Spectrum Computing

I've been trying to export video from Spectaculator (PC) and upload the resultant video to YouTube. However the result is an artefact ridden mess.

Has anyone any advice as to settings I should be using? Or should I be using a different emulator entirely for this?

The problem is two-fold:

• Spectaculator offers you a choice of different video codecs - unless you use a lossless codec like "Full Frames" or "MS-RLE" then the artefacts will be baked in at the recording stage.
• Spectaculator records the video at native resolution (something like 240p), so unless you upscale it in an editor, YouTube will process it at this resolution and end up smudging the fine details. You ought to scale it up to at least 480p, but 720p is usually the minimum standard these days.

I did try full frame, the resultant AVI file looked okay. Could be case of upscaling before YTing then.

Does Fuse or ZXSpin or similar have video capture? Are they any more YT friendly?

Fuse can record "Fuse movie files" which can be converted to video using a command-line tool (fmfconv) - though this tool can output video files directly, you're better advised to pipe its output directly into a dedicated media encoding tool like ffmpeg. There's some examples of this usage in the manual pages (if you're on Windows you might have to rewrite the part with the pipe character, not sure if it works directly): https://manpages.debian.org/testing/fus ... .1.en.html

Honestly, there's not much difference in the end - you could rescale your full-frame Spectaculator recordings with ffmpeg (or a video editor) and end up with about the same result as you'd get redoing it all with Fuse and fmfconv.

As for ZX Spin, I think it records video - can't remember what the output is like though, but being of a similar age as Spectaculator it's probably not any better.

If you're upscaling you'll get the best results by using only exact integer scaling, turning off any scaling filters (i.e. bilinear, bicubic, lanczos, spline, etc.), and cropping the border as/if necessary to fit the target resolution.