Question / Help Please help with my recording settings

[Space Quest Historian]

Hey, there. For the longest time, I've had problems recording "more demanding" games, especially (for some reason) games made in Unity, on my machine.

It's the age-old problem of the video stuttering/freezing after a short while, but the audio keeps going normally.

I've been using OBS Classic for the longest time, but I decided to try OBS Studio now because it seems to have more options for controlling the output video, and I also heard that it was less CPU-intensive.

I'm not super-knowledgable when it comes to the technology behind this, so some of the settings (well, most of them) in the Output Settings pane are confusing to me. I don't know what "rate control" (CBR/ABR/VBR/CRF) does; I don't know what impact, if any, "profile" or "tune" has. I did try downscaling the resolution in Video Settings, but that seemed to do very little.

I'm hoping you could take a look at my log and tell me what I need to do to get a somewhat clean output.

https://gist.github.com/e845d57e6840ba1299932014062227c8

 

[Beardedbob]

Hi,

To be blunt that PC is going to struggle to play minesweeper given its a low end CPU and integrated GPU, but not wanting to be the doom and gloom of the forum you could try the following, tough I wouldn't expect HD quality.

Local recording
- x264 software
- 480p (720 × 480
- VBR
- 5000 (Lower to 1k at a time of your pc is struggling / lagging or higher 1k if its running fine until the struggle starts)
- 30fps (Could drop to 20)
- CPU preset Ultrafast

Some details on obs settings

https://jp9000.github.io/OBS/general/technical.html

 

[Space Quest Historian]

Thank you for the swift reply! Yes, you're absolutely right; this computer is not really made for recording games. My best results so far have been recording classic 90's adventure games and low-res games made in Adventure Game Studio. :P

I tried messing around with the settings you suggested (rescale output to 768x432; lowered fps to 20; cpu preset ultrafast; VBR), and while it did improve *a bit*, it still freezes intermittently.

I'm sorry, but I didn't understand what you meant by "5000 (lower to 1k at a time (etc.)". Is this bitrate you're talking about? My current bitrate is set to 2500. I was under the impression that higher bitrate meant more stress on the CPU, but I could of course be very wrong.

 

[Beardedbob]

If its space quest then I used to love it and Police quest and kings quest...

Ultra is the fastest and least intensive.

Yes bitrate, if it cant' hand 2500 then you can try lower, as its 90's games you might get away with it, try 2000 then 1000, after that its a no go sir.

 

[Space Quest Historian]

Space Quest is my favorite game of all time, and I do mostly adventure game Let's Plays (http://youtube.com/troelspleimert). Most of the time I get away with it because adventure games are less graphically intensive than your average Call of Modern Overwatch Warfare type games, but recently people have begun making modern adventure games that I really want to play and show off ... and they're almost always in Unity.

Anyway, yeah, even with bitrate at 1000, recording is still crap. I guess these Unity games are just not for me at this point in my budding career. ;)

Just a last question: Someone told me to use Window Capture instead of Game Capture. Does this make any difference at all in terms of how much OBS has to work to capture?

 

[Beardedbob]

Yeah unity will require more cpu than say a rom emulator.

I use windows as i find it better but haven't noticed any performance different but at this point anything could be worth a try even a different recording prog.

 

[Space Quest Historian]

Thank you for all your help, man. I really appreciate it!

Gonna throw in the towel for now and go back to playing 320x200 VGA games. There's no shortage of those going around, anyway. :)

 

[Beardedbob]

hehe nope enjoy.