Question / Help OBS and Elgato Game Capture HD60

[tni13]

Hey there.
I bought an Elgato HD60 recently and I'm kinda confused about the quality of its recordings. For one, it exports video files as .ts files (which i'm not sure but I think they're mpeg-2 encoded?) and these are kinda big, which is ok because I have the quality slider on the "best" quality setting, but it also gives the option to save mp4 files which are a lot smaller and make me wonder which of these two files has the best quality.
In an effort to get the best quality possible out of the device I read somewhere that I can record almost uncompressed video (not sure why "almost") using OBS with Elgato, but apparently it's not that easy to set it up. I have tried following some directions that suggest using the x264 encoder and setting "crf=0" in the special settings, but I get a warning that the encoder is overflowed (not sure if it is the correct term) and the cpu usage is almost 100% and as a result the video file is very small and won't play.
My questions are:
- Will using OBS really improve the video/audio quality of my recordings with Elgato?
- If so, how can I go about recording uncompressed/lossless recordings?
- If not, which of the Elgato files has the best quality? The .ts or the .mp4? Or are they the same?
- I also read that you can get lossless recording with VirtualDub. Is it better than OBS?

P.S - I do not intend to stream my gameplay, just want to record some good quality gameplay videos.

Thanks in advance :)

 

[SumDim]

You don't use Elgato to record. You use OBS Studio to replace it.

In a nutshell, with OBS Studio:
- You create a scene by clicking the "+" button and give it a name (call it Test)
- Add an Elgato video capture source into the scene and resize it to your liking in the preview window
- Audio Settings to 48hz sample rate
- Output Settings set to Simple
- Video Settings to 1920x1080 for base and output, Bilinear, 60FPS (*)
- Recording tab MKV format and x264 format
- Use the Mixer to adjust Elgato sound volume

If your display is set to something other than 1920x1080, use the appropriate display resolution and change to Lanczos scaling.

Thats it!

 

[tni13]

You don't use Elgato to record. You use OBS Studio to replace it.

In a nutshell, with OBS Studio:
- You create a scene by clicking the "+" button and give it a name (call it Test)
- Add an Elgato video capture source into the scene and resize it to your liking in the preview window
- Audio Settings to 48hz sample rate
- Output Settings set to Simple
- Video Settings to 1920x1080 for base and output, Bilinear, 60FPS (*)
- Recording tab MKV format and x264 format
- Use the Mixer to adjust Elgato sound volume

If your display is set to something other than 1920x1080, use the appropriate display resolution and change to Lanczos scaling.

Thats it!

Alright, so I've setup OBS with the Elgato and here are the results. The resulting file has no video, only audio, but it is rather big so I'm guessing I just need to download some codec (ULRA maybe?) to be able to see the video because MediaInfo says the file contains video data. Some rather odd thing happened tho, the audio is in 44.1KHz sample rate, even though I set it to 48KHz in OBS.
I also have some questions regarding some of the settings:
- In the properties tab of the Elgato (1st screenshot) what are the best settings for YUV Color Space and Color Range? Shouldn't my source be RGB? And what does buffering relate to?
- In the output tab (2nd screenshot), encoder preset set to "ultrafast" changes the quality of the video? If so, which is the best option? Also, since the output is lossless I'm guessing the video bitrate value is irrelevant right?
- In the video tab (4th screenshot) I set both base and output canvas resolution to 1080p because I thought those are the best values. My screen is 1366x768 and the recording is at 1080p. Should I change these? If so, will it impact the quality of the video? Or just my PC's performance?
- In the advance tab (5th screenshot) are these settings the best? Do they refer to the video file? Again I'm kind of confused about what to choose in the color format and yuv color space and range.
- In the 6th screenshot it says encoding overloaded (which is what I meant in the first post). What does it mean? Is it dangerous for my PC in some way?

Sorry for the long post. All of this is just an effort to get the best quality out of my capture card. If OBS improves it I want to do my best with it. Thanks in advance for the help :)

Here are the screenshots:

Also here is MediaInfo's log of the resulting file:

General
Complete name : E:\2017-09-18 15-50-32.avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
Format profile : OpenDML
File size : 1.54 GiB
Duration : 45 s 418 ms
Overall bit rate : 291 Mb/s
Writing application : Lavf57.66.102

Video
ID : 0
Format : RGBA
Codec ID : ULRA
Codec ID/Info : Ut Video Lossless Codec
Codec ID/Hint : Ut Video
Duration : 20 s 833 ms
Bit rate : 630 Mb/s
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 60.000 FPS
Color space : RGBA
Chroma subsampling : 4:4:4:4
Bit depth : 8 bits
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 5.066
Stream size : 1.53 GiB (100%)

Audio
ID : 1
Format : PCM
Format settings : Little / Signed
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Signed
Codec ID : 1
Duration : 45 s 418 ms
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 1 411.2 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 kHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 7.64 MiB (0%)
Alignment : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration : 11 ms (0.64 video frame)

 

[Harold]

Recording in lossless RGBA is actually going to hinder your recording quality. Very few video cards have hardware conversion capabilities for RGBA.

Set your advanced settings back to their defaults. They're default for a reason.

 

[tni13]

Recording in lossless RGBA is actually going to hinder your recording quality. Very few video cards have hardware conversion capabilities for RGBA.

Set your advanced settings back to their defaults. They're default for a reason.

I'm guessing the Elgato HD60 isn't one of those right?
Also, I can't remember what were the defaults. Can you tell me if there's an option to revert the settings anywhere?
I know colorspace conversions can really mess up the quality of the video, but I really can't tell what is the source colorspace :/

 

[Harold]

The elgato HD60 is also a usb 2.0 device, so you've already introduced compression artifacts just by using it.

Default is nv12, 601 partial.

Saving directly to mp4 is strongly NOT recommended.
There's a warning on the output settings screen for a reason.

 

[tni13]

The elgato HD60 is also a usb 2.0 device, so you've already introduced compression artifacts just by using it.

Default is nv12, 601 partial.

Saving directly to mp4 is strongly NOT recommended.
There's a warning on the output settings screen for a reason.

Can you clarify what kind of artifacts and why this happens?
I don't save directly to mp4 because of encoding times, if I want a separate mp4 file when using the Elgato software I convert it afterward with the export option.
So in a nutshell, will using OBS really improve the quality of my recordings?

 

[Harold]

To the upper limit of what usb 2.0 capture devices can offer.

Can you clarify what kind of artifacts and why this happens?

Standard video compression artifacts because the elgato you have does not and can not send uncompressed 720p30 or higher to the computer. 480mbit is NOT enough bandwidth for it.