First post, by Grunt
- Rank
- Newbie
Ok, so now I have video recorded directly from DOSBox. It is beautiful, crispy, colorful (as much as you can get from VGA palette), with integrated Fluidsynth MIDI, choppy as hell and I would like to share it.
Question: Where exactly?
Would you recommend any specific platform? I mean for streaming videos recorded directly from DOSBox? Or let me generalize the question: Do you know guys any internet platform suitable for this job? „Let's Play“, Game Walkthrough or Longplays of old games. 320x200 video resolution (or different resolutions whatsoever), bright 256 color palette, different framerates, etc.
- Youtube – first shot in mind, sure…; So first and foremost: NO! Hell NO!
Let me give you a few reasons why not:- There is a need of account when I want to upload anything on Youtube. Do I have one? Sure. Am I willing to link my personal account with random stuff from DOSBox lying somewhere on internet? Absolutely no! I appreciate my anonymity on internet and I would like to maintain myself in this condition.
- Technical reasons. Have you ever heard about pixel-perfect scaling? Do I need to use some patch or something? No reason to do so. Simply record thing as is (640x400 and 320x200, 24-bit RGB in my case) and let do the media player rescaling. With nearest-neighbor interpolation. --scale=oversample parameter for mpv. Combined with -fixed-vo to get perfect (and fast!) result even on full-screen. I've tried Youtube. Almost hour of chewing and processing and with this result: On given bitrate I'm able to get 4× better result with 5-10 minute x264 encoding on my laptop. Now I know exactly what „Youtube quality“ means. I can set bitrate, choose codec, strength of deblocking filter, encoding preset, container format, everything. What can I choose on Youtube?:
- YUV422P, YUV444P, BGR24, RGB24 (libx264rgb), GRAY8, 10-bits? Completely different codec? Libopus? No? – No. Forget it. You'll get questions if is content suitable for kids, if I want to place age restrictions, I have to choose category, title picture, license, language, product placements. Why do I have to choose subtitles? What about commercials? You know what? Screw that! No Youtube, no problem.
- File sharing services (Megaupload, Hellshare, Mediafire, etc.)
- Free ✔
- Anonymous ✔
- Codec or container of my choice ✔
- No stupid questions ✔
- No stupid restrictions ✔
- No stupid commercials ❌
- Animated GIF – You'd be surprised how good choice it is. Custom palette, effective coding. Just look at it:
For a short clip is surprisingly good choice. But- no sound
- no stop button
- no seeking
- and definitely not suitable for game walkthrough, longplay or anything longer.
So…
And now technical questions:
- Pixel format? Yuv420p, Yuv444p, RGB24? Or can I somehow recode ZMBV diretly into PAL8 aka 8-bit palette? And stream it?
- Targer bitrate? 0.5 Mbps? 1Mbps? Or more?
- Deblocking? Yes or no?
- Can I fit chunks with different resolutions into one stream or file? DOSBox solution is simple and witting but what should I do with multiple files?