said:
Dxtory with lagarith can possibly do what you want to achieve
Click to expand...
DXtory can record other sources at the same time as the game? I can't find any info about that.
 
R

Rydian

New Member
Bensam123 said:
what exactly does crf=0 do? Looking at the log it just looks like it manually sets the quality to 32.
Click to expand...
http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Settings#crf

Also if CRF is the same type of quality setting that Handbrake uses, I tend to use 20 to 25 in my videos that are going to get stuck up on youtube.
 
G

Grimio

Member
CRF on 18 is considered visually indistinguishable from the source, but I never tested it so it may not be true.
 
R

Rydian

New Member
I can confirm here that when using a quality setting of ~20 on Handbrake, I can barely tell the video's been compressed. That's why I don't mind uncompressed video being all huge, since I can recompress it with no visual loss before upload.

Anyways, nobody knows about getting the recording to be faster by skipping the compression when saving locally?

Or, barring that, an alternative piece of software that will do this?
 
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tehspirit

New Member
I got same question. I would like to stream in picvideo mjpeg because it is low performance codec to another pc and there re-encode it to h264.

adding vfw option would be nice
 
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