Question About Video Size And Quality

[Angrboda]

I recently installed OBS to record videos for a 'let's play' type of thing... only without my microphone. I should say a 'playthrough' really. Anyway, me playing a game.

I want to upload it to YouTube but my internet is so crappy that with the HD video quality it seems like it would take forever.

Is there a way to reduce the size drastically without losing huge amounts of quality?

May sound like a silly question: But I know there is something like that for audio. FLACs have all the audio quality of wavs but they are way, way, smaller in file size.

So I was wondering if there was a video equivalent to FLACs.

Assuming you are recording to a standard format, there are many programs which can downconvert to a lower resolution (or same resolution with less detail). However, what you ask, is there a video equivalent of FLAC, I don't believe there is. FLAC uses lossless compression which is a method of compressing the information in an audio stream into a smaller representation which contains the same information as the original. More or less by definition, video compression is lossy. However, with a good compression program, the visible quality may be well preserved while still realizing a space savings. I use format factory for translating between formats, which you could use, but I don't know how it compares in terms of the relative quality of the compression. That's not a feature which attracts much attention in reviews, so I imagine it's a crap shoot. You'd just have to experiment and see whether the quality / size trade-off was suitable for your needs.