Tech Support Fort - Questions, Comments and Codecs (READ THE OP!)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Tech Support Fort - Questions, Comments and Codecs (READ THE OP!)

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ufarn: May 30, 2009

What would be the minimum CPU and RAM requirement for a PC that solely encodes and streams video 720p60 at 3,500 kb/s? I have an old i5-760 lying around, but it's been a major bottleneck in general, so I doubt it'd do the job. Also got some GBs of 1600 RAM.

I'm currently using the i5-760 and 8GB 1600 RAM (and Radeon 270X) on my desktop PC, and there is nowhere near enough CPU juice to both play and record, but maybe the CPU is decent on its own. I doubt it, though, so there's probably an i3 that could do the job on a standalone streaming pc.

I'm using OBS Studio at 720p30@2,800, and I still can't stream without lagging.

ufarn fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Jul 7, 2016

# ¿ Jul 7, 2016 17:58

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:49

ufarn: May 30, 2009

lohli posted:

Do you mean doing videocapture + streaming on the old i5 while playing on console or another computer? It should be more than up to the task if that's the case.

What games are you trying to stream, by the way?

Yep.

I tried both Overwatch and Alpha Protocol and the latter felt very off and showed ~50% CPU use, so I just need to dedicate the full CPU to the task for it to work I guess. (On the desktop, mind, the streaming PC is just a build I'm pondering the minimal cost of.)

ufarn fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Jul 8, 2016

# ¿ Jul 7, 2016 20:01

ufarn: May 30, 2009

What do you use to test your mic level when recording and/or streaming to Twitch with OBS Studio?

ufarn fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Jul 18, 2016

# ¿ Jul 18, 2016 11:21

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Is Resolve any good? It's free, which is nice, especially if I only want to do some basic tasks.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2016 10:34

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Edmond Dantes posted:

How long do you guys keep your raw footage around for? I'm only 1/3 into the LP, footage-wise, and my folder is already up to 38 gigs; but I'm 99% sure the moment I delete something is the moment I realise I goofed something up and will want said footage back.

Probably worth looking into something like AWS Glacier, considering, as you point out, how unlikely it is that you'll need any of it again. It's usual the traffic that costs money, not the storage, and given that you'll only use a few gigs if at all, that might be something to look into.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2016 15:49

ufarn: May 30, 2009

How does the new experimental H.264 AMD codec in OBS compare to the old one?

# ¿ Sep 28, 2016 14:41

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Anyone who sucessfully uses Virtual Super Resolution with OBS Studio? I can't get OBS to capture the entire window with it on.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2016 11:41

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Any idea why nothing happens when I click the record or stream buttons in the latest version of OBS Studio (x86 and x64)? It used to work just fine, so I don't know whether a bug in the new version introduced this.

Next step is reinstalling.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2016 23:14

ufarn: May 30, 2009

ufarn posted:

Any idea why nothing happens when I click the record or stream buttons in the latest version of OBS Studio (x86 and x64)? It used to work just fine, so I don't know whether a bug in the new version introduced this.

Next step is reinstalling.

I tried reinstalling with a fresh obs-studio folder after which I copied my basic/ and global.ini to the new folder. All my settings were still there, but I get the same bug. This is the weirdest thing.

e: Think I solved it by using an older version of OBS.

ufarn fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Dec 6, 2016

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 13:15

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Anyone knows a good tutorial for VB-CABLE and everything that comes with it? Last time I used it, it was a mess that didn't work, and most the guides/vids out there are garbage, including the official one.

I use an audio interface for my mic and headphones, if it makes any difference.

e: Think I finally found a video that explains it. Going to try my luck with multiple VACs later.
e: Microphone doesn't seem to work.
e: Microphone works again just by not making it the VAC the default and then making it the default again.
e: And now it seems to have stopped working again, what the christ.

ufarn fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Jan 4, 2017

# ¿ Jan 4, 2017 16:31

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Companies like Focusrite don't recommend you use long cables for the audio interfaces. I don't know if that's bunk, but drawing long cables may not be the solution.

I don't really think a lack of commentary is interesting, as you'll be indistinguishable from everybody else. Of course, no one wants bad mic audio, though. Sometimes, people might want a silent playthrough for RPGs with a lot of exposition where something keeps happening, but it won't work for something like The Last of Us where the moments are few and far between.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 17:38

ufarn: May 30, 2009

What are your Sound -> Communications settings? It should be "Do nothing". By default, it's something else.

Second, check the levels in your Volume Mixer, because the above attenuation setting has a habit of messing this up.

Discord also has a similar attenuation setting under Voice. Turn it off for when both you and others speak.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2017 12:39

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Everyone runs into voice attenuation at some point with a serious audio setup. Don't worry about it.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2017 21:31

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Anyone played around with converting their video or archive to x265? I tried it with FFMPEG but end up with videos that are larger than the original when I convert losslessly.

ffmpeg -i in.mkv libx265 -preset medium -crf 0 -c:a copy out.mkv

# ¿ Jun 25, 2017 14:28

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Yeah, I'm not doing it to optimize quality; I just saw it can reduce storage space would be fun to explore.

