#Obs studio recording in mp4 movie
#Obs studio recording in mp4 mp4

#Obs studio recording in mp4 movie

The process involves reconstructing the movie atom for the file, and even the best efforts to do so may still result in a complete failure and a loss of your file.

#Obs studio recording in mp4 mp4

While it’s true that, some of the time, a corrupted MP4 file may be able to recovered, the reality is that it can be a pain in the ass to do so. They serve as an index for the contents of the entire file, and if your video player can’t find an index, it doesn’t know what to do with the file, and it becomes pretty useless. The atoms, and more specifically the “moov” atom or movie atom, are a key part of the structure of an MP4 file, and the file is incomplete without them. What this process does is write the “atoms” of the file, which are bits of information about what the MP4 file actually contains, including the codec that it’s encoded in and various other bits of metadata. The reason MP4 is so terrible for direct recording is because MP4, much like MOV before it, requires a finalization process to take place before the file is usable. You can use the timestamp in the description to skip over this part, or skip to the timestamp pictured to my left. And all of the same problems occur with the MOV format as well.īut why does this happen? Well, I’ll explain, but it gets pretty technical. If that’s not a compelling reason not to record to MP4, I don’t know what is. All of your hilarious jokes and excellent game footage will be gone and you cannot get it back. Power outage? Sayonara to that personal best time. Blue screen of death? Say goodbye to that perfect boss kill you just did. If something goes wrong, in any way, shape, or form, you lose every frame of that file and there’s a very good chance it will become completely unrecoverable. That, right there, is the reason you should not record to MP4. When I go back to check on the recording, the file is empty, and I cannot watch the recording. For the purposes of this video, I’ll be simulating this by killing the OBS muxer process, the part that actually makes the video. But, something goes wrong, and my computer dies on me for some reason. Right now, I’m recording to MP4 with OBS, and I’ve just about wrapped up. as a result of BSODs, power loss, etc.).īut why should you, the audience, care about this warning? Let’s demonstrate. Warning: recordings saved to MP4 will be unrecoverable if the file cannot be finalized (eg. In OBS Studio 22.0.2, the most recent version of OBS Studio at the time of recording, the warning which appears when you select MP4 as your recording format reads: We’ll talk about those types of videos in more depth in a later video. This warning is visible in most “best settings” videos for OBS Studio, which should be a big red flag that hey, maybe these aren’t the best settings. In fact, OBS has a big warning about this in the program itself. Plenty of YouTube tutorials about OBS Studio will tell you to record directly to MP4 though, and that’s a bit of a problem.įor as good, and convienient as MP4 is as a format, the fact is: MP4 is dangerous as a live format, and if you record to it directly like you would with OBS Studio or any kind of similar software, you’re putting your recordings at risk. It’s one of the most common file types for video for a reason: most video editors will work with it too, and a good portion of devices will play MP4 files with no additional setup. Don’t get me wrong MP4 is a fine video container. Today, I’m here to talk about OBS and the MP4 format. I help out with all kinds of issues in the OBS Discord server. My name is Jessica, known online as tielqt, and I’m a support volunteer and moderator for the OBS Project.

It’s wildly popular, so thank you very much for reading it.

As such, the structure includes all the usual video trappings, such as an introduction, call to subscribe, etc. Should you be recording to MP4 with OBS? - OBS MythbustersĮDIT - Hey folks, just a couple notes on this article! While the information is all up to date, even in the most recent version of OBS, I just want to give you a heads up that this is the direct copy of the script from the video version.