total obs

yo, are you sick of your snes capture looking like this: http://i.imgur.com/akkm5zW.png
how about making it look like this: http://i.imgur.com/kw6x6Lt.png

this is a tutorial for using a obs plugin that total made for obs direct capture, instead of using amarec or vmx, or mpc

the difference will be biggest on a RGB modded 1chip, but it still has a huge difference, even on my svideo 2chip capture setup

first thing, download this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gh996kvwj4wcngj/obs-plug%20%281%29.zip?dl=0 (32bit and 64bit included)

extract it to the top folder in your obs installation (the one that has a bin, data, and obs-plugins folders)

then close and reopen obs, if you haven't already

from here you'll need to add your capture card as a video capture device in obs if you haven't already, I'll let you figure that one out, as it may vary with your capture device, but the deinterlacing feature you'll want to use is "retro."

now, time to add filters, so go to the filter page of your capture device

here's a screen of what I have added, and we'll walk through all of them: http://i.imgur.com/6DDdkX8.png

the color correction is very minor, and just something I do to make svideo not look like total washed out crap

the initial crop is important, but all you want to do is crop the x axis. crop to the borders of your game capture feed, but leave the y-axis alone, since the video filter we'll use next expects an image thats 240 pixels tall

the next filter is the one that does the heavy lifting, the "240p optimizer"

first, you'll want to set the width to 256, and the height to 240

to use the x sampling and x offset, leave the x samples at 0, and increase the x offset til the left side of the screen looks good and sharp. then increase the x sample rate til the rest of the image looks clean and sharp

disclaimer: this is a LOT of tinkering with and seeing what works best. just keep looking at the image, wait til you see it look sharp, then decline in quality, and go back. there is one caveat to this, that high levels of x offset move the image left some number of pixels, so try to keep the offset values low (below 100 or so). the x sample rate will VERY slightly squeeze the image to the left, so keep those numbers low (below 100 or so) as well. in spite of all this, it can look very crisp.

after that, you'll want to apply the "TwoChip SNES Fix," if you have a 2chip like myself. if you have a 1chip, celebrate and move on

use default values it starts with (10, and 10), or only increase it by a small amount, as high values will add significant noise to your image

next, you'll want to add a crop filter to get rid of the top black border. don't use relative here, and just adjust the Y axis, since your X should already be properly cropped from before. at the bottom, set the width to 256, and the height to 224.

I added a SMALL sharpen filter here at this point, since it looks best to use the sharpen filter after the optimizer filter and 2chip snes fix, but before we rescale to a better resolution (let me emphasize SMALL. I only do 0.02 or 0.03 here, higher values look terrible)

finally, for the scaling filters

with all we've done so far, you'll end up with a 256x224 resolution image in your obs preview, and that's perfect, since its the actual resolution your snes outputs (for most games, except secret of mana menu screen, sd2snes menu, and whatever other weird ones that don't).

the problem is that that is a 8:7 aspect ratio.

so first you rescale to 1024x896 using the point scale filter

then, you use the bicubic scaling filter to give you a proper 4:3 image. its your choice here what resolution you want to stream your game at, but total pointed out the best image to stream at is probably a 896x672, since most people will view your stream in the twitch player, which has TERRIBLE scaling output, and most people will see your gamefeed very close to that resolution, it makes sense to be that resolution.

hope this helps, feel free to direct questions at me, or total in the sm discord