My OBS settings are 4,500 kbps, "Quality" with 160kbps audio. I just picked lossless figuring that would be the easiest way to preserve the quality as-is rather than potentially reducing the quality by more.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2017 16:44

ufarn: May 30, 2009

berryjon posted:

I haven't done audio mixing in a while, so could someone give this test video for my next LP a listen? It sounds good to me, but having a second/third opinion is always handy.

Overall audio is slightly low, but the mixing between game audio and mic seems perfect.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2017 18:53

ufarn: May 30, 2009

IrfanView should be fine. You can also install imagemagick and use its "convert" command in the commandline.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2017 10:47

ufarn: May 30, 2009

I'm trying to figure out how audio sample rate works.

My setup supports either 44.1kHz@16 bit or 96@16/24. I think I can get it to do 44.1@24 if I reinstall the driver or something; it's probably just the Scarlett Solo that's plugged into the wrong port.

OBS Studio accepts either 44.1 or 48. (Maybe it's an ASIO thing.)

48 *seems* is the preferred format for Twitch and YouTube (AAC), but it doesn't seem long since 44.1 was the default.

OBS doesn't specify audio format, but .mp4 seems to be the preferred container, and I assume it uses AAC by default?

My question is what you need to do in terms of audio settings; I don't have an 48 MHz setting in Windows, so is there any issue with using 96@24? 44.1 seems like a standard sample rate, but according to Twitch and YouTube, I should probably go with 48, right?

If I use .mp4 in OBS Studio, is it going to use AAC? I don't edit my OBS Studios further, so I have no idea what the audio and video streams are beyond what the settings say.

ufarn fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Aug 5, 2017

# ¿ Aug 5, 2017 17:59

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Cheers on the info.

OBS Studio has also added MKV as container output, but I'm just going to use MP4 since it'll probably be transcoded by whatever I upload it to.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2017 20:29

ufarn: May 30, 2009

lrzip seems to do a good job, but I never managed to get it to work on Windows, even inside Ubuntu on Windows 10.

https://a3nm.net/blog/images_lrzip.html
https://github.com/ckolivas/lrzip
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lrzip

You can always try a basic zip/rar/7zip and see how far it gets you.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2017 10:02

ufarn: May 30, 2009

lohli posted:

If all you're doing is trimming the video then try this: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

Dang, everything's an Electron app these days.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2017 15:26

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Is AviSynth still ideal if I just want a free, open tool to edit (cut and re-arrange) footage and superimpose fairly simple text(s) on video losslessly?

# ¿ Aug 23, 2017 10:16

ufarn: May 30, 2009

I love the idea of frame-based seeking, especially for AviSynth's handling of time, but I can't figure out how to fix VirtualDub support for MKV. Google just turns up a bunch of shady guides and links to crap like K-Lite, so what's the official way to fix MKV in VD? I managed to do it with AviSynth, as much of a pain as that was.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2017 18:42

ufarn: May 30, 2009

ufarn posted:

I love the idea of frame-based seeking, especially for AviSynth's handling of time, but I can't figure out how to fix VirtualDub support for MKV. Google just turns up a bunch of shady guides and links to crap like K-Lite, so what's the official way to fix MKV in VD? I managed to do it with AviSynth, as much of a pain as that was.

Should I just give up using MKV?

# ¿ Aug 28, 2017 15:17

ufarn: May 30, 2009

nielsm posted:

No, rather you should give up on VirtualDub.

VDub has two reasonable uses left: Previewing Avisynth scripts, and encoding Avisynth scripts to a lossless format in AVI.
And both of those tasks can be solved in other ways too. (There are actual Avisynth IDE's with editor and preview built in, and you can use x264 to encode to lossless H.264 from an Avisynth script.)

Should I demux before I convert my MKV to MP4?

By x264, do you mean I should just have ffmpeg convert the AVS file to the MP4?

I use ffmpeg regularly, so using that rather than some other CLI tool is probably preferable anyway.

I did like VirtualDub's decent seeking features, and so far, I haven't come across anything with a decent interface. But that's the only killer feature I'd like.

ufarn fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Aug 30, 2017

# ¿ Aug 30, 2017 13:47

ufarn: May 30, 2009

I just assumed (eventually) uploading directly in the right container format to the likes of YouTube would guarantee as pure a compression as possible rather than adding demuxing to the process on their end. Not that it'd necessarily happen, but just for simplicity's sake.

ffmpeg supports AVS, so there's no issue there. I'll just have to figure out what options to pass to it to get from MKV to MP4 without adding any other steps than whatever text, cut, and speed-ups I add to it.

