Question / Help Unreadable text due to low luminance contrast? (Low res due to bandwidtdh constraint)

[zergl]

So the other day I was playing Civ5 with friends as Korea and streamed it for another friend to watch in a bit and I noticed that, while the text is hard to read in general due to my low resolution/bitrate, anything in my Civ's colours was an utter mess of pixels.

Example snapshot taken via VLC/livestreamer from a single player Korea game I had:

You'll notice that the Dutch city names are perfectly readable with the other text and tooltips being ok-ish while the Korean ones are completely indecipherable and same with the Unit icons.


After experimenting for a bit with various settings and no significant improvement, I started to suspect that it might be due to extremely low contrast in the Luminance channel (screenshot -> Decompose in GIMP):

Original Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/vG5ngsk.jpg


Any idea if there's a way to force OBS/x264 to do better edge/contrast detection across the chroma channels while staying within the bitrate/resolution constraints of ~1MBit upload?

OBS Settings:

CBR with Padding
Bitrate 800, Buffer 600

Base Resolution 1920x1200
Downscale 1.50, Lanczos,
25 FPS

fast preset
high profile
experimented a bit with --input-csp and --output-csp settings with not much noticeable improvements

 

[Krazy]

This is what happens to fine details like text when they are in red. It's one of the biggest limitations of the 4:2:0 colorspace, which every streaming site that uses Flash player uses.