Video production at higher quality - alternatives and solutions

Question

My question here is a redirection per suggestion of my original question over here

I have an i5 4th gen CPU which can support 2k displays and output 2k signal. And I have an AMD Radeon R7 graphics card. I have an old monitor whose native resolution is 1366x768

My problem is that with the hardware configuration I have, when I record my screen on OBS Studio with settings as chosen by the OBS Auto Configuration Wizard, I get a totally disappointing output. The text is not clear and nothing looks sharp when viewed on any other monitor than my own.

I wish to do some screen records of some coding sessions, and with the quality of output I have, it's not an option. People advice me to get a Mac which can give me 4k recordings hassle free, but Mac is out of my budget.

Xrandr seems to be of no help either.

I want to explore all software based solutions before I buy anything. In particular, I am looking at the possibility to "trick" the CPU into thinking there is a another1080p/2k monitor connected and make it output a higher resolution signal and then capture it in some sort of a screen record. Is such a thing possible? If yes, how?

I want to utilize my CPU and GPU capacity to the fullest and produce 1080p/2k quality videos. What are my options?

I am on an Ubuntu 19.10 machine

Any leads are appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

First variant: You can try to set resloution of your display to 1920x1080, but I think that you will have scroll on your screen. I know that with digital connect via DVI port on Windows PC with XP it was real. In the last time I didn't take any experiments.

Second variant: You can buy FullHD monitor and don't have any problems with this. They are won't cost a lot of money, especially which sell as used.

Third variant: I don't see what image see your viewers, but I can think, that problem can be in bitrate of image which won't allow to stream quality image. If your viewers view your stream in original quality and they are have problems with reading text, I think that you need to do bigger scale of your desktop or bigger scale of text in your coding software.

Can you show me the settings of OBS stream, screenshot from your PC and screenshot from your viewer? Also it can be helpful if you will do recording of your screen for your viewers instead of streaming.

Answer 2

I've looked your linked question.

If you want to get a better quality of image you can try to set bitrate to more higer value, like 5000 kbps or more. Also I think that you can try to set CPU Usage preset to more slower preset. Like "quality" or "max.quality"

More higher bitrate will give you more load of internet, but also will give you more quality for your image. Big file (stream) size, but higher quality. More slower profile of x264 processing will give you more load on your CPU, but it will have more time for processing and it will use more complex algorithms for processing video. Less file (stream) size, but higer quality.

Also you can find balance between this two parameters.

Also can be helpful for you it's change FPS to 25-30, because for 60 fps bitrate should be higher, but for streaming "coding video tutorials" instead of "gaming videos" high fps doesn't need.

And you can try to set keyframe interval to 1 second and compare your result.