GRcade

I recently captured some gameplay footage from an emulator which I then uploaded to YouTube. The game ran just fine and the video I have saved on my computer plays fine too but when you watch it on YouTube it looks like gooseberry fool and goes all glitchy. Can anyone with any experience in this sort of field let me know what I'm doing wrong or give me any ideas as to what could fix this?

For the record I'm not very tech savvy so hopefully nothing too complex

What filetype is it saved on your computer as?

AVI

No idea then I'm afraid, I've uploaded AVIs before with no issue. I was just wondering if it was some strange filetype that youtube was doing a bad job of converting.

How large was the file, and how long has it been since you uploaded it?

It could still be processing.

Don't know the file size I'll have to check when I get home but the vid was about an hour and ten minutes if that's of any relevance and I uploaded it Friday night/early hours of Saturday morning.

Do you have a link to the video? It mightn't be an issue for all viewers.

It's in the retro thread page 136. I didn't even know there was anything wrong until someone mentioned it in that thread.

Looks like it's about a 16Mbps video, which at 70 minutes is about 8GB.

That's huge, and likely during the processing stage, YouTube were throttling the server capacity for your video, resulting in the glitches.

I'd advise running the original file through Handbrake first to get it in a more web-friendly format before uploading.

Thank for the advice, I'll take it down and give that a try when I get home. What format would you advise converting it to?

Also how easy to use is Handbrake? I've never really done this kind of thing before outside of Mario Kart clips and Fallout 4 clips but I've been thinking about making some retro game vids for a while now.

With the borders and audio slowdown I'm also going to guess that the emulator was on 50hz pal mode

NTSC



Yours



Make sure the emulator is set to NTSC 60hz. We had pal back in the day right enough but it was shite and I have no nostalgia for it.

Okay it's a separate issue, but it drives me insane probably the main reason I haven't started a retro collection, why would I buy shitey pal version when I can emulate ntsc

Well I'm playing a PAL version of the ROM and it didn't look like that while I was playing it... oh wait, you realised it was a different issue.

PAL games are what I grew up with and where possible I prefer to play things how I would have as a kid. Like I'd rather play Probotector than Contra for example. I do occasionally play fan translations of the Japanese versions of games such as Solbrain over Shatterhand but that's often because story elements get lost in translation and often removed entirely in Western releases, I believe Dynamite Headdy is a good example of this practice. I'm cutting my nose off to spite my face I guess.

I sort of get probotector with the different content, but sonic is literally just a worse version. Each to their own and all that but they only got away with the lazy crap ports because there was no internet (so no easy way to compare) back in the 90s.

Anyway, practical advice. I bet the emulator being as old as it is uses an old ass codec, might be a better idea to use something like shadow play for capturing if you have an nvidia card?

Well I'm on a hand me down laptop and I'm not even sure what's inside of it to be fair. This was my first attempt at something like this but hopefully I'll get it right eventually.

Also I suck at computers in general so a lot of terminology is like moonspeak to me. If there's not an easy program that can pretty much do stuff for me I'm gooseberry fool outta luck.

Maybe play with OBS and its local saving options?

Really depends how bad this laptop is.

btw AVI is only a container format so the way the video is actually encoded could be anything really, if the size of the original video was indeed massive it probably was uncompressed Windows raw video format. To find out open it in VLC and go to Media Information.

As YouTube works with MP4 format natively and very occasionally outputs VP8/9 I compress my videos to either 480p, 720p or 1080p MPEG-4 (H.264 codec) around 8-10Mbp/s, and let YouTube do whatever it wants to encode its multiple quality streams. And yes make sure it's 30 or 60fps (or 25 if you are running PAL as it's divisible with 50 so you get exactly half the frames in a normal video format) or you will get weird framepacing issues.

Generally, if you know what the platform/disks/hardware's output is going to be, you will have less problems if you match that format. And just make sure it's 50-100% higher bandwidth/quality input than what the output is going to be, so you don't lose perceivable quality after it gets squished.