Best low-thershold scriptable h.264 encoder

[ThePhysicist]

Hello,

Moved this over from the "newbie" section. I think it belongs here

I have a nephew who is wants the be the #1 minecraft youtuber of all time! In that regard, we spend the 25. dec. putting together his new stationary with a nice mix of new and pilfered parts! Now, I'm new to video recording and encoding, so I spent the following two days understanding the demands of game recording and subsequent post-processing. Now, he only has 8 GB of memory, and recording for 10 minutes will easily exceed that, so I figured we'd encode it with h.264 to make it easier to work with (also, he is using windows movie maker, which doesn't handle the large file sizes). This takes a lot of time after he is done recording though.

So I thought to automate the process. The recording tool can spit out 5 minutes of video at a time, and I thought to write a small code, utilizing an existing h.264 encoder to monitor the output folder for the files. When they appear, I want to put it in a "to-be-encoded" queue, and then start the encoding in a process using all but one core of his CPU, one job at a time. Then spit them out in a new folder and perhaps move the big file to a storage location (so it doesn't clutter up the SSD).
(Side note: He has two GPU's, the one on his main board seems to take care of the recording process. This leaves the CPU relatively free to do encoding work .)

Now, to do this, I'd ideally like to find an encoder which can work with a config file. I've used "ImagesToVideo" to make 3D movies for computational fluid dynamics in C#, and have a framework ready to go. However, I'm a bit lost as to what encoder to use.

I've had a look at videolans h.264, but I couldn't immediately figure out how to work with it. And it looks too much like a core engine where I would have to handle quite detailed arguments. I then looked at ffmpeg, which looks better, but it is quite command line based. Also, it looks like I have to specify a lot about the input format, which I'd hoped the tool could figure out itself.

And this is where I'm at... I'm a bit short on insight into encoders, and would really appreciate any advice/reccomendation! Like... Should I look into h.265?

[Selur]

.. so I spent the following two days understanding the demands of game recording and subsequent post-processing. Now, he only has 8 GB of memory, and recording for 10 minutes will easily exceed that,...

Only if you try to keep all of them uncompressed inside your memory, no clue why you would want to do that.
Normally when doing game capturing and not live streaming you try to. capture the content as fast as possible and try to dump it to a second hdd with a fast lossless compressor. Then later you take the captured material do your cutting, editing (inside an NLE) and convert it to the format best suited for distribution,...

Should I look into h.265?

not really, at least nor for live capturing

...so I figured we'd encode it with h.264 to make it easier to work with..

1st time I read that someone encodes to H.264 to make something easier to work with.

Personally I would:
a. buy a NVIDIA card which supports ShadowPlay and simply capture the whole time while playing.
b. use NLE instead of WMM

The whole writing code and trying to figure out how to work with the encoders is a waste of time from my point of view.

Assuming buying a NVIDIA card with ShadowPlay isn't an option, why not use something like LoiLo Game Recorder, Fraps, DxTory, Open Broadcaster Software, BandiCam, Action!,... and capture on a second hdd?

From my point of view looking for a "low-thershold scriptable h.264 encoder" is totally the wrong way to go at the problem at hand.


Cu Selur

[ThePhysicist]

Only if you try to keep all of them uncompressed inside your memory, no clue why you would want to do that.
Normally when doing game capturing and not live streaming you try to. capture the content as fast as possible and try to dump it to a second hdd with a fast lossless compressor. Then later you take the captured material do your cutting, editing (inside an NLE) and convert it to the format best suited for distribution,...

(...)

Personally I would:
a. buy a NVIDIA card which supports ShadowPlay and simply capture the whole time while playing.
b. use NLE instead of WMM

Thanks for the reply! As for the editing. Movie maker crashed when trying to import the recording (14 GB, 7 min 1080p @ 60 HZ). I'm not sure why, but I guess that movie maker isn't the most stable editing program out there (I had to run it in Win 7 compatibility mode to even get it to start on win 10). My thought was that it tried to put everything into memory, or that it had problems with file sizes above 4 GB. After compression with h.264 to 1.7 GB, everything worked fine.

Now, my nephew is ten, so I didn't want to move him to a new editing program (at least not before I found one with a simple interface). But, I see now, that this might be the best solution. Is there one you would recommend? This will be useful for me too!

The whole writing code and trying to figure out how to work with the encoders is a waste of time from my point of view.

Hehe... I guess I would because I could. And my nephew would get that "Wow" effect of having something unique, and would tell his friends that his uncle is the coolest guy ever

Assuming buying a NVIDIA card with ShadowPlay isn't an option, why not use something like LoiLo Game Recorder, Fraps, DxTory, Open Broadcaster Software, BandiCam, Action!,... and capture on a second hdd?

Capture works fine We're using Action! (he was quite determined on that choice). I have to pilfer more hdds though. I have underestimated the amount of storage these things require.

[racer-x]

Why not use ffmpeg here? Sounds like a good tool for this. You just need to write the proper batch encoding script.....