Welcome to Laser Pointer Forums - discuss green laser pointers, blue laser pointers, and all types of lasers

LPF Donation via Stripe | LPF Donation - Other Methods

Links below open in new window

ArcticMyst Security by Avery

Youtube - is this acceptable quality

Joined
Dec 10, 2013
Messages
1,343
Points
83
Hi all,

I recently discovered, to my delight that fraps runs rather well on my computer and allows me to record gameplay with no detrimental effect on performance. I've been wanting to record playthroughs of some of the games I enjoy for years, so I got right to it.

I've started uploading some, but for some reason Youtube slashes the quality of my uploads something awful. I'm going to post a sample and my question is - would this be acceptable to you as a potential series or would you click off it and go elsewhere?



Full honesty appreciated. I'm not planning to earn money off it (though it would be nice), so while pixel sharp quality isn't necessary I don't want to upload a pile of stuff that people deem unacceptable in quality terms.
 





Joined
Feb 23, 2012
Messages
1,282
Points
0
It's not too bad, but may disappoint some viewers that the red HD logo doesn't pop up next to the resolution button.

What's the resolution of your FRAPS recordings?
 
Joined
Dec 10, 2013
Messages
1,343
Points
83
Half the res of my screen, so...

just went and checked, 680x384

Regardless, the quality drop when they load onto Youtube is astonishing.
 
Joined
Feb 23, 2012
Messages
1,282
Points
0
There's a significant quality jump from 360p to 480p, so if there's a way to increase Doom's resolution, try it.

Or you can re-encode the video and double or quadruple the resolution. Not the most effective, but should prevent YouTube from butchering the video quality.
 
Joined
Dec 10, 2013
Messages
1,343
Points
83
Yep, I did some googling and I think the way to solve this is to upscale the res. As it so happens I pass each of the videos through handbrake anyway to reduce size. To upload footage straight from Fraps on my ADSL would take a whole day per few minutes of gaming...

So I'll just tell handbrake to upscale them to 720 or 1080p and do a test. Will be an hour or two as I've got another video on the go but I'll be back soon...
 
Joined
Feb 23, 2012
Messages
1,282
Points
0
Good idea, try using H264 5.1 High profile and a large keyframe distance, such as 300. Might take a while but certainly makes the files smaller.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Dec 10, 2013
Messages
1,343
Points
83
A marked improvement, I think:



It turns out handbrake doesn't allow upscaling, so I just tried Windows Live Movie Maker and output the file as HD 1080p. It works, file sizes are a bit larger but on uploading to YouTube it retains the majority of its quality.

Tell me, does it default to HD (720 or 1080) for you? Twice I've had to manually select it, perhaps its my connection but if not I'll need to force HD playback via the tags.
 
Joined
Feb 23, 2012
Messages
1,282
Points
0
It doesn't default to 1080p, just 360p on LPF.

I do have a Chrome extension to force every video to max resolution, so it does play 1080p default on YouTube though.
 
Joined
Feb 23, 2012
Messages
1,282
Points
0
Yup, I think so.

I couldn't compare the original side by side, but 1080p looks much better than 360p. :)
 
Joined
May 26, 2014
Messages
2
Points
0
I am a bit late but, well... the videos you make with fraps have a giant size, definetly not acceptable for 10 and 20 minute videos... i would recommend you that, after you record these vids to edit them with a program. Vegas is a very good program that you could use to edit your videos and make them much smaller in mb. Worths a try :p
 
Joined
Dec 10, 2013
Messages
1,343
Points
83
I now run them through windows movie maker before uploading. There is a tiny loss in quality, but by upsizing to 1080p YouTube will play them in high quality and the end result is actually much better.
 




Top