The frame-seeking is just so I can get the frames exactly right.

ufarn fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Aug 30, 2017

# ¿ Aug 30, 2017 16:32

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Do you have any favourite AviSynth(+) Subtitle() fonts with a free license?

The ones I've tried all look kinda weird, be it on their own accord or AviSynth's.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2017 17:14

ufarn: May 30, 2009

discworld is all I read posted:

Why not use Aegisubs? It's got plenty of fonts and it's not terribly difficult to use and/or add the subs it pops out into an avisynth file.

Subtitle() is just AviSynth's poorly named library for putting text on video. Good lowercase-subtitle fonts are fairly straightforward (Calibri, Palatino, etc), but big video fonts (strong/bold/book/black) or casual ones that look good in AviSynth and are also free have eluded me so far.

Again, it might just be AviSynth's rendering that's weird, but little good it does me.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2017 20:01

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Trying to write an AviSynth function, but I keep getting "Invalid arguments to function 'Subtitle'":

code:

# Works
Subtitle("Test", align=5, size=64, font="Helvetica", text_color=$FFFFFF, halo_color=$000000)

# Doesn't work
function Watermark(string s) {
    return Subtitle(s, align=5, size=64, font="Helvetica", text_color=$FFFFFF, halo_color=$000000)
}
Watermark("Test")

Can someone explain what I'm doing wrong? I also tried (clip clip, string s) and "clip c" with the same result.

This happens with every other custom function, nothing particular to Subtitle.

I tried finding some other .avsi files to learn from, but I couldn't find any good ones.

ufarn fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Sep 18, 2017

# ¿ Sep 18, 2017 15:16

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Ah, I didn't prepend "c.". I tried to do that out of the function, but didn't know to do it inside because I didn't have any examples to go by. Cheers.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2017 15:44

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Jamesman posted:

Anyone have any suggestions on reducing the clickity-clacky of mouse and keyboard sounds?

Buy o-rings for your keyboard if you haven't already?

Other than that, I don't know how much more you can do beyond lowering your gain.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2017 01:09

ufarn: May 30, 2009

If you have an XLR mic, you can also replace your condenser with a dynamic microphone to reduce the pickup pattern.

Other than that, you can try positioning and your mic in different ways, but if echo is not the issue, that probably won't do much for you.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2017 13:08

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Can someone explain to me how conditionals work in AviSynth?

If I want to create a function that instead of taking a blanket argument takes only a limited number of possible arguments and responds accordingly, what does the condtional syntax look like?

I know functions like Subtitle do it for 1-9, but that could be something that's just coded in C++ or whatever the base language it as a standard library.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2017 22:06

ufarn: May 30, 2009

I know how useful a compressor can be in general, but what are people's experience with OBS's new-ish compressor filter? Worth using defaults - a "might as well" if you will? Or any cookie-cutter config that everyone should use.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2017 00:58

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Has anyone run a benchmark of iGPU benchmarks for OBS? What's the max bitrate a modern Intel iGPU would be able to run 720p60 with Quick Sync? I'm not counting on something amazing, but just wondering.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2017 00:45

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Try SMG.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2017 22:20

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Speaeking of, are there any good free visual video editors where you can import multiple videos at the same time and fiddle with keyframes rather than editing them one at a time in something like AvsPmod?

# ¿ Dec 16, 2017 13:29

ufarn: May 30, 2009

TheGamerGuy23 posted:

So, does anyone here use OBS? I'm having some issues with it. Mainly, I've fiddled around with the settings, but I just can't seem to get the quality to "Indistinguishable", but noticed no actual change. I have a sample video of the Wii U version of Wind Waker as an example. I've fiddled about with some of the obvious settings, even Googled it and tried the settings others say to do, but nothing really makes a difference. Is there any way to keep using OBS and improve the quality?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZQGO9ktoF4

* Resolution
* Downscale filter. This makes a huge difference. Pick Lanczos in Video settings
* Bitrate (a large one like 25k+ means you can always re-encode it with a lower bitrate later)
* Preset (at least the default, but you can obviously do something slower with something as easy to run as an emulator - or do it later when or if you re-encode your high-bitrate version)

Inspect your video with MediaInfo to see if you're getting a constant FPS and so on in case your CPU can't keep up for some reason.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2018 13:37

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Do you use AudioDub to add additional audio to a video(+audio), or do you have to do something else to retain both audio tracks in AviSynth?

# ¿ Jan 24, 2018 17:50

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:49

ufarn: May 30, 2009

nielsm posted:

You use MixAudio(inputA, inputB, volumeA, volumeB) to mix two audio tracks together. The volume values are from 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 being full original volume, usually you want volumeA+volumeB to add up to 1. (If the sum is greater than 1 you risk clipping/distortion, depending on the actual levels.)
The AudioDub function only replaces the audio on a video clip with the audio from a different clip.

Awesome, didn't know about MixAudio, cheers.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2018 18:39

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Tech Support Fort - Questions, Comments and Codecs (READ THE OP!)

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