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Old 30th January 2017, 16:44   #1  |  Link
orion44
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The recorded game looks bad when played back in software players

I recorded a game with fraps. When I played back the game in three different software players,
the game looks blurry compared to the in-game quality.

Here's how the in-game image looks like:



And here's how the game looks like in KMPlayer, PotPlayer, and Windows Media Player, respectively:







How do I fix this?
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Old 30th January 2017, 18:18   #2  |  Link
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1. Try madVR
2. Check that capture codec is lossless
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Old 30th January 2017, 18:31   #3  |  Link
Bloax
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The captured footage is suffering from chroma subsampling.
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Old 30th January 2017, 19:34   #4  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cork_OS View Post
1. Try madVR
2. Check that capture codec is lossless
1. I tried madVR in KMPlayer, and the video still looks the same.

2. Capture codec is fraps, and I also checked the "force the RGB lossless mode", but it made no difference.

Could it be that this problem is related to video renderer or video scaler, or something?
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Old 30th January 2017, 19:51   #5  |  Link
Ghitulescu
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I see no blur.
I see a video range change, probably PC vs. Video.
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Old 30th January 2017, 19:58   #6  |  Link
nevcairiel
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There is plenty blur, especially on the red text, which is a key sign of chroma subsampling.

What I don't see is the typical washed-out look from range mis-match however. The colors look the same, its just all blurry.
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Last edited by nevcairiel; 30th January 2017 at 20:05.
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Old 30th January 2017, 20:01   #7  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ghitulescu View Post
I see no blur.
I see a video range change, probably PC vs. Video.
Weird. On my monitor all three images look blurry when compared to the in-game screenshot.

Last edited by orion44; 30th January 2017 at 20:04.
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Old 30th January 2017, 20:30   #8  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by orion44 View Post
Could it be that this problem is related to video renderer or video scaler, or something?
Strange situation forces to make strange assumptions:
1. Fraps codec isn't fully lossless
2. Blurring due to little scaling
3. Blurring due to turned on post-processing in videocard driver settings
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Old 30th January 2017, 22:31   #9  |  Link
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I opened the fraps blurry video in Virtual dub, set the video to "Full processing mode", set the compression to "Uncompressed
RGB/YCbCr" and encoded it to AVI. When I opened the encoded video in KMPlayer it wasn't blurry anymore, it looked exactly the
same as the in-game image. Does anyone know what's happening here?

I've been messing with player settings entire day, and can't find the solution. Is the problem with the fraps codec, or with software
player decoders, or with my nvidia graphic card?

All I want is fraps encoded video to look the same as the in-game image (i.e. no blurring).
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Old 30th January 2017, 23:34   #10  |  Link
raffriff42
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> 1. Fraps codec isn't fully lossless
Fraps' YV12 codec does chroma subsampling; Fraps RGB codec does not.
RGB requires writing twice as much data to the HDD per second, but this is no problem with a low-res source, like this appears to be.

> 2. Blurring due to little scaling
It would be better to point-wise upscale the original by 2x or even 4x before subsampling and final compression with x264.
(In VirtualDub: resize filter, 200%, mode="nearest neighbor")
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Old 31st January 2017, 13:53   #11  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by raffriff42 View Post
> 1. Fraps codec isn't fully lossless
Fraps' YV12 codec does chroma subsampling; Fraps RGB codec does not.
RGB requires writing twice as much data to the HDD per second, but this is no problem with a low-res source, like this appears to be.

> 2. Blurring due to little scaling
It would be better to point-wise upscale the original by 2x or even 4x before subsampling and final compression with x264.
(In VirtualDub: resize filter, 200%, mode="nearest neighbor")
Thanks, raffriff.

If I have a lossless video without chroma subsampling, and decide to encode it with x264 or xvid, will these codecs encode
it with or without chroma subsampling?
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Old 31st January 2017, 14:17   #12  |  Link
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X264 support encoding in RGB (don't use it) and YCbCr 4:4:4 but this can't be decoded by hardware decoder and it can only be used on PC with a decent CPU. stand alone box youtube and other host and playback devices doesn't support 4:4:4
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Old 31st January 2017, 20:39   #13  |  Link
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Youtube will recompress what you upload to YCbCr 4:2:0 , so there will be some loss of quality.

You should encode your video to h264 10 bit YCbCr 4:4:4 ... since the video may not be decoded in hardware, you may as well use 10bit encoding for better gradients and other things.
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Old 31st January 2017, 21:19   #14  |  Link
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Things that usually go wrong when capturing game footage and then convert it:
-PC levels vs. TV levels
-wrong colormatrix aka BT.601 vs. BT.709
-chroma subsampling can really screw up quality, blurry result
-extremely bad quality of hardware encoders

Really a lot can go wrong (and it usually does ), if not literally everything.

Edit: It's very important to realize btw. that most video players simply ignore flags for color matrix and range.
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Old 31st January 2017, 22:25   #15  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by orion44 View Post
Weird. On my monitor all three images look blurry when compared to the in-game screenshot.
That is definitely also the case and the WMP result comes the closest to the original but still strangely processed the others get even crazier processed and file size also visibly exploding.

a big mess none of the 3 pictures bellow holds the original input sharpness and many unnecessary conversions seem to going on, the captured results are all different from the output in some way chroma or luma.

Per eye WMP is closest to the original chroma result KMP and Potplayer result totally off,still WMP blurs.

On the 2nd one KMPlayer ? the whole depth perception even seems to change visible data is even lost like there is a slight zoom going on shifting everything out of it's input space there is something majorly wrong on that KmPlayer result totally wrong setup somehow resulting in the most unnecessary conversions of the other 2 creating unnecessary overhead.
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Old 31st January 2017, 23:15   #16  |  Link
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Even the first example looks a bit ragged, because it's been point-wise upscaled by a non-integer amount.
Better to capture (in RGB mode) at the native game resolution, maybe in window mode instead of full screen;
then upscale by an integer multiple, targeting 1920x1080 or just below, adding black bars if needed;
then convert to YV12 (for compatibility, as others have said) (using Rec.709 matrix), then compress with x264.
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Old 31st January 2017, 23:19   #17  |  Link
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The ninja characters proportions look a little odd and the door and window looks also odd proportion wise everything feels warped horizontally, you of course right
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Last edited by CruNcher; 31st January 2017 at 23:36.
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Old 2nd February 2017, 08:57   #18  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally Posted by orion44 View Post
Weird. On my monitor all three images look blurry when compared to the in-game screenshot.
I saw the pictures on my old linux computer and these were not fully displayed.
I had a second look at them on another computer and these are now fully seen, including the red writings.
Indeed, one can now clearly see the loss of chroma resolution.
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Old 2nd February 2017, 14:27   #19  |  Link
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Since this chroma subsampling is normal when encoding with XviD and x264, I decided to just encode the fraps video as it is.

Thanks for all the answers.
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