Dosbox, Doom, and YouTube Resolution

Somebody on the forums here mentioned the best way to setup DOSBox for recording and uploading to youtube without it looking like shit, but I can't for the life of me find that post again.

Anybody know what I'm talking about?

This one?

Ah ha, not the exact post I was looking for, but it contains the same information nonetheless. Thanks. I just couldn't manage to find it with the search function.

The main problem with DOSBox is that, for most games, you're running natively at 320x200 and it's just using a normal2x scaler. I believe when you record video the output file is 320x200. Obviously both YouTube and whatever movie editing program you use don't know how to use nearest neighbor scaling so it just gets blurred and looks like shit.

Thanks for the thread link.

You can use aspect=true in DosBox. I don't like how it looks because it doesn't seem to scale every pixel in the same way. Recorded video will still be 320x200.

StoneFrog said:

The main problem with DOSBox is that, for most games, you're running natively at 320x200 and it's just using a normal2x scaler. I believe when you record video the output file is 320x200. Obviously both YouTube and whatever movie editing program you use don't know how to use nearest neighbor scaling so it just gets blurred and looks like shit.

Movie editing programs tend to mess it up but taking the video straight to YouTube produces decent results.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZaO_1bc3Dk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvbrXRgdbic

On the Chex Quest one I tried appending the command prompt footage to show that it crashes at the end, but I couldn't find anything that could do it without making it look like a complete mess.

^ I was watching the orig.wad YT vid in full screen and caught myself pressing the ESC key to attempt to exit "Doom." Do I have a problem? :D

StoneFrog said:

The main problem with DOSBox is that, for most games, you're running natively at 320x200 and it's just using a normal2x scaler. I believe when you record video the output file is 320x200.

Correct, filters/scalers are not applied to recorded footage. That's why it's best to run DOOM in a window with scaler=none when recording, for the smoothest results.

StoneFrog said:

Obviously both YouTube and whatever movie editing program you use don't know how to use nearest neighbor scaling so it just gets blurred and looks like shit.

Forget nearest-neighbor scaling - it is the least accurate of all resizers and should never be used wherever quality is a concern, whether with images or video. VirtualDub's built-in resizer offers the Lanczos3 algo that is several orders more precise and that's what I recommend.

DuckReconMajor said:

Movie editing programs tend to mess it up

I suspect PEBCAK is the real culprit, not the editing program. For encoding plain, unedited DOOM footage (from Dosbox or elsewhere) you don't need anything more fancy than VirtualDub anyway.

DuckReconMajor said:

but taking the video straight to YouTube produces decent results.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZaO_1bc3Dk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvbrXRgdbic

I'm afraid "decent" is a gross exaggeration. YT's 320x240 makes even a bare two-room level like ORIGWAD look like a 20-year old VHS tape run through a washing machine. On levels with only minimal detail and a few more monsters on screen anything farther then a few steps tends to dissolve into kasha. Even a Dosbox-sourced video that was encoded at the best settings (e.g, play this one or any of TGH's recent caps on the HD setting) looks like someone playing DOOM on a 30-year old TV via composite out. The codec Dosbox uses to grab video (ZMBV) is not perfect, of course, but posting DOOM footage to YT in any res below 960x720 is guaranteed to butcher it.

Until I write up a tutorial, just using Lanczos3 to resize and x264vfw @3000 kbps/2-pass to encode should greatly improve the results.

DuckReconMajor said:

On the Chex Quest one I tried appending the command prompt footage to show that it crashes at the end, but I couldn't find anything that could do it without making it look like a complete mess.

