The YouTube upload feature is a nice thing to have, it's a quick way to make a ton of Viz for sometimes little to no effort. All that's required is for you to just have a way to record the game, which with the RGR's Mednafen implementation allows pretty much as easy of a time recording as possible. However I have been experimenting and found possibly the best way to upload to the YouTube channel.

I will first start with these two videos, the differences will be obvious.






As you can see the bottom one looks a lot better, but is in fact the same video, but with different encoding methods.

1.The top is recorded using mednafen in the raw codec in native resolution, for the GBA that would be 240x160
2. It is then the finished file, being probably very huge is then converted through a two-pass encoding to FFV1, a lossless codec that works basically as FLAC for video.
3. It is finally compressed down again into a the VP9 and OGG Opus codecs for maximum compression while still being lossless video side while sufficiently lossy on audio.


This is done with a program called FFmpeg, found on ffmpeg.org which is a very powerful tool for encoding and converting video, it is command line, but it is very customizable.


The bottom method is made in a similar method but with one difference, it is upscaled to it's resolution but time's 2 until it reaches 1080p, which for GBA is 1920x1280. While using what is known as Nearest Neighbor interpolation to keep the pixelated look, allowing for a sharper image that's usually looks really blurry and nasty.



The steps I do this are as follows.

1. Get FFmpeg from ffmpeg.org, it's already installed on Linux systems, but on Windows probably not.
2. Download the mednafen emulator and install it.
3. Find your mednafen.cfg after running it once and set the following.
   a. -qtrecord.vcodec = raw
   b. -qtrecord.h_double_threshold = 1
   c. -qtrecord.w_double_threshold = 1
4. After run your game with the following command in command prompt, preferably inside the folder of the game rom.

mednafen -qtrecord game.mkv game.rom

5. Play your game as long as you wish, with the side effect of sudden stuttering and freezing before working, this is due to the codec saving to your disk faster than it really can keep up with, but it doesn't matter in the long run, just keep it in mind when using it with action based games.

6. After you're done, just exit and it will automatically stop recording and save the file, if successful you will have a very large .mkv file containing the raw native res and 60FPS game you recorded in your selected.

7. Now we run our first command with ffmpeg, our goal is to compress the uncompressed lossless video into a compressed lossless video with that is upscaled to 1080p. To find your consoles 1080p equivalent, times the native resolution by 2 until both height and width exceed 1920x1080. We will also set a interpolation to nearest neighbor, to make it look pixelated rather than the default blur it uses. It will encode twice using two-pass, which takes awhile but allows a much smaller file.

Example with my mkv, named wario.mkv, this is a Linux command, but editing the command to work with windows should work fine. Specifically the /dev/null part. Perhaps redirect it to a file that you'll delete after pass 1 is done.

ffmpeg -i wario.mkv -an -vcodec ffv1 -level 3 -slices 4 -slicecrc  0 -sws_flags neighbor -sws_dither none -pass 1 -passlogfile passlog -f nut /dev/null && ffmpeg -i wario.mkv -acodec copy -vcodec ffv1 -level 3 -slices 4 -slicecrc 0 -sws_flags neighbor -sws_dither none -pass 2 -passlogfile passlog output.mkv

Wait for it to encode, it might take a bit, especially being a two-pass, but once done your file will be most likely much smaller than the original, and that's when upscaled to 1080p. My original file was 2.5GB, my upscaled video was 1GB which is a vast improvement.

8. However, no one wants to upload a 1GB file or whatever size that lossless format is, which is why we are going to compress it further but still keep the video lossless by using WebM and VP9 + OGG Opus. The command below takes the file we made and compresses it down without degrading the video, but degrades the audio, but not much to make it noticeable.

ffmpeg -i output.mkv -acodec libopus -vcodec libvpx-vp9 -sws_flags neighbor -sws_dither none -lossless 1 -deadline best output.mkv.


This will take a long time, but after the file will be SIGNIFICANTLY smaller, my 1080p WarioWare video went from 1GB to pretty much 32MB's, which is a lot easier to upload with still little to no quality loss.

9. Upload the video through Vizzed's YouTube uploader, once it's done and processed, you should have uploaded a game running at 1080p 60FPS. Producing high quality gaming footage for the channel.


Hope this helps, it was very terribly structured, but it's very effective for those who want a more advance way of making a recorded video look good, and to me is vastly superior to Freemake Video Converter, though it isn't beginner user friendly.


Cheers!


EDIT: This will also work with RGR recorded videos from mednafen. Using the actual emulator just allows you the choice of codec as well as native resolution, where the RGR version records in double resolution. The method in the post below is also very nice, if command line is not your thing.

or use camstudio 2.0 with K-Lite Codec and the game will not lag. After the video file being long use a software (not handbreak because it can not find no codc on it) and upload it to youtube.


K-Lite Codec has FFmpeg so it will easily install it for you and you can use it on camstudio. it isnt really the best, the program is known to bug out on videos.

mastergame : I would say it's a good alternative, however most probably want something that won't make their gaming videos bug out. Especially those who plan to record for hours straight. I'd hate to record lets say a 3 hour video, only to test watch it and have it not work.

I also tested and you can use cscd with mednafen and it's the same as raw but smaller and no temporary lockups. It's also what RGR mednafen uses as it's default.


png is an option also but I wouldn't recommend it cause it doesn't scale well that much cause well....it's just a bunch of PNG's in a movie rather than RGB24 video.