Does anyone have a spare hard drive I could have?

Hi everyone!

I hate to do this, but I don't really know where to turn next. My mom is going to have to take out a loan just to take care of our puppy who has seizures, so the money flow right now is beyond tight in my house. I have absolutely nothing at the moment to spend.

I don't want a pity party or anything, I was just wondering if one of you kind folks happened to have a spare 1 TB *internal* hard drive laying around that they weren't using? I really need one.

The thing is, I make HD videos, and sometimes the file sizes are so large that I actually run out of room while I'm recording! It makes for a big pain in the behind to deal with. The hard drives in my new desktop are 256 gb (ssd) and 500 gb (hdd). The 500 gb was all I could afford at the time, but it's simply too small to do what I need to do with it.

A 1 tb drive would give me some flexibility and allow me to record longer amounts of footage without having to do a dance to make room for the footage. It's rough right now.

Someone did kindly donate me a WD Passport external hdd, and I'm putting that to good use, saving all of my videos to that drive. However, it's too slow to record HD 1080p 60 FPS footage to, even though it's USB 3.0, and it's already nearly half full with my current videos that I've created.

So, I ask you guys, my buds at RPGWatch if you happen to have a spare drive that you could donate to help me make videos. It has to be INTERNAL, and at least 1 TB. I think any speed of internal drive will be fast enough to record HD footage to, but the faster would indeed be better here.

So, please let me know. You can private message me if you'd like. Thanks for your time and I hope I didn't offend anyone with this post.

Best,

Fluent

P.S. Here is my current motherboard - Asus H81M Series Intel H81/ DDR3/ SATA3&USB3.0/ A&GbE/ MicroATX

I have 2 hard drives currently in the machine. Can I add a third? If not, I will swap out the 500 GB, and I would even send that to the person who sends me the 1 TB drive, since I won't need an internal 500 GB anymore.

If you use Nvidia Shadowplay with your new video card, it will record the footage in top quality, compressed in h264. You will have plenty of space to work with these videos. If you're running out of bandwidth and space, I assume you are using Fraps, and recording uncompressed?

Yes, Ripper, because I have to use Fraps in order to record from a streaming laptop.

Shadowplay is great but it doesn't work when streaming games, and my computer chair is broke, making long sessions in front of my desktop PC very difficult.

http://plays.tv/download"]Plays.tv [/URL] should allow you to record x264 using the Radeon GPU on your laptop. If that works, it could solve the problem.

Also, if you need to record on the laptop, why do need a 1tb drive to attach to the motherboard in your desktop?

I'm not actually recording on the laptop. I'm streaming the game from my desktop to my laptop. The desktop records all the data.

I'm experimenting with PlaysTV. It seems like files will still be quite large with on the highest quality settings. But it might work. I will keep playing with it.

They should be less than half the size of the uncompressed videos, which would equate to the doubling of hard disk space.

How does the quality compare? I know beggars can't be choosers, but I prefer to record in full 1080p 60 FPS at max bitrates. One thing I noticed is that the bitrate is 50 in PlaysTV compared to 130 in Shadowplay. Does it create a noticeable difference?

50mbps is far higher than HD TV broadcasts and Blurays.

Also bear in mind that the quality is going to be significantly downgraded by YouTube anyway.

I've read that if you have a good enough internet connection (which I do), that you can upload very high quality videos to YouTube and you won't see much of a significant downgrade in quality. I could be wrong, but I believe the last time I read the info page on YouTube about that, they suggested those wanting high quality HD videos to upload at least a 50mbps bitrate file.

Ugh. If only I had the extra money to spend to upgrade the HDD in this computer I just built. I didn't realize I would be cutting it so short like this. One session alone of Elminage Gothic in lossless recording could fill nearly the entire 500 gb drive!

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en-GB

Recommended bitrate for 1080p is 8mbps. No one in their right mind would be recommending 50 for 1080p on youtube. Even 4k wouldn't need that. You typically add 50% bitrate for 60fps, so 12 to 16 would be fine. Trust me - you gain nothing but headaches working with those massive uncompressed files, and you don't need tons of disk space. You can see in those recommendations that Google advises uploading in h264 anyway.

