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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • From a technical level you should use something lossless in this situation, but it really quickly becomes impractical. Actually lossless 1080p60 is going to be something like 500mbps, so if you’re playing for an hour I hope you have a spare 2tb drive laying around. The artifacts in really high bitrate compressed video are so minimal that they basically don’t matter. Often codecs do noise removal first thing so whatever minor artifacts still exist will get smeared over by that anyway.

    Also when you are testing make sure there’s some movement in the video. AV1 especially has modes for presentations and things that basically make a PowerPoint, so sizes might be unrealistic if you’re just recording your desktop. I don’t think that gets enabled in handbrake but it’s been a while since I looked.


  • If you’re seeing any artifacts in the original video, you probably need to re-record in a higher bitrate. It needs to look identical to uncompressed. Your later encodes will be trying to encode all the artifacts in the original video, which could be why the file sizes keep getting bigger - you’re giving it noisier video than the original.

    50mbps for recording as an intermediate like that is well within the realm of normal. You can try having obs record in 264 with a quality setting instead of a bitrate setting, which can save space when things are more static - something like cq 6 or lower can do pretty well.

    Unfortunately, yeah finding the sweet spot does take forever. One thing I would recommend is once you have an idea where you want to land, try a few much longer videos and see what the differences are. Slower paced sections might compress much better than the fast action stuff in one codec or another. Again it’s all kind of a balancing act on where you want to be.




  • Because it’s just for personal archival, I would recommend recording in super high bitrate 264 or 265 depending on what your card can do in real time, then compressing that file later using either av1 or 265, depending on which works better for the content.

    If you’re playing in 1440p165, then you should record that to start although if it’s an option I would play and record at 1080p120. 1440 is a bit of an odd duck resolution that some stuff doesn’t really like, but it’s getting better all the time so it’s not a huge deal. More important is 120fps because if you decide to go down to 60 or even 30fps they split evenly, which is important since it means the extra frames just get thrown out. There’s no 82.5 frame so it either has to blend two together or pick one that’s at the wrong time, and neither looks good.

    Record in OBS using like, 25-40mbps in whatever your graphics card can do realtime, with all the audio tracks in something lossless like FLAC. High enough it might as well be uncompressed.

    Once you have your gameplay recording from OBS, use either Handbrake or FFMPEG to convert it to your long term storage format. Since this is such a big project I would make some samples using cheats to get an idea what the bullet-hell-iest parts will look like, then try a few different handbrake or ffmpeg settings, and see what gives you the tradeoff of file size and quality that you like. It’ll also give you a ballpark idea about how much long term storage you’ll need.

    Non-realtime encoding like ffmpeg and Handbrake is much more efficient than realtime done by your graphics card, like on the order of like half the file size for the same quality - that’s why you want the two step process. It also allows you to play in 120fps for that responsiveness, but watch at 60 or even 30fps to save some file size.

    When you set up handbrake, you’ll have a few settings to play with and make samples from - encoder, quality level, speed, fps, and rescaling.

    Encoder is probably the most important. Use either x265 or SVT-AV1. In my experience, they’re close in terms of efficiency, but AV1 pulls ahead in certain situations. AV1 is more efficient about large static sections and when it breaks up it just looks blurry. 265 is better at retaining texture, but when it fails its gross digital blocks. 265 is faster than AV1, but when you push AV1 and it takes 1000 years it does a better job. Basically, run a lot of tests and then decide.

    Scaling is where you go from 1440 to 1080 and is probably the least important for file size. I honestly wouldn’t bother with it, but you can try. Like I said, technically some TVs don’t like 1440, and everything supports 1080, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

    FPS I have the least experience with. My guess is that going do something lower is going to save you some size, but its really going to depend on the codec and the content.

    Quality level is the most important setting - just set it to what you think is watchable. It doesn’t use a bitrate, it adjusts the bitrate to get a constant quality level, so it’s much more efficient. It’s important to note that they aren’t exactly the same at every speed setting, so be careful.

    Lastly is the speed. 265 goes from very fast to very slow, and AV1 goes from 9 (fast) to 0 (stupid slow). Personally I use slow or very slow for 265 and about 4 for AV1, but if you have a lot of video to crunch through you might want to crank that up a bit.

    For audio use OPUS. 96 is the default “bitrate” and I find it to be enough. Some players don’t like it but if you’re thinking about using AV1, anything that would support AV1 supports opus.

    The main thing will just be doing a bunch of video encode samples and finding the settings and workflow that’s right for you.



  • After having to fly United a bunch of times this summer, they changed the names of the tickets and invented a new “no one wants that” tier.

    There’s now standard economy which is what everyone’s used to and gives you a “personal item” (i.e. a backpack or a purse) and a “carry on item”, and basic economy which only includes the personal item. They mention it on their website, but on third party websites its not quite as obvious which ticket you’re getting.

    It has been a nightmare - on every single flight there’s a crowd of people pissed that they aren’t allowed a carry on with their ticket, with them having to run halfway across the airport to upgrade their tickets or pay 3x as much for a bag they thought was included.

    If you’re being charitable, it’s a roundabout discount on checked bags to fix the problem they invented by charging for checked bags and then sucking at handling them. Every single flight I took had them asking for people to check their carry on for free because the bins were going to be overloaded, and it seems like they want to incentivize actually checking a bag again.

    I started instantly asking them to gate check my carry on (for free) because honestly, the airport experience is way nicer when you don’t have to deal with your luggage all the time. If you check 1 bag as a couple you might even save money, and if you’re alone it might be worth the difference to not have to worry about only having two pairs of pants on your three week trip.

    More realistically they want to normalize having to pay for carry on the same way they did checked bags, and they are trying to sneak around that by starting with only their new BS economy tier. Wouldn’t surprise me if they got rid of “basic” and just made carry on a “business class” or whatever amenity.







  • aren’t you still limited by ambient air temp because the hot side of the Peltier needs to be cooled by air anyway?

    No, that’s why the baby fridge works. The peltier TEC in the fridge can produce temperatures below ambient, but generally not below freezing. Computer chip TEC coolers would go farther and push more power through the TEC and do things like water-cooling the hot side instead of a little fan.

    The reason they don’t get used anymore more complicated. It’s my understanding that basically TECs have a sort of limit on the amount of heat they can push from the cold side to the hot side, because moving more heat means more energy used and thus more waste heat. Apparently most modern chips are past that limit. IIRC, TECs can only move something like 100w of heat - past that and they start to heat themselves up because of waste heat. Modern chips can be like 300w.

    Sub ambient cooling also comes with a bunch of issues like condensation, so no one really uses it day to day. Also, chips are run so close to their limits now that cooling like that doesn’t get you nearly the performance difference it once did.




  • Yeah, it feels like the entire time he’s really trying to link these games to actual deaths during war that seems pretty tenuous, largely due to his own “ick” factor that “his thing” is being used by the military.

    The section in the middle where he essentially asks all his interviewees basically “have you killed anyone” is pretty awkward. Like, of course these people don’t really want to talk about that. Nobody wants to go around thinking they’re directly responsible for preventable deaths. It’s like he wants someone to just say “Am i the baddie?” like that Mitchel and Webb sketch.

    It also completely glosses over the way that “play” is often just training for something more violent. Tag is a fun game until someone brings a knife. But there’s a world of difference between “you sunk my battleship” and the Bismarck. It’s like he’s somehow taken the stance that video games cause violence in the most roundabout way possible.

    It’s a shame because the video is good but it could be so much more interesting diving into examples about how these games actually work and are used instead of hemming and hawing the whole time over his imagined Cluedo to murder piperine.