How far can I push OBS with "not great" hardware?

[IYIomo]

So I've been trying to figure out how to get the most out of OBS with the current specs of my PC, I only record for Youtube and I have no need to stream any time soon, I mainly record console gameplay through a capture card or things like minecraft which arent the most intensive games.

 

My specs are: 

Phenom II X6 1090T

Radeon HD 5750 

16GB DDR3 (supposedly at 669.6MHz) 

 

At the moment I'm running x264 at veryfast with CBR 2500Kbps, and tbh I have no idea what that means

 

[IYIomo]

Side not if possible I would like to be able to have my webcam seperate, I know you can set the resolution to 3840x1080 and just have them side by side but I dunno if my PC can handle that, I currently just have hotkeys to switch between the scenes of full face and gameplay

[Hans Christian | Teri]

Have you tried just testing it out? Should be fairly straight forward to come to a conclusion.

[IYIomo]

47 minutes ago, Hans Christian | Teri said:

Have you tried just testing it out? Should be fairly straight forward to come to a conclusion.

I have tried to wiggle around with it, it’s mainly, if there’s alternatives to the 3840x1080 for my webcam and to understand what the difference between cbr/vbr and things like that

[LogicalDrm]

10 hours ago, IYIomo said:

I have tried to wiggle around with it, it’s mainly, if there’s alternatives to the 3840x1080 for my webcam and to understand what the difference between cbr/vbr and things like that

I don't see point of that resolution. Your viewers would need to have actually ultrawide to enjoy it. Otherwise you are looking two tiny screens and wondering what the creator was smoking when they thought this was a good idea.

 

1080p streaming bitrate needs to be 4000kbps for 30fps. Test out different nitrates and resolution. That's how I tested for my setup.

[LAwLz]

17 hours ago, IYIomo said:

At the moment I'm running x264 at veryfast with CBR 2500Kbps, and tbh I have no idea what that means

x264 = "use the CPU to encode the video".

 

"veryfast" = Not that high quality but it doesn't take as much CPU resources. The slower the settings you use, the more complex encoding will take place which in turn will increase quality but also put more stress on the CPU.

 

CBR = Constant bitrate. Each second will (roughly) take up an equal amount of space on your hard drive regardless of what is being shown. Good for streaming but not necessarily good for recording to local storage.

 

2500Kbps = Each second of video will be roughly 2500Kbps large, which translates to about 19 megabytes per minute of footage.

 

 

 

Some things to consider:

• Down-scaling to 720p might actually make your video look better if your video is bit rate starved. A crisp 720p video is way better than a blocky and blurry 1080p video.
• If you are recording locally, try bumping the bitrate up. Having large files is usually not an issue when you will be editing and uploading the content anyway, and higher bitrate will translate to better quality (if the rest stays the same).
• Try changing from "veryfast" to "faster" and see if your CPU can handle it. If it can, then you will get quite a bit better quality without having to increase the bitrate.

[IYIomo]

On 8/14/2020 at 10:57 AM, LogicalDrm said:

I don't see point of that resolution. Your viewers would need to have actually ultrawide to enjoy it. Otherwise you are looking two tiny screens and wondering what the creator was smoking when they thought this was a good idea.

 

1080p streaming bitrate needs to be 4000kbps for 30fps. Test out different nitrates and resolution. That's how I tested for my setup.

Sorry, to explain I record at 3840x1080 so that i can have the raw footage of both webcam and screen at 1920x1080. When editing I crop out half and just shrink down my webcam into the corner, however since I have the full res footage I can animate and add effects to the webcam.

 

i have tried the 4000kbps and it worked well so thank you v much!

[IYIomo]

On 8/14/2020 at 4:22 PM, LAwLz said:

x264 = "use the CPU to encode the video".

 

"veryfast" = Not that high quality but it doesn't take as much CPU resources. The slower the settings you use, the more complex encoding will take place which in turn will increase quality but also put more stress on the CPU.

 

CBR = Constant bitrate. Each second will (roughly) take up an equal amount of space on your hard drive regardless of what is being shown. Good for streaming but not necessarily good for recording to local storage.

 

2500Kbps = Each second of video will be roughly 2500Kbps large, which translates to about 19 megabytes per minute of footage.

 

 

 

Some things to consider:

• Down-scaling to 720p might actually make your video look better if your video is bit rate starved. A crisp 720p video is way better than a blocky and blurry 1080p video.
• If you are recording locally, try bumping the bitrate up. Having large files is usually not an issue when you will be editing and uploading the content anyway, and higher bitrate will translate to better quality (if the rest stays the same).
• Try changing from "veryfast" to "faster" and see if your CPU can handle it. If it can, then you will get quite a bit better quality without having to increase the bitrate.

Thank you for the explanation it was very helpful, when I dropped it to faster I started to overload the encoder but I did manage to boost the bit rate, I’m testing out vbr aswell atm I shall update if it’s better.

[LogicalDrm]

5 hours ago, IYIomo said:

Sorry, to explain I record at 3840x1080 so that i can have the raw footage of both webcam and screen at 1920x1080. When editing I crop out half and just shrink down my webcam into the corner, however since I have the full res footage I can animate and add effects to the webcam.

 

i have tried the 4000kbps and it worked well so thank you v much!

You are encoding 2x stuff with weak-ish hardware. Not optimal, but if it works for you, sure.

[starry]

Back when I had an FX-6300 and HD 7950, I just bought a cheap USB capture card that could do very basic 1080p30, and I used an old laptop to actually encode on OBS and stream it to twitch using software encoding, that was my laptop's entire job so the 2 iron lake cores and HT was perfectly fine. My webcam only took up a small part of the screen in the video so I just set it to a very low resolution that wouldnt be that noticable at that size anyways. Hope this helps.

[IYIomo]

5 hours ago, seapriestess said:

Back when I had an FX-6300 and HD 7950, I just bought a cheap USB capture card that could do very basic 1080p30, and I used an old laptop to actually encode on OBS and stream it to twitch using software encoding, that was my laptop's entire job so the 2 iron lake cores and HT was perfectly fine. My webcam only took up a small part of the screen in the video so I just set it to a very low resolution that wouldnt be that noticable at that size anyways. Hope this helps.

I will give this a go thanks

[starry]

Just now, IYIomo said:

I will give this a go thanks

For consoles, I would take your main PC over an old laptop for recording any day. Just letting you know, but if youre trying to record or stream PC games specifically, I would offload that task to an old laptop and let your computer do the gaming.