Yeah, I wasn't thinking correctly. 8 Mbps is indeed the recommended quality. I always take the huge file and convert it at around 8 Mbps, giving me a file size around a few gigs depending on the length of the video and what game I've recorded.

I did see a YouTube help page that I can't seem to find now that said something about 50 Mbps. It was recommended for people who have big time internet connections or something. Maybe they were talking about 4k resolution videos.

I will probably start recording around 16 Mbps. Sometimes I just upload the .mp4 that Shadowplay records at 130 Mbps without even encoding it (the file size for some reason is much smaller, only a few or several gigs).

Another point you should consider: Many people outside the big cities still have slow DSL connections. Typically between 2 and 16 MBit/s. Streaming a 50 MBit/s video through a 16MBit line sucks!
So finding the sweet spot which optimizes small size and good quality is in your own best interest, to avoid scaring viewers away.

Gorath, I'm not sure it works that way. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but YouTube converts the video to whatever standard it uses, and then that is what streams.

I do realize that streaming at 1080p60, which is what I upload for all my videos, is taxing on weaker connections. However, I strive to have the best quality possible with my videos.

The good thing about YouTube is, you can always lower the quality if your computer isn't up to the task.

They must have been talking about 4k. The bluray spec itself only goes up to 40mbps, and most don't use half that.

File sizes may be smaller than expected if the compressor is being intelligent, and not using the full bitrate when it doesn't need to (static and dark scenes, for example, contain far less data.)

Fluent said:

Gorath, I'm not sure it works that way. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but YouTube converts the video to whatever standard it uses, and then that is what streams.

I do realize that streaming at 1080p60, which is what I upload for all my videos, is taxing on weaker connections. However, I strive to have the best quality possible with my videos.

The good thing about YouTube is, you can always lower the quality if your computer isn't up to the task.

Click to expand...

Yes, that's right. YouTube will upload the video and convert it to its own VP9 format, which will be fairly close the the original quality, but definitely reduced.

When a user plays the video, it transcodes it to a lower quality on the fly if the user's bandwidth is constrained. So it makes sense to upload at the best quality required for the max resolution, but no more than that.

You're right, Ripper. I will start encoding at 16 Mbps, when I do encode. The end result may be twice the size I normally use, but I'm hoping it's max quality-to-size ratio.

However, I still have issues with Fraps file size. The raw footage, I mean. PlayTV seems to be a bit buggy on my system, very similar to how Raptr's recording worked with my previous laptop. NWN would crash, the volume levels would be wonky and need endless tweaking to get correct, etc. So, I'm not sure what to do. I love Fraps but without a larger hard drive, it's just not feasible to use it like I'd like to.

I have to test PlayTV more and see if I can improve it. Why is the volume of the game itself so low? I have everything set to 100% volume but the game is barely audible.

Don't know about the audio issue I'm afraid. Have a look on their forums.

It seems very closely related to Raptr's AMD recording solution, which I thought was great, minus the bugs and crashing that would occur with games. I would record 30 minutes of gameplay only for the recording to crash and I'd lose the data. I would get similar audio issues with that service as well.

I hate to say it, but nothing is as good as Fraps in my experience, except perhaps Shadowplay. And I've tried many of these programs.

I believe Shadow play has promised an upgrade to recording and streaming simultaneously, so hopefully that'll be along soon. Fraps kills framerates, and hours of raw video is a pain in the arse.

Oh, I agree. Huge file sizes, huge videos, framerate hit, but seems to get the job done right without a lot of bells, whistles and distractions that other programs have. And I'm always pleased with the quality and the results I get from it, even if it takes 30-60 minutes to encode the raw footage down.

Shadowplay simply seems amazing. No framerate hit AT ALL, smaller file sizes, stability, quality footage. Only wish it would work when streaming games. For some reason, whenever I have a game playing on both the laptop and desktop, Shadowplay refuses to record. As soon as I turn off the game on the laptop, it works fine again for the desktop. If only I could solve that somehow...