Preparing FRAPS video for YouTube HD?

exoplasm

So I have been having fun recording stuff in FRAPS lately. I get nice, high quality full resolution videos at full framerate. I then try to convert them, using numerous applications to do so, only to end up with something that looks like pixelated garbage at choppy framerates.

I need help with this.

Someone, please help.

For reference, I have used:

SUPER
Windows Movie Maker (bleh!)
Cyberlink PowerDirector
Handbrake (actually for some reason it doesn't output any video, just 2 megs of audio)


I have used some other stuff in the past, but again I have never had good results.

I just want my game videos to look good and be "HD" on Youtube.

stigweard

I usually use MediaCoder. Use h.264 with a cuda encoder, re-sample the audio down to 44.1kHz form 48kHz, and save them as either m4a or .flv for the container. Youtube still seems to be messing with the frame rate. I have yet rto be able to get 60 fps out of an uploaded video. Transcoding is almost instant if you use h.264, 44.1kHz mp3, and flv @30fps.

480 sample

and another in color but no sound

exoplasm

So with SUPER what I got was a nearly black and white video. It came out just under 300 MB (for 2 minutes) and looked good despite having almost no color.

I tried MediaCoder and it put out a 19 MB file that looked like a Real Video file from 1997.

Can you save a preset for it and upload it somewhere?

By the way, my best result thus far has been with PowerDirector (earlier I watched it while encoding and thus the framerate looked bad, but now it's not too bad). The quality could be a bit better, though. I used the "upload to Youtube HD" output mode, and it automagically uploaded it. It obviously wasn't in the format Youtube expects because it took a while to encode it on Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbDvFgZnX0E

stigweard

I'm not sure this saves a full preset or not. You can try this:

[coode]<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<MediaCoderPrefs><node key="overall.ui.optionTab">1</node><node key="overall.ui.param">680,640,620,220</node><node key="overall.video.mode">Quality-based</node><node key="overall.video.quality">100</node><node key="overall.video.autoEncoder">false</node><node key="overall.video.encoder">CUDA Encoder</node><node key="audiofilter.resample.samplerate">44100</node><node key="videofilter.frame.fps">30</node></MediaCoderPrefs>
[/code]

Paste it into a text file and save it as xml and load it as a preset in media coder.

Cuda won't work if you don't have an nvidia card. Cuda is an encoder that uses nvidia hardware. In the video tab, make sure the format is set to h.264 and the mode depends on the encoder you use. The version of mediacoder I am using doesn't work with anything other than quality based when using Cuda. If you don't have it, try x264 for the encoder and set the bitrate for the encode higher (1500 at least). In the audio tab, you just have to make sure to downsample the the rate from 48 to 44.1 or the audio gets messed up by youtube.

exoplasm

I loaded your preset and get this error message:



Which is strange because I used CUDA h.264 on my first try which is what ended up with a 19 MB crap video.

Any ideas?

Edit: Changing it from CUDA to x264 I got this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf1W2pXDP3c&fmt=22

Strangely it looks colorless in WMP, but in VLC it looks fine. What is up with that? Win7 h.264 playback problems?

stigweard

The error might come from different versions of mediacoder. I haven't updated mine in a while and there has been at least one new version. At least the quality has greatly improved over the last one, but it seems like your output video size ended up cropped in 720p. There should be a way to change the output sizes, but I can't really remember how to do it.

exoplasm

It's cropped because Mass Effect 2 puts black bars on the top and bottom during dialogue scenes. I tried to crop the video to actually be the right aspect ratio, but I have yet to find a program that will do it without butchering everything.

stigweard

MediaCoder will do it on the fly as it compresses it. Go into features and use the auto cropper.

exoplasm

So I think I have this all figured out now. Almost.

I have a good config for mediacoder to output the video at a quality I like. The black and white video problem seems to be a result of using dual monitors - on one monitor the output video is B&W, on the other monitor it is normal. Moving from one monitor to the other during playback freezes the video. Windows 7 and/or nvidia quirks, I guess.

Now, the cropping isn't working right. If I set it to resize to 1280x720 with cropping set to the right numbers, it works fine for the first video. Today I queued up about 40 videos and only the first one was cropped, the rest were stretched. EDIT: Nevermind, the first one is stretched and the rest are unaffected by cropping/resizing at all it seems.

I may need to just get a real video editing app.

FyreWulff

stigweard wrote: »

I usually use MediaCoder. Use h.264 with a cuda encoder, re-sample the audio down to 44.1kHz form 48kHz, and save them as either m4a or .flv for the container. Youtube still seems to be messing with the frame rate. I have yet rto be able to get 60 fps out of an uploaded video. Transcoding is almost instant if you use h.264, 44.1kHz mp3, and flv @30fps.

30 FPS is the limit of flash video on Youtube.

Barrakketh

FyreWulff wrote: »

stigweard wrote: »

I usually use MediaCoder. Use h.264 with a cuda encoder, re-sample the audio down to 44.1kHz form 48kHz, and save them as either m4a or .flv for the container. Youtube still seems to be messing with the frame rate. I have yet rto be able to get 60 fps out of an uploaded video. Transcoding is almost instant if you use h.264, 44.1kHz mp3, and flv @30fps.

