Best settings using VirtualDub

I am posting this here rather than the LP section so that people who do this type of thing but do not watch LP's will see it.

I have had a few requests to make LP's, so after mucking around for many hours with CamStudio, I installed DXTory instead. DXTory makes recording so painless it makes me wonder why anyone uses anything else lol.

I am recording AVI in full 1920x1200 using the Xvid MPEG-4 codec. This seemed to make a good compromise between file size and quality. The recording is nice and crisp and about 18gig per hour, compared to the Lagarith Lossless that is about 5 times that.

I am trying to use VirtualDub to compress the AVI down to something under 5Gig (preferably under 2Gig). The 18 Gig files are too big to store and take too much time to upload.

I messed around with Windows Live Movie maker, but it only saves in WMV and the quality is horrible, I don't have the old Windows Movie Maker that saves in AVI.

If anyone has any experience and can recommend a good codec and set of settings in VirtualDub or another freeware (not Super please) to compress to a 1080p AVI for upload that retains a good balance of quality/size I would be greatly appreciative. It would be nice if I can compress in about the same time that it takes to record so that I can record a session while compressing the previous one. I am doing this now and my system handles it painlessly.

If it matters I am running Windows 8.1pro with an i7-3770K 3.5GHz, 16GB RAM, and duel MSI GeForce N570GTX Twin Frozr SLI

Any GUI should work fine (except Super which is really crap), matter of preference I guess (well, I'm only talking about the popular freeware ones here, anything that costs either costs way too much or is also crap). Especially as long as you're not looking into doing specific stuff. It seems to me that all you wanna do is have your Xvid Quantiser set to 2 (Q=2) and leave everything else at default (of course also compress audio to... whatever: aac, mp3, ogg, all ok). That will be good quality at decent file size... exactly what you want to have to upload it to YouTube.

Now I really don't recommend doing encoding while you record a new vid. If that didn't cause problems, the recording software would do it on the fly by default already or at least offer to do it (and none does that). The encoder will use 100% of your CPU power, or at least everything other applications do not take away from it. Because games and recoding though aren't demanding the same amount of CPU cycles all the time but will vary greatly in what they need, there will usually be little hickups for the game which cause a frame drop/lag which of course also gets recorded then (it might just not be very noticeable within CiV as you hit the button, the spike occurs but you are in "I clicked and now wait 30+ seconds 'mode'" anyway). You should also test if it doesn't actually increase your turn times which of course would also lengthen your recordings. Definitely try encoding while not doing other CPU heavy things. I bet you'll be surprised at how little time it will actually take to encode to Xivd with that machine).

So which frontend? I don't think you really need anything fancy for plain xvid encoding/cutting from a self-recorded source - VirtualDub(Mod) should be absolutely fine.

Thanks for the reply. Compression only uses about 25% of my CPU, but the bottle neck is write speed since I used my old HDD when I build this rig a year ago. I might get a faster HDD and write to it instead. Took your set-up advice except I set the target to 700 instead of quantisizer to 2 and continued to use the Xvid codec. Takes about 35min to compress an 18gig file down to ~2gig and the quality is good enough I can read the ingame text.

I have noticed that on some vids the video will lag a bit but the audio does not, and then the video runs in a super fast forward to catch back up with the video. Not sure what causes it, it happens even when nothing else is going on in the background that I am aware of.