Great Hierophant wrote:
I only have experience capturing analog composite and s-video. I capture game video at 720x480i @ 30fps, deinterlace it to 720x240p @60fps, then scale it to 878x720p @60fps (with horizontal borders to 1280 to preserve aspect ratio). The file sizes tend to get large when taking the video uncompressed, it is probably 1GB/minute.
Now if you are capturing digital video, 1024x720p/60fps (with borders to 1280) would be the best way to go if you don't have a 1080p/60fps source or capture device. Given we are talking about 256x224 @ 15-bit color upscaled graphics most of the time on the SNES, a codec like DOSBox's ZMBV should drastically cut down the file size.
Pillarbars are bad practice. This is because if you view it on a device like an iPad it will wind up window-boxed.
Mainly if you are capturing from an analog source, you capture with a lossy codec because the analog noise compresses better with a light lossy codec. If you are recording from a completely digital source (eg an emulator, or HDMI/DVI) then you need to capture using a lossless codec, of which ZMBV is only good as the CPU speed of one core. You CAN however upload ZMBV directly to Youtube, but you need to have key frames every 5-10 seconds to ensure it can be seeked. A lot of testing with ZMBV suggests you can get away with at most 720p with ZMBV, after that, google's on-the-fly transcoding process can't keep up. The key thing to remember is that ZMBV in DOSBOX's key attribute is that it delta-frames not only the visual data, but the palette as well on 8-bit color. The SNES requires 16-bit color and delta frames using ZMBV.
Hence, if you are trying to create the smallest seekable, lossless, file ZMBV probably the only option that works for 2D games. 3D games are better off going straight to h.264/AVC or VP8/WebM because a lossless compression only benefits the HUD of the game.