What video format will look the best?

[DovahTube]

I want to improve the video quality for my YouTube videos but I am unsure which format will have the highest possible quality for 1080p. I currently record and render in MP4 but I have seen many other YouTubers playing the same games and not having the same video quality as mine. There video quality is far more superior than mine. I have tried tweaking the render settings, fiddling with the bitrate, and pretty much everything. I've had multiple people tell me its probably my recording format. Is this true? If there is a format that will make the video quality look a lot better can someone please tell me what it is?
Thanks for all the help!



BTW I have recorded with MSI Afterburner, XSplit, OBS, and finally I've started to record with Nvidia's ShadowPlay which is giving me the best quality yet.

 

[PTOWN GAMER]

not really its probably the device you use for capturing the gameplay. What do u use?

 

[DovahTube]

not really its probably the device you use for capturing the gameplay. What do u use?

I don't have a capture device such as a capture card so I just use my GPU which is and MSI Geforce GTX 750TI

 

[Solandri]

Is there an option to capture in MPEG2? MP4 (actually a container which usually uses MPEG4) is newer. It offers more compression than MPEG2, but at the cost of needing a lot more processing power. In order to do it in real-time without impacting your game, your capture software may be doing a quick and dirty job converting the captured video to MP4 in low quality.

MPEG2 (codec used on DVDs) is really old and designed to run on 1990s hardware. So its compression sucks, but it takes very little processing power. Consequently, the video files will be huge (which is why people serious about this buy a separate HDD or SSD just for video capture), but the quality will be much better. Afterwards, you have your computer convert from MPEG2 to MPEG4 or (more commonly now) H.264, taking its sweet time to do a good job (2-pass is normal, once to process the video and figure out the best way to compress it, again to do the actual compression). Often this conversion takes more time than the running time of the video, so there's no way it could be done in real-time, much less simultaneously with a game playing.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video/introduction-record-capture.htm

Note: Capturing in high compression codecs, like that of XviD/Divx MPEG-4, H.264 MPEG-4 or Windows Media, is not suggested. It will give lower quality video output using that method. For best results, capture with an uncompressed or low-compression codec, and then re-encode the material to the higher compression ratio.

 

[PTOWN GAMER]

the best thing you can do is get an Elgato HD60

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0TP-0072-00001

This will last you a long time with good quality.

 

[James Mason]

the best thing you can do is get an Elgato HD60

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0TP-0072-00001

This will last you a long time with good quality.

You don't need an external capture device for PC, only consoles need them.

@OP, capturing video is pretty CPU intensive, you need a high end CPU like an i7 to do it well, but you can get by with less usually, at the lower quality you're referring to. You'll also need 16+GBs of ram, and the faster the ram the better.

Are you sure you've setup OBS right? (you can try a CRF of like 5, but expect like 10GB files for 20mins of video)
And here's how to set it up for local recordings, start at the recommended crf 15, and lower it for higher quality and higher file size recordings.
https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/how-to-make-high-quality-local-recordings.16/