Content creators looking to get the best quality out of their captures are always looking for the most streamlined and reliable ways to get lossless capture. While this is something most streamers wouldn’t ever need to think about, people doing comparisons or analysis of video signals need to ensure that their captures are accurate; If not, they’ll accidentally be comparing compression or subsampling artifacts, rather than the devices or games they’re analyzing. Here’s a list of my current lossless capture methods, starting with the newly updated guide. I’ll have more instructions soon on capture and there’s more info below:
- OBS Capture Guide – If you’re already used to the OBS interface, this might be the easiest method of recording. You may run into frame drops or screen tearing if the refresh rate doesn’t match, but overall, it’s a good solution.
- Amarec v3.10 Guide – When Amarec works, I’ve found it to be the best tool for lossless recording. Sometimes it’ll flip your image, other times it’ll record at a fraction of the framerate (a Windows 10 thing?) and occasionally the audio inputs are labeled wrong. If you can find v3.10, it’s worth trying though, as if it works, it’s a great solution.
- VDub2 – Here’s another solution that’s awesome…when it works. You’ll know right away if there’s an issue: Record a test file of a game or video you know well. Then, play it back and see what happens: Does the audio and video stay in sync over a few minutes? If so, it’s probably fine. A common issue is to not only have the audio and video drift apart, but the audio is sped up! It’s speculated that matching the exact refresh rate in the advanced options will fix this, but I’ve never had it consistently work.
Some backstory: Awhile back, yoshiyukiblade helped create a pre-configured, portable OBS build that allowed for lossless capture. At some point along the way, I took the guide down, as I thought something had gone wrong with the software. Turns out, the issue was a combination of OBS + Datapath driver! The fix was to use beeanyew’s “RGBEasy” plugin, when using the Datapath Vision series of capture cards in OBS, instead of adding a normal Video Capture Source.
As a result, I worked with yoshiyukiblade once again to create a portable OBS build, with the Datapath plugin and lossless settings pre-configured. You can use the instructions to just tweak your current OBS installation if you’d like, however I prefer individual, portable OBS builds on my PC – This way making a change to one won’t affect another and I can keep each fully tweaked for its main use.
Here’s a link to the main video capture section for more info, as well as some video’s I’ve made. Please note that these all focus on helping content creators get as close to a perfect capture as possible and also focus on direct RGB capture. If you’re just a causal streamer, you don’t need any of this! That said, if you’re someone posting a review of scalers, comparing two versions of a game, or anything analysis-based, using these methods (or ones similar) are pretty much required, otherwise your results won’t be accurate.
Video Capture Section / Direct Capture / Oversampling Guides: https://www.retrorgb.com/videocapture.html
