6 ms·

It sounds intriguing, but where do you find the space to store all the recordings? A bunch of external drives? Feels like 8hr/day × 20 days/month of recording m

It sounds intriguing, but where do you find the space to store all the recordings? A bunch of external drives? Feels like 8hr/day × 20 days/month of recording my multi-monitor setup would fill up my drive pretty fast.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
capableweb 4y ago
No need to record 4k 120fps videos if you're doing web development, something like 1080p in 10fps might be enough and it won't take ridiculous amount of space.
- fuckcensorship 4y ago
  Parent comment specifically mentions recording for game development so 1080p at 10fps probably isn't going to cut it.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Update it to be 20~25 fps then, still won't take ridiculous amount of space.
    - soruly 4y ago
      Unlike movies, the content on screen recordings usually remains roughly the same for minutes before switching scene. So it can achieve significantly higher compression ratio even at high fps
      - capableweb 4y ago
        I wrote more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32223240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32223240 But the TLDR, ffmpeg can remove duplicate frames: ffmpeg -i in.mkv -map 0:v -vf mpdecimate,setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB out.mp4
- PeterisP 4y ago
  1080p may easily mean that the code is unreadable if you have a decent size screen.
haunter 4y ago
x264/veryfast, 1080p 10fps at 2000kbps, is more than enough for plain text recordings and it won’t take that much space. You can go even lower with other encoders (x265) + if you don't record audio at all
- jenny91 4y ago
  2000 kbps = 0.25 MiB/s = 900 MiB/h? That's only 1.14 TiB per year doing it 5 h/week * 5 days/week * 52 weeks.
- sp332 4y ago
  You're using 4:4:4 (disabled chroma subsampling) to keep text readable?
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  You only need 40kbps for acceptable audio, so I wouldn't worry about that at all in this ballpark of video bitrate.
  - raffraffraff 4y ago
    If you record mono speech, opus can produce great results at 15kbps.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      If you just want speech, yes. For cheap generic audio I don't think I'd push it below 32 unless I really needed to shave bits.
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  A while ago I tried to see what compression I could get out of screen recording losslessly to a scratch disk and encoding afterwards as slowly as I could wait. I didn't write any numbers down, but the difference in efficiency was significant. Some observations: - Of the lossless encoders in OBS/libav, utvideo was the best in both CPU usage and efficiency, followed by lossless ultrafast x264. - An SSD can handle even uncompressed 24bpp 1080p60, which is 375 MB/s. Typical screen content compresses well below the ~100 MB/s write speed of an HDD. Fullscreen video does not, instead gradually filling the write cache until either OOM or thrashing. - For onscreen content, I prefer the bitrate tradeoff of keeping PC color range and not chroma subsampling. This technique isn't as effective for this use case of recording several hours daily, since reencoding must be fast enough on average to keep up. Best to already have a home server (any spare desktop). Otherwise, use AOM codecs, known for poor multithreading, to encode at full speed without hogging CPU. ps, temporal compression means that dropping framerate makes surprisingly little difference with modern codecs. But I really should be writing down the results of my ad hoc tests...
darzu 4y ago
If you’re working on open source, stream straight to YouTube or Twitch. Can be private or not. I do this sometimes. the accountability hack works even better if someone could be watching. Bonus points is that it feels way more natural to narrate aka rubber duck problems when you are streaming.
NavinF 4y ago
If you have an old machine you can use as a NAS and run raidz2, disks are $7.50/TB or less: https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/ Screen captures also compress much better than live action since most frames are duplicates of their predecessor. So a cheap NAS can run for years before you start thinking of deleting VODs.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

capableweb 4y ago

No need to record 4k 120fps videos if you're doing web development, something like 1080p in 10fps might be enough and it won't take ridiculous amount of space.

fuckcensorship 4y ago
Parent comment specifically mentions recording for game development so 1080p at 10fps probably isn't going to cut it.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Update it to be 20~25 fps then, still won't take ridiculous amount of space.
  - soruly 4y ago
    Unlike movies, the content on screen recordings usually remains roughly the same for minutes before switching scene. So it can achieve significantly higher compression ratio even at high fps
    - capableweb 4y ago
      I wrote more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32223240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32223240 But the TLDR, ffmpeg can remove duplicate frames: ffmpeg -i in.mkv -map 0:v -vf mpdecimate,setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB out.mp4
PeterisP 4y ago
1080p may easily mean that the code is unreadable if you have a decent size screen.

haunter 4y ago

x264/veryfast, 1080p 10fps at 2000kbps, is more than enough for plain text recordings and it won’t take that much space. You can go even lower with other encoders (x265) + if you don't record audio at all

jenny91 4y ago
2000 kbps = 0.25 MiB/s = 900 MiB/h? That's only 1.14 TiB per year doing it 5 h/week * 5 days/week * 52 weeks.
sp332 4y ago
You're using 4:4:4 (disabled chroma subsampling) to keep text readable?
Dylan16807 4y ago
You only need 40kbps for acceptable audio, so I wouldn't worry about that at all in this ballpark of video bitrate.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  If you record mono speech, opus can produce great results at 15kbps.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    If you just want speech, yes. For cheap generic audio I don't think I'd push it below 32 unless I really needed to shave bits.
mgdlbp 4y ago
A while ago I tried to see what compression I could get out of screen recording losslessly to a scratch disk and encoding afterwards as slowly as I could wait. I didn't write any numbers down, but the difference in efficiency was significant. Some observations: - Of the lossless encoders in OBS/libav, utvideo was the best in both CPU usage and efficiency, followed by lossless ultrafast x264. - An SSD can handle even uncompressed 24bpp 1080p60, which is 375 MB/s. Typical screen content compresses well below the ~100 MB/s write speed of an HDD. Fullscreen video does not, instead gradually filling the write cache until either OOM or thrashing. - For onscreen content, I prefer the bitrate tradeoff of keeping PC color range and not chroma subsampling. This technique isn't as effective for this use case of recording several hours daily, since reencoding must be fast enough on average to keep up. Best to already have a home server (any spare desktop). Otherwise, use AOM codecs, known for poor multithreading, to encode at full speed without hogging CPU. ps, temporal compression means that dropping framerate makes surprisingly little difference with modern codecs. But I really should be writing down the results of my ad hoc tests...

darzu 4y ago

If you’re working on open source, stream straight to YouTube or Twitch. Can be private or not. I do this sometimes. the accountability hack works even better if someone could be watching. Bonus points is that it feels way more natural to narrate aka rubber duck problems when you are streaming.

NavinF 4y ago

If you have an old machine you can use as a NAS and run raidz2, disks are $7.50/TB or less: https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/ Screen captures also compress much better than live action since most frames are duplicates of their predecessor. So a cheap NAS can run for years before you start thinking of deleting VODs.