Question / Help How do the OBS presets compare to handbrake?

[keybounce]

(I did not see a forum section for general OBS discussion)

How do the OBS presets compare to the handbrake presets of the same name? Ultra fast / very fast / medium /etc?

I'm asking for this reason: I tossed an OBS recording at Handbrake. Ultrafast came out to 13.39 GB.

I then stepped up the "quality" level, keeping everything else the same. I expected the size of the file to shrink -- the idea being that spending more CPU time to compress would make for a smaller file for the same quality (either giving you more quality for the same stream bitrate, or a smaller recording for the same quality).

Going up one notch to Super fast, it shrank to 7.16 GB.
Going up two notches to Very Fast, it shank to 6.13 GB.

Anything "better" than that made a bigger recording.

If the handbrake settings and OBS settings are the same, this would mean that the best streaming quality for a given bitrate, or the smallest recordings for a given quality, would be at very fast, and not anything more intensive -- which just seems really odd to me.

 

[Fenrir]

They don't compare at all. The goals of Handbrake and OBS are extremely different. Handbrake doesn't have to care if encoding is realtime.

 

[R1CH]

You're comparing file size and quality, which are very different metrics. Size is determined almost entirely by your rate control settings - CRF, CBR, etc and bitrate. Quality is affected by the bitrate - more bitrate is always better - the x264 presets simply spend more time trying to achieve better quality within the allocated rate control.