Bug Report Recording: No where near the quality I asked for

[keybounce]

So I asked for a recording at 3000 Kbps, and 30 fps.

After converting from flv to mp4, I had "30" fps, but it repeated 4 or 5 frames at a time -- effective frame rate of about 13-14 fps. Bit rate was only 339.1kbps (as reported by mplayer).

Log file: https://gist.github.com/9a3ab011703cd6c515ac

 

[Harold]

What preset did you use to record?

 

[Rotab]

Don't use the slow preset. You're barely handling ultrafast

 

[keybounce]

Barely handling ultrafast???

First, how can you tell?
Second, I've got CPU to spare, right?

 

[Harold]

https://obsproject.com/analyzer?url=https://gist.github.com/anonymous/9a3ab011703cd6c515ac

It looks like you tried different presets in the same session.

 

[keybounce]

Hold on -- Log file says,
13:20:09: Output 'adv_file_output': stopping
13:20:09: Output 'adv_file_output': Total frames: 53256
13:20:09: Output 'adv_file_output': Number of skipped frames: 20971 (39.3777%)
13:21:31: [rtmp stream: 'adv_stream'] User stopped the stream
13:21:31: Output 'adv_stream': stopping
13:21:31: Output 'adv_stream': Total frames: 56708
13:21:31: Output 'adv_stream': Number of skipped frames: 23090 (40.7174%)

When running, OBS tells me zero dropped frames at the bottom of the window. Why am I seeing this -- tens of thousands -- when OBS is saying zero?

 

[Rotab]

Dropped frames are frames dropped due to poor network conditions. Not the same thing as skipped frames

 

[keybounce]

Alright, thank you for pointing me to that log analyzer. And yes, I was playing / experimenting with all sorts of things for ... a few hours? (yea, according to the logs, three hours).

I was not aware that "veryfast" was the recommended, I thought "ultrafast" was recommended for streaming. I'll give that a try instead. (I do know that streaming/ultrafast gives sometimes good, and sometimes yucky, streams).

EDIT: Meanwhile, why does my CPU monitor report so much idle/unused CPU time? Is there any way to make OBS "work harder" to encode the frames?

 

[Lain]

If you're just recording then you can get near lossless quality out of the program with the right settings.

As for streaming, "ultrafast" is only for really really poor CPUs, it sacrifices all possible quality improvements that may add CPU usage. It's meant for the lowest end CPUs, not good CPUs like yours, so "veryfast" is more ideal for you. "veryfast" is the best all-around setting for 4-core CPUs and up.

Don't worry about "unused" CPU usage; the encoder can't magically utilitize all 100% effectively at all times, nor would you want that, for live encoding you want to ensure that it's below 100% to make room for other activities on your computer anyway. That's sort of the point of live encoding in the first place.

 

[keybounce]

Yea, I know, minecraft wants about 250-400% CPU when you take both primary threads, networking threads, and garbage collection into account. But I still have plenty of leftover CPU, even when I was having lots of skipped frames.