brookielove44
New Member
I wanted to make a YouTube video by recording on my OBS. I'm just not sure what format to have the video file save as. What type is best?
Best File Format for Recordings to Save as in OBS?
- Thread starter brookielove44
- Start date
MKV
It's normally not heard of in the consumer world, but it works more like an analog tape in that if something goes wrong, you still have everything up to that point.
The well-known MP4 is designed to make playback plumb easy on minimal devices, so some of its important parts can't be finalized until the recording itself is finished. So if something goes wrong there, you lose *everything*!
Any editor worth its salt, and most upload destinations (including YouTube), will take MKV directly, with no need to convert. But if you really MUST have MP4, OBS can remux the MKV recording to an MP4 file, after the fact. It's the exact same data in a different container, so there's no loss of quality, and it's fast, limited only by the speed of the storage medium.
It's normally not heard of in the consumer world, but it works more like an analog tape in that if something goes wrong, you still have everything up to that point.
The well-known MP4 is designed to make playback plumb easy on minimal devices, so some of its important parts can't be finalized until the recording itself is finished. So if something goes wrong there, you lose *everything*!
Any editor worth its salt, and most upload destinations (including YouTube), will take MKV directly, with no need to convert. But if you really MUST have MP4, OBS can remux the MKV recording to an MP4 file, after the fact. It's the exact same data in a different container, so there's no loss of quality, and it's fast, limited only by the speed of the storage medium.
Lawrence_SoCal
Active Member
For reference, on a not fast SATA SSD, OBS Studio will remux a 1hr+ 11+GB MKV (ie write copy of video file as MP4) in 15-20 seconds. The remux would be faster on a NVMe drive
@Suslik V - I've been meaning to ask... is Fragmented MP4 as robust as MKV? or, just better than normal MP4, but still greater chance of some data loss vs recording with MKV?
Suslik V
Active Member
@Lawrence_SoCal even better than MKV. But all depends on implementation, if some additional seeking is performed on writing of final data, then format is less robust. From forum's reports, I estimate about 2-3 broken mkv files per year, while fragmented mp4 only about 1 per year (in all cases hardware failure is quite possible cause). Fragmented mp4 was less popular in OBS, thus, true statistic is not possible.