You can do it with VirtualDub but both video segments must have streams of exactly the same format - especially the fps must be identical. The problem with Dosbox is that it caps DOOM and the command prompt at different fps, and I have never been able to reconcile them. You can get around it by capping with HyperCam - it is now freeware and finally has stereo audio recording. The command prompt window segment (to show the crash error?) will still need extra work - it will have to be cut from the main footage, cropped and resized to match the DOOM window's dimensions. VirtualDub can do it all - that's how every video in the v1.1 barrel suicide bug series was done. (BTW, these videos were made when I just started experimenting with encoding for YouTube, so it's not hard to get better results now)

edit:

POTGIESSER said:

^ I was watching the orig.wad YT vid in full screen and caught myself pressing the ESC key to attempt to exit "Doom." Do I have a problem? :D

Not a problem, just low standards. ;) When watching some of my encoded videos (before they are posted to YT to be mangled, of course) I do occasionally find myself trying to stop the video player by hitting F10.

Never_Again said:

HyperCam - it is now freeware

Awesome!

Yay, more than half a year after I paid my registration fee they added stereo sound and went freeware. Still, it's good news for all of us who prefer the software renderer. Fraps' main strength is its excellent proprietory lossless codec but Fraps only works properly with ZDoom's software renderer and very poorly (or not at all) with SDL-based ports. HyperCam can grab video from any window or part thereof, or even the whole desktop, and ZMBV works well with it in most cases @640x400 windowed - example. Extreme action footage like this tends to get a bit smeary, though. :<

If your system is at least SATA 3gb and dual-core you could try capping to uncompressed (RGB24) but watch out for dropped frames. The older HyperCam I used to cap with at 640x480 would sometime choke and the video would be out of sync with the audio. Symptoms - video suddenly speeds up like crazy. The only way to catch it is by sitting through the whole thing, no warning from HyperCam.

Alright, so if I record a video from dosbox (which will show up as a 320x200 video regardless of Dosbox's video settings), import that in VirtualDub, convert the frame rate to 35, resize it to 960x720, compress it with x264vfw @ 3000kpbs/2 pass, it should look more or less like your suicide barrel videos?

Only issue I'm having is that where I would specify the bit rate, it's greyed out..

I experimented with uploading 320x200 dosbox captured video, and it does indeed look like crap.

Leave the framerate as is. The bitrate box can be edited once you select Multipass - 1st pass from the drop-down box. Should be better quality than the barrel suicide videos. Those were encoded with xvid and had a bit much sharpening applied.
edit: Dosbox records at about 70 fps, so halve the frame rate by Video -> Frame Rate -> Frame rate conversion = Process every other frame (decimate by 2).

Alright, well, I've done everything you've mentioned, but unfortunately the file it outputs only has audio.. I can't get anything to play back the video on this thing...

You need to do the second pass, too. The first pass outputs a dummy placeholder .avi and a stats file. The stats file is what is used to encode the second pass. There is nothing to play back after the first pass.

Ah, you'll have to forgive me then. I am not really familiar with all the terminology when it comes to this sort of thing. Thanks.

So do I now do Multipass - nth? I don't see a 2nd pass anywhere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOrX0kec7so - This one was scaled from 320x200 to 1600x1200. :p

Yes, for the second pass select Multipass - Nth pass. "N" can mean 2, 3, 4 or, ... You can do as many passes as you like if you have too many CPU cycles to kill, but the gains rapidly diminish after the second. You can queue up multiple passes and or files with File -> Queue Batch Operation -> Save as AVI. Queued up videos can be reviewed and edited via File -> Job Control.

It's a good idea to set up custom keyboard shortcuts for the common operations. I have the following keys bound:
F1 - File Info
F2 - Save as AVI
F3 - Video -> Filters
F4 - Video -> Compression
F8 - Save as AVI (queued)
F10 - Job Control

Never_Again said:

Forget nearest-neighbor scaling - it is the least accurate of all resizers and should never be used wherever quality is a concern, whether with images or video. VirtualDub's built-in resizer offers the Lanczos3 algo that is several orders more precise and that's what I recommend

It depends entirely on the source. For vanilla Doom's low-res pixelated image, it's best to stick to nearest-neighbor as more complex scalers will introduce unnecessary blurring and artifacts that are only adequate for images of photographic quality.