OBS recording shitty video

[BG213]

Hello all. I am asking advice on OBS recording of doom play throughs. I have been recording some of my playing of doom with OBS recently and am less than satisfied with the results, but don't know quite what to do to improve things. A recent video which I believe shows a sample of this is below. In the opening room the shotgunner and imps are far blurrier than they appear in-game and in the second room a distant chaingunner I snipe is essentially invisible in the video but in the game is clearly visible, if very small.

 

I am recording in OBS at 360p (480x360, 20fps) because with my old, slow computer OBS will either cause the game to lag or the finished video to have terrible artifacts if I record above 480p. Recording the same demo file playback in 360p vs. 480p doesn't meaningfully improve video quality (distant chaingunner remains essentially invisible in either case) while the upload time for my bottom-basement internet connection of course goes way up, so I have settled on an acceptable mean of 360p. Since I don't see many other doomstreamers/tubers having this blurriness and poor quality video problem I figure it must be something to do with how I am recording these videos. FWIW the video on my hard drive looks about the same as the one on youtube, so I don't think its them. I typically record at 20 fps as this too is a bit less demanding on my system and I don't see a difference when I change it to 24 NTSB or 29.95.

 

 

 

[Shepardus]

YouTube severely limits the bitrate for low resolutions, so 360p is destined to look bad. If recording in high resolution isn't an option, you'll want to upscale the video before uploading it.

 

If you're using PrBoom+ or dsda-doom to play back the demo, you can take advantage of the port's "viddump" feature instead of screen recording with OBS. When playing back a demo with -timedemo (not -playdemo!), you can add -viddump videoname.mkv to have it encode a video as it plays back the demo. The source port will run as fast or as slow as it needs to encode each frame, but the resulting video will play back at normal speed, so even on a low-spec computer you can produce a 1080p 60fps video without any frame drops (it'll just take a long time). You do need some external programs to actually perform the encoding (this is configurable but on old versions of PrBoom+ the default is x264/oggenc/mkvmerge and on newer versions the default is FFmpeg), so see more details in this guide, under "Viddumping."

Edited January 26, 2022 by Shepardus