I’m planning a huge playthru of a game, and I’d like to be able to look back at it years down the line. However I’m expecting it to be 100s of hours (maybe around/over 1k, but I hope not longer than 2k) and years to finish (I’m not planning on playing 8+h a day).

What are he most optimal settings for OBS to save as much video as possible, while it’s still watchable?

I could record in 1440p 165fps. I know that’s dumb, but idk how low I’m willing to go. 1440p sounds awesome, but lower than 1080p would lose too much information. Same with lower than 60fps. I don’t have a clue as to what bitrate would do well, and what encoding is best. For bitrate I have a clue that it needs to be as high as possible. As it can be a bullethell and there are way to many particles/effects on screen, while everything that matters is small. (I’m not trying to be secretive here, game’s modded Terraria)

I’d also state that I’d like to error on the storage side, I don’t mind buying another HDD, they really aren’t that expensive. And I’m also planning on editing the video down as soon as possible, so that I delete all the boring parts. Meaning I probably won’t have all of that lenght on my disk at once.

Thank you for any aid in my crazy endeavour.

  • @NorthWestWind
    6•11 hours ago

    I stream Splatoon 3 for 2 hours every day and I record higher quality VODs alongside. I keep a lot of the VODs in my storage.

    I record at 1080p 60fps 9000kbps with H265. 2 hours of that takes up 8.8GB, for simplicity we will say it’s 9GB.

    The 9000kbps is enough for a bitrate-heavy game like Splatoon 3, so I’d say 12000kbps is enough for you.

    We can scale it up to your settings by (1440/1080)^2 * (165/60) * (12000/9000) = 6.52 (worst case, but H265 should reduce that a little bit). The scale factor mainly comes from the increased FPS and bitrate.

    I’m currently looking at storing a year of footage in a 4TB HDD (9GB*365=3.3TB), so as an estimation, you need 7 of those.

    There are better codecs though, such as AV1, but my GPU doesn’t support AV1 hardware encoding and software encoding would cause too much lag, so I didn’t use it.

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•6 hours ago

      I did a test recording of 2 minutes (1440p 60fps 15000kbps) it’s 320MBs, encoded it with AV1 and the file became 392MBs, it also lost all but the first audio track.

      Anyways, I estimate a 6.8TB for 1k hours. Seems doable.

    • @[email protected]OP
      3•6 hours ago

      Thanks for the numbers, I’ll try some test clips to see what bitrate is good for me. And I’ll use your formula for estimates :)