The VideoLAN Forums

I recorded a quick ten minute long clip on my computer of a game at 1080p 60fps to make sure my computer could handle writing video at 60fps. I converted it to .mp4 in freemake, watched it, it looked fine, so I went and did a two hour long gaming session with some friends and recorded it for fun.

When I went to try to convert it (it records as .flv and I edit in Adobe Premiere, which can't open .flv) but I guess it was just too big and freemake is too shitty and it kept crashing before finishing converting. I googled around and found that VLC has the file conversion feature and VLC has been my go to for watching or listening to media for years now, so I have no clue how I didn't know that.

Anyway, I converted my video to .mp4 with the same settings I used for the test clip, and when I watched it the video was pretty much nothing but compression artifacts. It was completely unwatchable and you could barely tell what was going on on screen. When I watch the .flv file it looks fine, when I watch the .mp4 of the test clip it looks fine, but when I watch the .mp4 of the full video, recorded and converted on the same settings, it looks like --please stay polite--.

My settings are:

Codec: H.264-MP3
Resolution: 1820 x 1080
Frame Rate: 60 fps
Bitrate: 32,000 kb/s

Thanks in advance for any help

Side note, I converted the test video, it still looks god awful. There must be something in VLC I'm doing wrong but I have no clue what

Here's a screengrab from the original footage


Here's a screenshot of about the same spot from the .mp4 created by Freemake at 32,000 kb/s


And finally the same spot from VLC's conversion


You can see it's not just a tiny differece, it's pretty jarring

Side note, is there any way to do some kind of spoiler tag so that opening this thread won't immediately screw over people with bad bandwidth with my pile of large images?

Another note, I math'd it and Freemake's .mp4 has an average bitrate of approx. 29,000 kb/s while the VLC version has an average bitrate of approx. 610 kb/s

610 kb/s is a just a little weird given that I told it to compress to a bitrate of 32,000 kb/s

610 is too low, indeed