For the most part the video capture quality on the Quest 2 is ok...
but at the same time if you're a content creator or simply someone wanting to get
the best looking gameplay captures from the Quest 2 that you can, the default capture
settings leave a lot to be desired. Take, for example, this footage from Resident Evil 4.
First of all the aspect ratio is 1:1.
This is fine I guess for the most part if you're watching the video on your phone but
if you want to watch on a TV or computer screen then this aspect ratio just doesn't look right.
When you're editing your captured game play later you can of course zoom in on the footage to make
it fill a 16:9 frame, or whatever other aspect ratio you want to use, but when you do that you're
enlarging or zooming in on the pixels in that capture which makes the resolution look worse.
And on top it, in scenes like this one in Resident Evil 4 when it's dark outside and raining
the low default capture bitrate leaves things looking pretty muddy and splotchy at times.
There is a way however to change the default settings and capture your game play at really
any aspect ratio and resolution you want as well as increase the capture
bitrate making your Quest 2 game play footage look much sharper and clearer.
To do this we're first going to need to go to dashboard.oculus.com on our computer,
sign into our Facebook or Oculus account and then register as a developer.
In this field here you'll need to enter a name for your organization,
check this "I Understand" box and then click Submit.
Now that we're registered as a developer we need to put our Quest 2 into Developer
Mode so we'll need to power it on and grab our smartphone or tablet and open the Oculus app.
As I'm sure you already know you need both devices to be connected to the same wifi
network and have the bluetooth on your phone toggled on.
Down at the bottom we want to tap on Menu... then on Devices. In the Headset Settings there's
an option for Developer Mode, tap on it then enable Developer Mode by toggling this switch on.
If you're using a Windows PC we now need to go back
to our computer and download and install the Oculus ADB drivers.
If you're on Mac or Linux you can skip this step.
I've placed the link to Oculus' Developer page in
the video description where you can download the Windows drivers.
For those that are curious ADB stands for Android Debug Bridge.
These will allow our computer to communicate with our Quest 2
and change the video capture resolution and all kinds of other settings.
Once you've downloaded the drivers you'll want to unzip the package,
open this folder,
then this next folder
and then you'll right click on this android_winusb file and click Install.
Now that we have our drivers in place we need to download and install SideQuest.
SideQuest is an application that allows us to do a number of different things like
side load apps that aren't available on the official Oculus Store onto our Quest 2.
It also has some nice tools for changing settings on the Quest 2
as well which is what we're going to be taking a look at shortly.
I've placed a link to SideQuest's download page in the video description for your convenience.
Depending on your computers operating system you'll want to download and install the
corresponding version of SideQuest and once you've got it installed you'll want to launch SideQuest.
And now we're ready to plug our Quest 2 into our computer using a USB cable.
You'll now need to briefly put your headset on and you should see
this message asking if you want to Allow USB Debugging?
You want to click Allow here, or if you don't want to have to do this
every time you connect your Quest 2 to your PC you can click Always Allow From This Computer instead.
You'll then get this message asking if you want to allow your PC to access data
on your headset. I always click Allow on this but you don't have to.
SideQuest should then show you that your headset is connected
and now we're ready to change our Quest 2's capture settings.
There's a couple ways that we can go about changing some of these settings.
The first is to click on this wrench icon here at the top of the SideQuest
window. As you scroll down the first one that deals with the video capture
is this one, Full Rate Capture. By default the Quest 2 captures at 30fps;
turning this option on will instead record our game play at 60 or 72 fps depending on the game.
The next setting we wanna look at is Set Video Capture Size.
Here we have 3 choices...
480 set's the capture resolution to 640 X 480 which is an aspect ratio of 4:3.
720 sets the capture resolution to 1280 X 720 and 1080 to 1920 X 1080
both of which are an aspect ratio of 16:9.
Unfortunately there is currently no way to change the capture bitrate on the Quest 2 from this menu
so now I'm going to show you the other way to change settings which does allow you to
change the capture bitrate as well as set any capture resolution or aspect ratio you want.
We're now going to click on this icon here which will let us run
ADB commands on our Quest 2 and click on Custom Command.
By default the Quest 2 captures at 1024 X 1024 at 30fps with a bitrate of 5Mbps.
Using ADB commands we can change all these parameters to whatever
we want them to be we just need to know which commands to use.
In the video description I've placed the 4 different commands we're going to be using
in this video so all you have to do is copy and paste these commands, one at a time, into this
command line here and then change the value at the end to whatever value you want to try.
The first command we're going to put in is to set the capture width.
So in this line we need to type adb, space, shell, space, setprop, space,
debug, dot, oculus, dot, capture, dot,
width followed by one more space and then the value we want for the width of our video capture.
For this tutorial I'm going to put in 1440 and then click Run Command.
Next we need to set the height of our capture. This command is almost exactly
the same as the command for the width so we just need to replace the word width here with
height and enter our height value which I'm going to use 1080 and then click Run Command.
Next we're going to set the capture bit rate. The command for this is, once again,
almost the same as our previous two but here instead of height we want to change that to
bitrate and then we'll enter our value in bits per second.
The default is 5Mbps or 5,000,000 bits per second so we want to be
higher than that. I've found a bit rate of 25,000,000 or 30,000,000 looks the best.
Once you've got your desired bit rate entered hit Run Command and now we're on to our final command.
This one will set the frame rate to Full and that command is adb, space, shell, space, setprop,
space, debug, dot, oculus, dot, fullRateCapture making sure to capitalize the words Rate
and Capture like this, then space and finally we'll enter our value
which we want to be 1. Hit Run Command and now our Quest 2 is ready to capture some gameplay.
As you can see the settings I used give us an aspect ratio of 1.33:1
and not 16:9 but since it was captured at a higher resolution if you want to go to 16:9
you can zoom in in your editing software like this without losing much quality.
Of course you're welcome to try capturing at 1920 X 1080 or any other resolution,
just be aware depending on the game you will have to adjust the capture values somewhat.
If you set them too high then you will see noticeable dips to the frame rate
as well as get some artifacting so there is kind of a delicate balance you need
to find to get the best capture quality as well as acceptable game performance.
Also it's important to know that changing these settings is only temporary.
As long as you don't power your Quest 2 all the way down or reboot it the settings will remain in
place. However once you do either of those things all your settings will be returned to default.
The good thing about this is if you change a setting that really messes things up
all you have to do is reboot your Quest 2 and everything will return to normal.