Achieveing typical "torrent" sized quality and size videos?

[2mg]

ok, as for that text, look closely at that text for original 1080 mjpeg video, that text shows aliasing, compressed artifacts already,..,so you compress it again, it still looks ok in that resolution you downsample it to, but blown up back tu full HD on screen it shows bad compression ,.., point is, did you check that text as original, it looks bad already

AND at the same time you get below actual resolution capability for that text size, look at that second time compressed video at that real 960x540 resolution on screen, I had to take glasses and read it from a close up what actually original 1080p resolution says, not mentioning downsampled video, I could read it as well, but sure it is in much worse shape, where fully blown up to 1080p it looks much worse, btw. that text looks much better in my compression, I tried quick in here, but I used CRF 18 which gave me bitrates shown in graph below and LanczososResize(960,540) :
you perhaps compress it even more

I record in YV12, since VLC is funky with RGB playback for some reason.

I recorded in MJPEG simply because the high quality preset (80/100) was one click away and it provided a small yet clear files to link here.

Plus with MJPEG, it doesn't exactly stab you in the eye at first that video is compressed MJPEG.

960x540 here

I see that 960x540 of yours is mjpeg as well, ...., well either resize is not right or compression is bad, doing both things live, you should capture 1080p and downsample later into mp4, it will look better

you talk about uncompressed above, as I recall, but you use mjpeg, nothing uncompressed there

Please see above about MJPEG.

Well resize was Lanczos4 and comp'd into same quality MJPEG it was recorded with. And full size looks really solid with MJPEG, but comparing your and mine, I see the difference.

However, your is still blurry compared to last two pictures I linked...

Just for comparison, see my linked video with half the resolution and the pic with newspapers. Incredible difference.

Even though the frame size is smaller, the text of the newspaper is slightly larger than the text in your half size game video. It also helps that the newspaper text is at a slight angle. It was probably better antialiased than your game text. And the colored background on your text doesn't help. All those things are working against your game video even before you start encoding.


[Attachment 23817 - Click to enlarge]

Newspaper text looks better than letters above the weapon box IMHO.

However that lopsided pic does confuse me... it does look better. But it all seems so circumstantial... I kinda "refuse" to believe that simply halving the resolution produces such dramatic drop in quality... I am prepping avisynth and vdub and some plugins all over (didn't have the time to do it sooner), and I'll record in full uncompressed format, resize with Lanczos 8 taps, or Spline64, and put one short compressed to achieve approx. same MB/min as their videos with x264, and one totally uncompressed.

[jagabo]

Just for comparison, see my linked video with half the resolution and the pic with newspapers. Incredible difference.

Even though the frame size is smaller, the text of the newspaper is slightly larger than the text in your half size game video. It also helps that the newspaper text is at a slight angle. It was probably better antialiased than your game text. And the colored background on your text doesn't help. All those things are working against your game video even before you start encoding.


[Attachment 23817 - Click to enlarge]

Newspaper text looks better than letters above the weapon box IMHO.

No ****in' duh. I just told you why there was no hope of it looking as good as the newspaper text.

I kinda "refuse" to believe that simply halving the resolution produces such dramatic drop in quality...

Try shrinking this image to half it's size while keeping all the detail:

[_Al_]

and it make little sense to wonder why quality, artifacts are this or that, but completely messing up capturing before, just use something lossless full HD and then downscale into H.264

[_Al_]

Or try this:
download this crop, taken from your HD capture, a a icon it looks perfect to read right ?

double click it from on your desktop after downloading, to load it into windows photo viewer, zoom in almost to 800xsomething, suddenly it becomes chaos, that is what encoder can see, now how can encoder encode that, so it is readable like original. It cannot simplify anything in that area, those artifacts around it caused by jmpg make this task almost impossible.

You have to capture original, what creators of the game generate on screen.

[jagabo]

Just for kicks, here's one minute of Family Guy at 720x400 encoded to only 491 KB, video only. At this rate a 22 minute episode would only be about 11 MB. Of course, this clips is all still shots with just the characters' lips moving. But it shows you that some videos are much more compressible than others.