Hi all, I’m new to video production and am trying to create some art-themed videos to upload to Peertube. Does anyone have recommended video output settings for OBS that would keep the filesize small while still having enough resolution to allow line art to appear readable? Or tips on using something like Handbrake to resize/compress videos without losing quality?

I currently have the following settings in OBS, and my last drawing session resulted a 37min MKV file of 892MB:

  • Video encoder = FFmpeg VAAPI H.264
  • Audio encoder = libfdk AAC
  • Recording format = MKV
  • Canvas resolution = 3840x2160
  • Output resolution = 3840x2160 (could probably make this 1920x1080)
  • FPS = 60 (could probably make this 30)
  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    7·
    19 days ago

    Depends on your hardware? You have a few sets of options:

    How to encode:

    • Software encode (with x264), which won’t load your system much but will always work.
    • Hardware encode, which is better and more performant but doesn’t always work. You don’t necessarly need a discrete GPU for this; many (basically all?) newer laptops have Intel/AMD hardware encoding blocks. You can usually do h.264, h.265, and maybe AV1.

    “FFmpeg VAAPI H.264” is hardware h.264, so you at least have that. You probably have h.265, and possibly AV1

    The recording codec:

    • h.264 hardware encoding is the least bitrate efficient, but you can directly upload it to peertube.
    • h.265 is (probably) not supported by Peertube, but its a good ‘intermediate’ format to record to. It’s not good for software encoding.
    • AV1 is best if your hardware supports it, and Peertube should take it directly if you wish.

    The codec to transcode to:

    • Don’t transcode, just upload directly. This won’t look as good but is often ‘good enough’, especially if your hardware supports AV1. Be sure to pick a reasonable bitrate/quality setting, though.
    • h.264 (via CPU x264 slow), reasonably fast, pretty much always works.
    • CPU AV1 is much slower to encode, but far more efficient if you have the CPU time/tweaking time.

    For sound, always do Opus. Opus is best. ~256K is pretty much lossless.

    4K output resolution might be hard on your peertube instance, but probably worth it for art-themed videos.

    For re-encoding, aviator is a good, simple, highly performant GUI with very good defaults: https://github.com/gianni-rosato/aviator

    If you want the abolute best quality for longer videos, have a decent CPU and don’t mind CLI, av1ian is still the best (as far as I know): https://github.com/rust-av/Av1an

    EDIT:

    Handbrake is a dinosaur, last I checked. It may work OK, but its defaults are not great.

    Oh, and do webm for the file type if its AV1 video. Only do MKV with h.264/h.265.