Fraps & VirtualDub for YouTube

Craig321 · 7 Jan 2009 at 21:50

Hi,

I've been recording a few videos using Fraps recently (Far Cry 2 etc.). Originally I was using Movie Maker to reduce the size of the videos, but it was making them really bad quality.

I've decided to start using VirtualDub mod and have found some fairly decent settings using the XviD MPEG-4 codec, however the sides of the video are still cut off for some reason, and the video quality isn't the best as you can see here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TxG57yFfWmA

Does anybody know of decent compression settings that are the best for YouTube. Bear in mind my upload speed is only 192Kpbs.

Thanks,
Craig.

Bane · 7 Jan 2009 at 22:55

Been a long time since I uploaded a video, but played around with this method once. Seems the codec is no longer updated.

If you try the below method please let me know if it works better that you existing method.

This was before I had a widescreen monitor, so no idea if it will still cut sides off.

Bane said:
Try the following, just to see if it produces any better final video while keeping file size down.

Get VirtualDub v1.7.7 and x264 VfW and install the two.

Use VirtualDub to edit/chop your raw Fraps footage. Once happy with with it select Video menu and pick Compression. Scroll down list and select x264vfw.

From the file menu select "Save as AVI". A quick test with a 320x240 Fraps recording reduced file from 125MB to 12.6MB. No idea how it would look after Youtube mess with it though.

Echo · 7 Jan 2009 at 23:49

Youtube is now 16:9 (when it works!) and your monitor is most likely 16:10.

Try a 16:9 screenmode for capturing in future, but for this footage you can still fix it. From Virtualdub go video > filters > add > null transform then hit the crop button. Don't know your original resolution, but it'll need about 5% cropped off top and bottom.

You could also add (under the same filters window) resize, then put in 640(w) by 368(h) with a bicubic filter. Youtube doesn't have much definition anyway so that should be plenty, and may help reduce upload time.

snowdog · 8 Jan 2009 at 00:02

You could download the flash codec and encode them directly to flahs, then youtube won't touch the file any more with a lousy convert... But I use Xvid too though

, I just use a very high quality setting since I can upload at 1024kbit/sec.

Craig321 · 8 Jan 2009 at 00:25

Echo said:
Youtube is now 16:9 (when it works!) and your monitor is most likely 16:10.

Try a 16:9 screenmode for capturing in future, but for this footage you can still fix it. From Virtualdub go video > filters > add > null transform then hit the crop button. Don't know your original resolution, but it'll need about 5% cropped off top and bottom.

You could also add (under the same filters window) resize, then put in 640(w) by 368(h) with a bicubic filter. Youtube doesn't have much definition anyway so that should be plenty, and may help reduce upload time.

Thanks, currently compiling the video with the resize filter on, hopefully it'll help

For some reason XviD is making the filesize about double the estimated size (I specified 60MB, it's making it 120MB).

snowdog said:
You could download the flash codec and encode them directly to flahs, then youtube won't touch the file any more with a lousy convert... But I use Xvid too though , I just use a very high quality setting since I can upload at 1024kbit/sec.

That's actually a pretty good idea if I managed to find out the exact codec settings YouTube uses so I can make it look the best I can before uploading it.

Bane said:
Been a long time since I uploaded a video, but played around with this method once. Seems the codec is no longer updated.

If you try the below method please let me know if it works better that you existing method.

This was before I had a widescreen monitor, so no idea if it will still cut sides off.

I'll give that a go if the resize filter doesn't work

[Edit]
Just gave that a go but it's still not doing what I want it to do. Basically I used XviD with the resize filter. I set the target filesize to 60MB but it came out as 111MB. I think specifying the size is a very bad idea, long videos will look horrible regardless of the other settings.

Basically all I want is some settings that will encode my Fraps video to a decent size/quality as well as resizing it to 640x360 (YouTube size)