What’s the easiest Video file for OBS to digest?
- Thread starter Nass86
- Start date
FerretBomb
Active Member
Any of these will work just fine for standard Media Source playback.
Just don't record to MOV/MP4 with OBS itself, as it is not a recording-safe format (stores its metadata atom at the END of the file, so if it's interrupted before finalization, the entire file is unreadable, unrecoverable digital garbage... and most video editing suites have problems with the MP4 files OBS creates anyway).
Technical answer, 'the best' for OBS would be uncompressed AVI, but that's going to EAT hard drive space like you wouldn't believe. Still could be worth for some short high-priority videos that are only a second or five long (stinger transitions). Strongly not recommended for general use, as you're looking at gigabytes per minute of video, like that.
Normally I'll use ffmpeg to convert to .webm for those, as it supports alpha-channel and can be used with cqp 0 to maintain maximum quality.
Just don't record to MOV/MP4 with OBS itself, as it is not a recording-safe format (stores its metadata atom at the END of the file, so if it's interrupted before finalization, the entire file is unreadable, unrecoverable digital garbage... and most video editing suites have problems with the MP4 files OBS creates anyway).
Technical answer, 'the best' for OBS would be uncompressed AVI, but that's going to EAT hard drive space like you wouldn't believe. Still could be worth for some short high-priority videos that are only a second or five long (stinger transitions). Strongly not recommended for general use, as you're looking at gigabytes per minute of video, like that.
Normally I'll use ffmpeg to convert to .webm for those, as it supports alpha-channel and can be used with cqp 0 to maintain maximum quality.
Lawrence_SoCal
Active Member
Alluded to in FerretBomb's answer is that most video is compressed due to file size implications. And playing such compressed files entails processing to uncompress/decode. For example, H.265 is more highly compressed, therefore takes more 'computation' to play (though moving less data (bandwidth) from storage to player
So a consideration is:
- does PC have spare compute resources to handle this?
- If CPU constrained but not GPU, then finding option to play video using GPU decode offload may help? sorry not really my area, but something to consider (I think). And beyond the video encoding wrapper/container (file format), there are the video encoding settings themselves of resolution, framerate, bitrate, color space, etc.
*IF* you only use for the video is within an OBS session, then no need (I'd assume, or at least minimal benefit) to creating video in Resolve with higher settings than you plan to record/stream at (typically).
I mention this as when I first started using OBS ~20 months ago, I use a mix of pre-recorded and live videos. A lot of those videos were 4K (and then cropped during playback to fit portion of screen). This overwhelmed a 5yr old gaming laptop (with NVENC). With what I know now, I think I could get it to work... but not something I'm sure of (not worth my time to figure out). To avoid some odd playback behavior (at least as rendering on screen, not sure about stream/recording), and having enough RAM, I did NOT close videos when not in use. That probably didn't help...
just something to be aware of
So a consideration is:
- does PC have spare compute resources to handle this?
- If CPU constrained but not GPU, then finding option to play video using GPU decode offload may help? sorry not really my area, but something to consider (I think). And beyond the video encoding wrapper/container (file format), there are the video encoding settings themselves of resolution, framerate, bitrate, color space, etc.
*IF* you only use for the video is within an OBS session, then no need (I'd assume, or at least minimal benefit) to creating video in Resolve with higher settings than you plan to record/stream at (typically).
I mention this as when I first started using OBS ~20 months ago, I use a mix of pre-recorded and live videos. A lot of those videos were 4K (and then cropped during playback to fit portion of screen). This overwhelmed a 5yr old gaming laptop (with NVENC). With what I know now, I think I could get it to work... but not something I'm sure of (not worth my time to figure out). To avoid some odd playback behavior (at least as rendering on screen, not sure about stream/recording), and having enough RAM, I did NOT close videos when not in use. That probably didn't help...
just something to be aware of
Our experience (also started about 20 months ago on a rather older laptop) is that it is much more demanding to playback a video with a higher resolution/frame rate. Every single frame has to be recalculated from ie. 3840x2160 to 1280x720. So if possible, try to have the video in the correct resolution and frame rate for your output.
Nass86
Member
Thanks! I was encountering this issue supposedly due to Rendering Lag (when a video of a ship cuts in)
Will see if I can avoid it, uncompressed AVI @ 1080 might be the way to go - they will always be short bursts of the area and I discard them after the stream.
The fact that the sun set early behind some rare clouds in Cyprus, I left an ND Filter on when it wasn't needed, and made myself look orange with a new light and had skippyness from 4G / LTE phone connection dropping from 6,000kbps to 3500 on this stream is another matter!
In hindsight I should have taken my time and recorded it.
Will see if I can avoid it, uncompressed AVI @ 1080 might be the way to go - they will always be short bursts of the area and I discard them after the stream.
The fact that the sun set early behind some rare clouds in Cyprus, I left an ND Filter on when it wasn't needed, and made myself look orange with a new light and had skippyness from 4G / LTE phone connection dropping from 6,000kbps to 3500 on this stream is another matter!
In hindsight I should have taken my time and recorded it.