Question / Help Recording to an External Thumbdrive

Is it a good idea? I plan on doing some longer recording sessions but my main hard drive is pretty bad on space, and I don't have the money to buy another SSD, but do own a 128GB USB 3.0, and was wondering if you could actually record videos to one of these. Would there be any disadvantages of doing so? Thanks!
 

BK-Morpheus

Active Member
Would be easier to clean up some space on the hard drive. You could also move some Data from your hard drive to the USB stick to get some space.

Recording to the USB stick should work, if it is fast enough for your recording settings, but I don't think it is the best idea.
 

FerretBomb

Active Member
I tried using an extremely speedy 64GB USB 3.0 thumbdrive as my recording device. It didn't work due to the USB overhead and streaming write commits from real time encoding and recording. Ended up stuttering and freezing up constantly, no matter what I did.
At this point I use a cheap 120GB SATA SSD for recording, then copy the files off to my NAS and archive disk after each livestream.
 
Damn. How would I be able to make OBS recordings smaller then? I record with ICQ and handbrake is good and all, but I need to be able to get smaller files WHILE recording then.
 

BK-Morpheus

Active Member
As I don't see a log file with your actual OBS recording settings, I can only guess.
I don't know ICQ (other than the old messenger), so I'm just guessing, you encode via intel GPU with Quicksync then.
CRF/CQP would be my first choice, but maybe ICQ is similiar (quality factor with variable bitrate).
Higher CRF number = smaller size+less quality.
Lower CRF number = bigger size+better quality

CRF 14-17 will produce high quality recordings but with CRF20 you will still get decent quality with smaller files.
Quicksinc needs more bitrate for the same quality, compared to x264 CPU encoding, so you could also save some hdd space by using x264 instead of Quicksync.
Not sure, if your CPU is fast enough to handle x264.
 
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