Hello, I'm very glad that I found the discussion and I have a lot to say. First, let me introduce myself - I'm a Russian YouTuber who has been making videos since 2019 (Most of them were removed by me due to terrible quality).
Here is the link to my channel -
https://www.youtube.com/@Clifries.
I've come a long way in improving video quality, I started by simply going into OBS and pressing the record button without changing any settings and now i have a dual PC setup with capture card. All this time I was slowly going crazy and becoming more and more disappointed in myself and my knowledge. But let's start from the beginning, At first I recorded on 1050 ti (1080p 60 hz monitor) and quickly began to notice that the quality of the recordings, even before uploading to YouTube, was simply terrible. That's when I first opened the settings and decided to achieve maximum quality. If only I knew how much pain and suffering this brings me... I was shocked by how many guides there are on YouTube and not a single decent one, In most cases, people just tell you how it should be done and how good it will be, but no one explains the concept itself and no one talks about what each setting does exactly. But I said to myself okay, I'm not completely stupid, right? I won't listen to guides at all and will just figure everything out myself. At that moment, I realized that setting a specific number for the bitrate was generally the wrong approach. That's when I discovered lossless quality and basically understood what bitrate is. I realized that there is no need to put up any barriers, but to simply take all the quality that is available. But then several problems appeared at once. First, I needed to figure out the plethora of codecs and which one was best for losless recording. Secondly, my PC was too weak for such adventures. The problem was that I was still a schoolboy and I simply didn't have the resources to upgrade my PC, which I had been saving up for my whole life, sacrificing everything else. That's why I was only able to update for 2021. I received my 1660 ti and immediately went to test it. I used nvenc h.264 with lossless settings and thought it was already real lossless. But let's not rush, at that moment, I just recorded a video and discovered that it was somehow unsmooth and there were often stutters. I thought the problem was the game's complexity, so I decided to run a very old game from 2003 that required literally no resources and ran perfectly even on a 2007 laptop. But the situation repeated itself, I was really upset and didn't understand how this was possible. I thought, well, is the almost full power of the video card really not enough to record without problems? I started asking questions and looking for answers - and then I realized that I am almost the only madman in the world who is trying to achieve the highest recording quality. No seriously, have you ever seen a single YouTuber or streamer with 10,000+ subscribers who made a guide to a lossless recording? (or at least indicate that he is recording in lossless) I thought the most logical thing to do would be to simply follow the example and find out what PC specifications are needed for such an activity. But I really couldn't find any adequate popular solution at the time. And those single people who, like me, tried to get the perfect video quality were simply called crazy and asked what was wrong with them. That's why most of the answers on the forums simply gave 0 information on how to solve the problem, and I didn't know what to do anymore. It was 2021-2022. Also, while recording videos during this period, I made another huge discovery for myself - my lossless videos weren't lossless and i mean no stutters here.
I was recording Stop GMO -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo-t4RCt08A. Unfortunately, the game worked only at 480 so I decided to upscale the recording. I converted the video into a PNG sequence and realized that my videos weren't real lossless. This became a huge problem, everyone told me that I was just crazy and that when comparing two frames, nothing could be seen. But I clearly saw in the background that a lot of stairs were appearing on the frame from the recording. Based on my experience working in Photoshop, I realized that the problem was in color spaces and started searching. But no matter what I looked for and what settings I set, I couldn’t get a frame like in the screenshot. I again fell into deep despair and just continued studying at the university.
But in 2024, proof was finally found that I wasn't crazy -
https://obsproject.com/forum/resour...lpha-channel-transparency-in-obs-studio.1875/. Here I learned not only about recording with alpha channel but also about the so-called Intra-frame codecs, which are truly lossless. And that was my first victory - I received an exact copy of the screenshot as a video frame, now my video looked exactly like what I saw on the screen during the game. And now I could make the highest quality upscale possible. But there was still a problem - the stutters. No matter what I recorded on or how, I never got a perfect 60 fps. Then in 2024 I buy my top PC build with 4080, 12700k and 32 gb ram (I also got a 4k 160 hz monitor later). Now I was ready, right? Pfft no - nothing has changed. For me, ever since I was a kid, getting a card from the 80 series like the 1080 was something of a miracle, and a PC like the one I have now was a dream. It seemed to me that having received such power I would become invincible to any kind of lags and stutters. It was a very deep wound and I completely despaired and stopped making videos. But in the end I still found the strength to try further for some reason.I tried absolutely everything that could be done on 1 PC - different OBS settings, different Windows settings, different games, different recording programs, different monitors with different frequencies and synchronization technologies, basically everything that was possible. So I thought about popular streamers again and remembered that they often use a dual PC system for streaming. And then I thought that this was a really brilliant idea because this is literally a different recording concept. You completely rid the first PC of recording problems and it continues to work perfectly as before, and all the load and recording processing is done exclusively on 2 PC. As a result, right before the crisis, I managed to assemble 2 PCs and buy a capture card, spending the last money I had and even taking out a loan. (Yes, all the money I've had since 2019 has gone only to my PC or steam account) Well, now I have a dual PC setup and again nothing worked, and it even got worse. If I try to record through a clone mod, firstly, a bunch of bugs appear and some games simply crash, and secondly, even if everything works, screen-tearing appears. (even on 60 hz, fps limit and vsync on) ((also in this mode you can't normally control your recording from 1 PC, you can't even disable cursor or seect specific windows, yes this is logical, but only when you've already bought a capture card and used it, in any case, this does not eliminate the problem)) So the only option is to use obs projector right? But this brings us back to the problem of recording on 1 PC - stutters stutters stutters. But now I can say it more precisely - duplicated frames. This is not a lag or lack of pc power. Second PC records everything perfectly, the capture card simply initially receives 2 identical frames -
therefore, all claims about recording overload disappear. I have a cleanest build of Windows installed on a RAID array of Samsung SSDs. I read about all the possible settings in the OS and also the settings in the BIOS. I probably did everything I could to squeeze out every percent of performance on 2 PC. I also ran various benchmarks and performance tests and everything was ok. And most importantly, you can see the repeating frames even without starting the recording, just through the preview of OBS, Virtual Dub 2 or another recording program. If you record through a clone mod, there seem to be no duplicate frames, but I can't say for sure because the video looks like a mess from tearing. And here again is a situation with no way out and all is lost. I'm at the peak of despair, searching for everything I can, and I realize that no one has found a fix. In the end, I get here and all my guesses and what I've been saying for years are confirmed again. Therefore, this place is the last hope and the last stronghold where it is possible to overcome this problem. I couldn't do it alone, but maybe together we can come up with something? I tried a custom build of OBS from Jobima, but it didn't solve the problem. Maybe I just did something wrong or the fix doesn't work for Projector without recording? In any case, I still haven't found a solution to the problem in this discussion. So I have a big offer to all the participants here - let's somehow unite and create a Discord server for content creators where we can solve this problem. I mean it would be much more convenient. I also have a sketch of a program for checking videos for repeated frames, and it actually even works, so if anyone is interested, I can refine it later and share it for testing. I can also try to make a video in Russian about this problem to attract more attention, but I don't think it will get more than 100 views.... So it would be nice to find someone who can really shed some light on this long-standing problem for a wider audience. I spent so much time and effort on all of this that I simply can’t give it up, no matter how much it hurts me. That's why I'm writing this post as my last hope.
www.filemail.com
