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  1. I am working on several projects for which I have to do lots of screen recordings. And I have been experimenting with different screen recording softwares. I have tried ActivePresenter, BBFlash Express, Camstudio and Camtasia Studio. All of them seem to do the recording job really well. But as far as rendering the recorded videos is concerned, I get fuzzy picture and blurry and thick looking text in each render. The only time it didn't happen, was when I recorded a few clips with BBFlash Express' Lossless coded. And rendered it in lossless. But of course the file size was way too big. Then, as soon as I re-encoded the lossless file into an avi, using Format Factory, the same thing happened. The picture and the text in the video became fuzzy.

    I read a lot about rendering on the forums of those softwares. All of them said one common thing that you must record and render with the same settings. In terms of screen size and frame rate etc. If you record with one set of settings, and render with another set of settings, then the video quality would suffer. And I did everything they said. But the problem still remained.

    I have a 19 inches monitor, so my screen resolution is 1280x1024. I wonder if that has anything to do with it. Although, I even tried recording with other lower screen resolutions. But, everything gave me the same result.

    I was thinking, if I render them with BBFlash Express Lossless coded, then whether uploading them to a video sharing website would make them blurry again. Because the website will also re-encode my videos.

    Please Help!

    Thanks in advance.
    Last edited by Earthling2000; 15th Sep 2013 at 09:40.
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  2. Originally Posted by Earthling2000 View Post
    But as far as rendering the recorded videos is concerned, I get fuzzy picture and blurry and thick looking text in each render.
    I don't see that in your sample images.

    lossless:
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    lossy:
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    I see color differenes and DCT ringing in the lossy image. But not blurry or "thick" text.
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  3. Member vhelp's Avatar
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    at first, i thought your issue was realted to the h.position and v.position of your monitor. and you want to use the maximum size that your monitor is capable of. but that doesn't seem to be your problem.

    however, when it comes to "encoding" text, you will see ringing artifacts once encoded with a compression codec. also, the "amount" of artifacts will vary according to the size of the textual image and how that area of text is zoomed in/out at the time those images are captured and encoded.
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  4. It's strange, but when I played the video in VLC player, the picture was blurry and the text was thick and fuzzy. But when I took snapshots in VLC, they were crystal clear. And yes, in the videos, the text did look thick and fuzzy as when your monitor has the X and Y problem. But it doesn't look that way in the VLC snapshots.

    I'm really confused about what's happening. I just need the videos to be perfect, don't need the snapshots.

    This is how it appears in the actual video.
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    This is how it appears in the VLC Snapshot of the same video.

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    Last edited by Earthling2000; 15th Sep 2013 at 11:33.
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    It seems you're NOT playing the recorded videos in its *original resolution* (and for your 5:4 monitor, 1280x1024 means *full screen*).
    There is no such thing as "lossless image resizing".
    The best that we can do is use a decent resizing algorithm, and possibly your VLC is not doing that.
    Last edited by El Heggunte; 15th Sep 2013 at 12:45. Reason: .....
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  6. @El Heggunte, So you mean, that the video capture program is doing its job and is rendering the video in crystal clear quality. And, it is just the video player which is making things look blurry? If that's the case then how do I find out how good the quality of my videos it?
    By the way, I have played the videos on GOM Player and Zoom Player as well. And I Zoomed in/out as well, but all the videos appear the same.

    Can somebody please give me a solution?
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  7. Yes, the problem is the resizing during playback:

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    On the top is the VLC Snapshot, on the bottom is the screen capture. The screen cap is obviously smaller. If you set VLC to play full screen you should get the same clarity (assuming your desktop is 1280x1024).
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  8. Of course I played the videos in full screen. But in that particular screenshot, I did scale it down because the screen capture program wouldn't take a screen when the video was being played at full screen. But the point is that, even at full screen, all the videos look the same. As I said that I zoomed in and out on several players, while playing at full screen. But the videos didn't get better. How do I watch them at the 'Original resolution' as you said? Because just by going full screen, the videos are not getting any better.
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  9. What is actual recorded size of your video? Check with mediainfo.
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  10. I record them at full screen, which is 1280x1024. And I render them at the same size, as it was advised on the forums of almost all those screen recording programs which I mentioned above. I re-confirmed the size with Format Factory's Media Info option. And the size was exactly 1280x1024.
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  11. Samples would help, you know 5 seconds of that lossless and then encoded.
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  12. I made two sample 5 second clips specially for uploading here. But the Lossless clip's size went up to 742 mb. Then I made another 3 second clip. But it was still 536 mb. So it's impossible to upload that one. Just know that it was visually flawless. The perfect video quality that you can imagine.