30 FPS is the limit of flash video on Youtube.

Whether it's 60 or 30 FPS Youtube still seems to be converting 720p video to 29.97 FPS. Example upload of mine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcL75F5fQyE

Still looks good even though I had to upscale it (even though you may have it run at a higher resolution the game still does 640x480 internally, and that's what FRAPS will capture). That said, I've seen some videos by other people where that slight difference from 30 FPS to 30000/1001 make bits noticeably jerky at times.

That said, I have no idea how stigweard is getting "almost instant" encoding with H.264. If you decide to go with one of the higher quality x264 presets (you can override particular settings if you wish) like '--preset veryslow' encoding is certainly not what I consider fast even with a 2.8 GHz quad-core processor and four gigabytes of RAM. Of course, I can't use CUDA but I don't see it making things that much faster.

TychoCelchuuu

I use VirtualDub with XviD compression, jack the quality up about as far as it goes. Works fine for me.

amnesiasoft

Barrakketh wrote: »

That said, I have no idea how stigweard is getting "almost instant" encoding with H.264. If you decide to go with one of the higher quality x264 presets (you can override particular settings if you wish) like '--preset veryslow' encoding is certainly not what I consider fast even with a 2.8 GHz quad-core processor and four gigabytes of RAM. Of course, I can't use CUDA but I don't see it making things that much faster.

I think what xe meant is that YouTube will process the video really quickly.

Fats

Barrakketh wrote: »

Of course, I can't use CUDA but I don't see it making things that much faster.

CUDA encoders are at least 4 times faster, depending on your video card, though sometimes you don't get the same quality out of them. They may have fixed that since I last checked.

Barrakketh

amnesiasoft wrote: »

Barrakketh wrote: »

That said, I have no idea how stigweard is getting "almost instant" encoding with H.264. If you decide to go with one of the higher quality x264 presets (you can override particular settings if you wish) like '--preset veryslow' encoding is certainly not what I consider fast even with a 2.8 GHz quad-core processor and four gigabytes of RAM. Of course, I can't use CUDA but I don't see it making things that much faster.

I think what xe meant is that YouTube will process the video really quickly.

In that case I've definitely noticed that with my H.264 encodes. Maybe I've just been lucky with the times I've uploaded videos or they started processing them as it's being uploaded (helped in part that my upstream bandwidth is considerably slower than my download), but I haven't had to wait for Youtube to process my videos as of late.

Fats wrote: »

Barrakketh wrote: »

Of course, I can't use CUDA but I don't see it making things that much faster.

CUDA encoders are at least 4 times faster, depending on your video card, though sometimes you don't get the same quality out of them. They may have fixed that since I last checked.

Well, there's the Badaboom encoder, but I'll just quote one of the x264 devs on that:

17:00] <cancan101> So does badaboom not work (well)
[17:00] <cancan101> ?
[17:00] <Dark_Shikari> no
[17:00] <Dark_Shikari> it's slower than x264, thus completely useless
[17:00] <holger_> that is going to change when we get graphics cores on the cpu.
[17:00] <Dark_Shikari> you can beat x264 in three ways: quality, speed, and features
[17:00] <Dark_Shikari> quality, hell no, no chance
[17:01] <Dark_Shikari> features: no chance, while there are audiences x264 doesn't aim at that require even fancier things than x264 does, these encoders are far simpler
[17:01] <holger_> (cuda or something else sharing the same caches - now that could be something)
[17:01] <Dark_Shikari> speed: that's the only chance
[17:01] <Dark_Shikari> and it fails at that, too
[17:01] <Dark_Shikari> so, summary, it fails.
[17:01] <cancan101> Are there any commerical attempts that beat x264 at speed?
[17:01] <cancan101> other than badaboom
[17:02] <Dark_Shikari> well, speed is a relative term, speed relative to what
[17:02] <Dark_Shikari> if you just mean raw encoding throughput, you could chain enough fpgas together to outperform x264, sure
[17:02] <Yuvi> youtube?
[17:02] <Dark_Shikari> but nothing acutally practical.
[17:02] <Dark_Shikari> at least not practical if you're trying to max encoding throughput for a given cost

Maybe it's gotten faster since then (but the x264 devs are always working on their encoder as well).

And a project to see the viability of accerlating x264's motion prediction ended up with the final report stating that CUDA is viable, but it's not yet fast enough to justify the loss in quality. The CUDA implementation also didn't try to implement all the features that the CPU-based motion estimation that x264 has. It was just a proof of concept, mind you.

exoplasm

I noticed on my last run that my quad core AMD cpu encodes much faster than CUDA for x264. Although the settings don't match 1:1 between the two encoders, the results were similar enough to prefer CPU encoding.

Anyways, guess I'll have to play my games in 1280x720 to record with FRAPS even though I have 5:4 aspect ratio monitors. Fun times ahead.

If anyone has suggestions on video editing software that is easy to get into and can do most of the nifty stuff, I'd love to hear it.