OBS Blurriness - New Discovery & Workaround - Wayland related

[CatMan]

TEST & DISCOVERY ON DATE: Tuesday the 8th of February, 2022

I tryed lots of different video encoding tests on obs and with different parameters
I have been only able to use x264 as the Encoder for the Streaming option
I tryed Codecs: MP4, MOV, MKV, TS, AVI
I have set bitrates up to 70,000 Kbits/s
I have had both my Base (Canvas) Resolution and Output (Scaled) Resolution BOTH set to 1920x1080 (HD)
I have also set my Output (Scaled) Resolution to 4k (Double that of HD)


I ran the app Simple Screen Recorder (SSR) under X11 (x.org) and recorded a bit of my seamonkey browser, and a bit of krusader
I played that mp4 file back using VLC player
I could not tell any differance between what i see on my monitor looking at seamonkey browser or krusader file manager - visually i could NOT see or determine differances at all
visually it was identical, I could not see any visual anomolies or blurring of any kind at all what so ever.

To have an accurate and proper visual comparison with OBS running under Wayland, i booted back into wayland and returned my desktop scaling from it's 80% back to full 100%
I then did a video recording test with obs, and the results were stunning !
The results were 100% mirrored with the video results i got from Simple Screen Recorder (SSR)

It should be noted that despite me turning the desktop scaling back to 100% from its 80%, the task bar itself still remains the same small size (not sure why though)
The small app icons pinned to the task bar looked either 99% the same as the video output or exactly 100% identical
It took quite a bit of flipping back between the VLC player full screen mode (both while paused and not-paused) constantly comparing the visual differances
I could barely just make out a very very ultra small differance between the video playback and the seamonkey browser icon (was hard to determine after many seconds)

CONCLUSION: The Wayland Desktop Scaling feature/function plays some kind of influence in the recording by OBS, hence why upon playback,
there is a very distinct degree of blurring of the recorded video

WORKAROUND: If using wayland under KDE Plasma, make sure to leave your desktop display setting at 100% scaling (I have not tryed greater than 100%)


POST FROM MATRIX.ORG - LINUX ROOM:

enigma9o7
Interesting. I thought one of the main advantage that wayland has over x11 is reliable fractional scaling.
As scaling with xrandr does lead to blurryness.

CatMan7Life
I have found the fractional scaling to be very reliable myself, however i did post a small bug about it a while back, and i got an kde.bugs automated email back about it a few hours ago
Well, it's an interesting thing you say that, because when i used to be on x11 two years ago, i too had an issue with a bit of blurring (either in x11 or when i tryed out wayland)

 

[CatMan]

Update - Blurriness when recording a
OBS RECORDING APP WINDOWS PRODUCE A SLIGHTLY BLURRY OR SLIGHTLY 'LOWER RESOLUTION' OUTPUT VIDEO:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Flash Player is X.org based (.SWF ANIMATIONS PLAYING IN ADOBE FLASH PLAYER)
SeaMonkey
FireFox


THIS WAS TESTED ON DATE: Friday the 11th of February, 2022

I tryed both 1920 x 1080 and also a doubling of the resolution (despite the fact that both my monitor and vidreo card have a max resolution of only hd)
This made no noticeable differance

Set DE Desktop Resolution: 1920x1080
Base (Canvas) Resolution: 1920x1080
Output (Scaled) Resolution: 1920x1080


I tested Bitrates up to 8000 - no differance

Tested Under this Info/HardWare (and also on KDE INFO just prior to latest OS update:

KDE INFO:

Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20220207
KDE Plasma Version: 5.24.0
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.90.0
Qt Version: 5.15.2
Kernel Version: 5.16.5-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz
Memory: 15.5 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD PITCAIRN


32" Widescreen Monitor connected via VGA:

CONCLUSION: The Wayland Desktop Scaling feature/function plays some kind of influence in the recording by OBS, hence why upon playback,
there is a very distinct degree of blurring of the recorded video

NOTE: Tests indicate that desktop scaling has NO effect upon the recording of App/OS Windows

 

[Tuna]

With no pictures, what are we to judge? Note that encoding are done in YUV 4:2:0 which by itself means a reduction in resolution for the color planes.

 

[CatMan]

@Tuna Are you a/The Admin or Moderator or Dev here of obs ?
Firstly - It's of no surprise to me, that many people would not simply believe me - which is sad really, as why would i make this up ?
I have a 32" wide-screen Monitor - most people do not own such a large size monitor for the purposes of a PC, most people might have say, a 15" to 17" laptop monitor, or maybe a 22" size external panel on average
so obviously people who were to see the recordings i have made with obs might not notice the differance as easily or as quickly as I

Secondly, i did not provide details of the color settings (except my log file is attached) because i did not deem it nessessary to do so seeing as i have not changed the setting between both capturing methods (screen vs window) - with an immediately clear differance
If any admins/moderators or devs of obs wish to see such video captures, I will do so.

For the record my advanced video settings in OBS are:

Color Format: NV12 (default)
Color space: 709
Color Range: Partial (default)

 

[Tuna]

Here it is how it looks for me. That is also what I would expect. Not blurry for the most part to me with exception of some color degradation on some details due to expected YUV 4:2:0 sub sampling.

 

[CatMan]

BLURRY CAPTURING UPDATE:

DATE OF DISCOVERY: Thursday the 17th of February, 2022


It has been found out, that if you take a snapshot of Area 'Current Screen' AND you have the Desktop Scale (DE under KDE Plasma Wayland) scale set to 80%
then when you goto view the snapshot with a picture viewer (I used 'Eye of MATE Picture Viewer') then the picture will have loss of details (will appear slightly blurry)
compared to the actual original window.

Flip back and forth betwen the actual original window and the snapshot viewed picture by pressing the F11 button in the viewer

If you have the DE Scale set to its default of 100%, and you take a snapshot, then if you flip back and forth between the snapshot picture and the original window
you will see/percieve no differance at all

VIEWED ON A 32" WIDE SCREEN Monitor
DE Resolution: 1920 x 1080

HYPOTHESIS:

The library/s that are responsible for taking snapshops (either for screen snapshotting or for screen/window video recording via apps like OBS) have a specific fixed or maximum rounding
is them that limits how much info (and therefore details) of screen are captured
This could perhaps be a library responsible for compression.

I personally suspected that this issue was NOT in fact something inherent to OBS itself, but something more

Here are 2 pictures that i took with the DE on both 80% Scaling, and 100% Scaling
I dont think these pictures will be on any value myself though

 

[AmanuelK]

Hello friends, this thread helped me to fix the blurry issue on my KDE Wayland. I have WQHD (2,560 × 1,440)
screen resolution and am using that size for both output and canvas, I have set the display scale to 125% and that was the reason for the output video going blurry, and I set back it to 100%, and now it's really better and clear. The screenshot I attached probably won't show the difference but I am seeing it here.