    Here is the other one which I rendered with XVid, and chose the maximum quality settings in the configuration area.
    Image Attached Files
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  13. I seem to get result as I would expect it to be, considering I have 1920x1080 max resolution, so resizing is involved on my screen, wait for somebody that can play your video exactly 1:1.
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  14. Member vhelp's Avatar
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    your issues seems to stem from your players resize with an incorrect aspect ratio setting. if you are screen capturing, then your sw player's aspect ratio (AR) should be 4:3 or else it will stretch poorly with the wrong AR and distort or blurr as a result.

    vlc has many AR settings. the shortcut key is "A" and you want to select the (Aspect Ratio 4:3 or 1:1 or 4:3 default) mode, whichever gives you a clean picture. but if the video is larger than the monitors' max resolution, it will have artifacts. it may still distort since the size resolution size is the same size, maybe.

    most players will go full screen with the "F" key or double-click the video window as it is playing.
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  15. oops, nevermind
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  16. Originally Posted by vhelp View Post
    your issues seems to stem from your players resize with an incorrect aspect ratio setting. if you are screen capturing, then your sw player's aspect ratio (AR) should be 4:3 or else it will stretch poorly with the wrong AR and distort or blurr as a result.
    No, his screen has a 5:4 AR (1280x1024), as does his cap, and the Xvid rendered file.

    Earthling2000, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with the Xvid file. Here's a screen cap of it playing on my 1920x1080 screen with 1:1 pixel mapping:

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    You'll have to click on the image a few times to get it to open in its own window with 1:1 mapping on your screen. The black text is perfectly sharp. The color text has fuzzy colors (but sharp luma), as expected, because of the YUV 4:2:0 chroma subsampling used in Xvid.

    So why doesn't it give a nice clean picture when you play it full screen with VLC? Make sure you have the following settings while running full screen: Video -> Zoom -> 1:1 Original, Video -> Aspect Ratio -> Default, Video -> Deinterlace -> Off. That gives me a view like the one above. For you it should fill your 1280x1024 screen with 1:1 pixel mapping. So it should look like the above image without the black borders.
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  17. Member vhelp's Avatar
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    my monitor's max resolution is 1440 x 900.

    ok, after tweaking around a bit with each, i wasn't able to get it to work in mplayer, smplaye and kmplayer

    however, i also figured out how to get it to view properly in vlc. but rather than tell how, i found an easier method using the mpc-be player. just press Alt-2 and it will stretch correctly. however, this is what i did first, to get it working on my pc correctly before i learned about just pressing Alt-2 key w/out all the steps below. but just in case alt-2 doesn't work quite yet, i'll post the steps i learned first anyway.

    setup for mpc-be viewing

    1. right-click play window
    2. select [zoom]
    3. select [100 %]

    then,

    1. right-click play window
    2. un-select [keep aspect ratio]
    3. select [video frame]
    4. right-click play window
    5. select [video frame]
    6. select [normal]
    7. finished
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  18. In any case, the OP has a player problem, not an encoding problem. The Xvid AVI is marked square pixel (1:1 pixel aspect ratio), has a 1280x1024 frame just like the screen capture, and the frame was not cropped or resized in any way during processing.
    Last edited by jagabo; 15th Sep 2013 at 20:36.
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  19. jagabo, _Al_, vhelp and El Heggunte, Thanks a lot. You guys are wonderful.

    But now that it's clear that it was not the fault of the screen recording softwares, I want to know one more thing. If I record the videos with the same screen resolution for uploading them on to video sharing websites, would there be any problems? I have to build a dozen websites in the next few months, with embedded videos. And I don't intend to use Youtube.

    Those websites would re-encode my uploaded videos. What settings should I use while recording the videos, in order to avoid any conflicts, which might result in blurry videos?

    Thanks again.
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  20. I'd go with 16:9 resolution,
    but those websites you will upload your videos have embeded players, do you know what is their resolution? , it is mostly fixed, so you follow that resolution, otherwise content will be either stretched or most probably pillarboxed, so you will see black borders.

    I'd encode H.264 using CRF mode, it was almost designed for this sort of encodings (screen capture), where you have no idea what the bitarte would be and where you just set quality, like CRF18 and just control peak bitrates for example setting vbv-buffer and vbv-maxrate to 10.000 ,peaks should not be higher than around 12.000 approximately.

    If you design your website, therefore encoding directly for your website, encoding would be different, you'd have to set your bitrates that are desired for streaming.

    Desktop capture of text and regular work doesn't desire much bitrate at all ~500kb ?, so it will be sharp enough if you encode it with enough bitrate. As soon you start to capture video on screen it is different story, bitrate demands go much higher. So as I said if content is mixed the best is to use CRF modes for H.264 encodings.
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  21. I recommend you switch to a larger, antialiased, sans-serif font so resizing doesn't screw them up as much. You can't really control the size at which people will be watching your videos.
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