Hi, I uploaded this: https://e621.net/post/show/1420619/16-9-2017-animal_genitalia-animal_penis-animated-a

it's passable, but compared to the original, it looks like shit. What should I do to fix this? I recorded the video using OBS, and converted it using a wrapper for the webm converter. I feel like the problem is through the original recording but I'm not sure. What should I do to fix it?

The problem was definitely in the original recordings' quality. using .264 settings like CRF with low values definitely produced way better recordings for conversion. Answered my own question, sorry.

Check out @Mario69 profile wall on converting Flash -> Video.

You can send him a message if you're unsure.

Pendra said:
The problem was definitely in the original recordings' quality. using .264 settings like CRF with low values definitely produced way better recordings for conversion. Answered my own question, sorry.

VP9 actually does have option for lossless encoding (-lossless 1) but if speaking of usage here on this site, this will most likely result insanely long encoding times, so absurd filesizes that you aren't able to upload it to begin with and if you can, majority of users will have problem playing them back. Sadly this isn't file hosting site, so that most likely doesn't end up that well in majority of cases on multiple aspects.

So like you already figured out, you can use CRF similar to 264 and scale should also be similar. So what we would like instead is "visually lossless", so that the video when played regularly is nearly indistinguishable from the material it originated from. Looking up online, usual scale is 18-21, but as the codec is pretty efficient and the goal here is to try preserving the stuff, I have been using 14-16 then adjusting even higher/lower if it seems like it (e.g. pixel art can go much lower and should to keep everything crisp, while already really compressed stuff the damage is already done so higher values serve almost as well).

As long as the stuff plays correctly, looks like original and doesn't take up absurd amount of space considering what content it holds, all is more than fine.