ffdshow H.264 quality test
On quality
I recommend a quality value of 60 in the screenshot on the GTA2 screen capture tutorial page. This is a very good compromise between quality/file size.
| Quality | File size [kB] | Bitrate [kbps] |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | 7 127 | 966 |
| 20 | 7 127 | 967 |
| 40 | 7 127 | 967 |
| 60 | 19 660 | 2 682 |
| 70 | 42 188 | 5 764 |
| 80 | 83 354 | 11 384 |
A quality value of 60 will give you a video which looks almost as good as the original. In fact 70 seems to be the threshold value beyond which there is not much quality difference visually, but it produces files twice the size of 60 at 41MB/minute, a little too large imho, so 60 seems to me the best compromise. Using more than 60 is pointless, you will just be wasting space unless you want to do further work on this video clip in some other program. Using less than 60 will give you a video where the grass tiles look like a solid color, and the roads and all other textures with little variation will look muddy and plain, which is obviously no good.
This animated gif should give you a better idea of the quality differences:
Here are the source images:
