OBS vs AmarecTV

[techmot]

I have been using OBS for a few days now, people on here have advised me that capturing VHS video should be set at a video bitrate of 2500kbps (720x576) for PAL. However, the final outputted file seems to produce rather poor compression, almost on a par with MPEG2 or even a VCD. When I have captured a 50 min video in AmarecTV and have used Handbrake to encode the file, setting the quality using H.264 encoder, constant bitrate and at 27 on the quality scale, not only does it produce a smaller size than OBS does but the video quality seems better. In OBS setting the bitrate at 2500kbps produces a file of about 1.75GB for around 48 mins, yet Handbrake can encode to a smaller size using the same bitrate but the quality seems to be far better. If I set the birate in OBS higher, say around 8000kbps, it produces a file of around 3GB, and the video quality is still pretty poor.

Anyone know why OBS is doing this?. I know that OBS isn't an ideal programme for capturing analog video but it is an easy way of capturing where you don't need to re-encode a very large file and spend over 3 hours encoding it, and my system only has 4GB of ram and not the best of processors. I don't know why someone suggested 2500kbps was the standard bitrate for capturing analog video when it clearly produces poor compression. Maybe I've been using the wrong encoder.

[lollo]

However, the final outputted file seems to produce rather poor compression, almost on a par with MPEG2 or even a VCD. When I have captured a 50 min video in AmarecTV and have used Handbrake to encode the file, setting the quality using H.264 encoder, constant bitrate and at 27 on the quality scale, not only does it produce a smaller size than OBS does but the video quality seems better.

You experienced the difference between a real time encoding while capturing and a compression after a proper capture. I do not use OBS, so I cannot reccomend its settings, but rather suggesting (again) to capture 4:2:2 YUV lossless and encode after.