twitch streaming tech tips?

[porina]

I just did my first ever Twitch stream. Technically it went ok, and already I spotted many areas of operational improvement I could make for the future.

 

I'm using Streamlabs OBS, and when I initially set it up, it did a test of some sort and decided to set my bitrate to 6000k and a streaming resolution of 1280x720. I downloaded and looked at the stream afterwards, and... it wasn't bad. Now, the question is, should I try increasing the bitrate and/or resolution? 

 

To half answer it myself, I did find a twitch help page suggesting 6000k is their limit, so it doesn't seem to be any point going above that. Do they just re-distribute the stream as is? No re-encoding like 'tube? It does suggest I can turn it up to 1080p though.

 

Also I'm currently using a 1080Ti in the streaming test system. I believe there was some update to the nvenc encoder in Turing. Is there a meaningful difference in apparent quality if I were to swap it with a Turing or newer card? I could do a swap with a 2070 in another system for example.

[Moonzy]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

should I try increasing the bitrate and/or resolution? 

depends on what you're streaming

6000kbps is the limit for twitch, unless you're a partner then it's 8000, i think?

they will refuse to play it if it's above 6000

 

for resolution, it depends on what you're streaming as 6000kbps isnt really enough for fast panning games really

test it yourself, 1080p vs 720p, see which one is clearer and is less blocky

 

4 minutes ago, porina said:

Also I'm currently using a 1080Ti in the streaming test system. I believe there was some update to the nvenc encoder in Turing. Is there a meaningful difference in apparent quality if I were to swap it with a Turing or newer card? I could do a swap with a 2070 in another system for example.

not enough to justify the work, imo

but you could if it's not much more work to swap gpu, the difference is not that high, hardly noticeable unless you compare side by side

[porina]

8 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

for resolution, it depends on what you're streaming as 6000kbps isnt really enough for fast panning games really

test it yourself, 1080p vs 720p, see which one is clearer and is less blocky

Fortunately I don't do "fast moving games" as such, but that's not no movement either... guess I'll have to test it out.

 

I do recall, in a snowy area, even 50Mbps wasn't enough at 1440p30 when doing a local recording. I tried doing that to help improve quality, but I don't do in depth testing to see if 60 vs 30 makes that much difference, depending on how much extra value they get out of temporal feature extraction.

 

8 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

but you could if it's not much more work to swap gpu, the difference is not that high, hardly noticeable unless you compare side by side

I'll leave them "as is" for now then. I still hope to pick up the latest gen GPUs at some point, and might shuffle them around then.

[Moonzy]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

in a snowy area, even 50Mbps wasn't enough at 1440p30 when doing a local recording.

small moving particles = bane of bitrate

 

personally i stream at 60fps, but sometimes i feel like that isnt enough because im so used to high fps, my stream looks like it's dropping frames even though it's not

[porina]

7 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

small moving particles = bane of bitrate

Yup, I was surprised how bad the hit was. Nothing else I ever recorded at same settings looked bad (maybe a little soft at most), but that was just awful.

 

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personally i stream at 60fps, but sometimes i feel like that isnt enough because im so used to high fps, my stream looks like it's dropping frames even though it's not

It looks like twitch expects 50/60fps so I shouldn't change it. I find I'm more tolerant of low fps if I'm watching than playing. Hmm... that's something else to test, does twitch get upset if you game at not 60fps, but stream at 60fps. I don't know how shadowplay does it, but for example on my main game I play at locked 72fps and record at 30, and I don't notice any frame time variation for example.

[Moonzy]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

does twitch get upset if you game at not 60fps, but stream at 60fps

afaik they dont care, they just display whatever you throw at them, it's up to your encoder to tell it what to display

i think 30 fps is also a viable fps to stream at?

 

3 minutes ago, porina said:

don't notice any frame time variation for example.

probably too minute to detect

[LogicalDrm]

6000kbps is way over what you would ever need for 720p30. For that anything above 3500kbps is placebo. SLOBS probably just checks your internet connection and hardware about what they could do with service of your choice. Or something like that.

 

Anyway, you can go full on 1080p60 with that bitrate. The problem comes from Twitch encoding side. As you thought, Twitch doesn't automatically encode all streams. It prioritizes that function to major events, partners, affiliates and everyone else. In that order. So for the most of the time regualr non-affiliate streamer doesn't get encoding options. Which means the ability to select quality of the stream. This leads to problem where your viewers download speed needs to match (or be bit over) your bitrate.

 

So if you are trying to reach more than just few friends with good connections, maybe lower your video quality and focus on actual content.

[porina]

4 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

6000kbps is way over what you would ever need for 720p30. For that anything above 3500kbps is placebo. SLOBS probably just checks your internet connection and hardware about what they could do with service of your choice. Or something like that.

To clarify, Streamlabs OBS defaulted to 720p60 at 6000k for Twitch. Youtube recommend 7500k for 720p60 for comparison.

 

I was separately mentioning if I did a local recording, I'd use 1440p30 at 50M, which is adequate as long as the scene isn't snowing. Actually, my memory might be a little off there, I might be thinking of youtube bitrates (16-24M at 1440-p depending on frame rate), and that's not enough for snow.

 

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So if you are trying to reach more than just few friends with good connections, maybe lower your video quality and focus on actual content.

I'd consider technical quality and content quality to be largely independent of each other (when meeting some minimum standard on both), so connecting the two is irrelevant.

 

If anything, I don't want to over-focus on the technical side. I just want a good setting I can then never touch again unless something changes to require such. To me a 6M connection is very poor by today's standards, recognising there might still be some out there with worse. I'm not sure reducing it would meaningfully increase the potential audience. A quick search shows roughly 10% of the UK are below 10M, with an average of 64M. I'm finding it harder to find numbers for other large English speaking countries but it seems the US might be higher, Canada might be lower, and there will no doubt be a mix. Basically I only see potential downsides with lowering bitrate, that potential gains will not offset easily.

[LogicalDrm]

9 minutes ago, porina said:

To clarify, Streamlabs OBS defaulted to 720p60 at 6000k for Twitch. Youtube recommend 7500k for 720p60 for comparison.

 

I was separately mentioning if I did a local recording, I'd use 1440p30 at 50M, which is adequate as long as the scene isn't snowing. Actually, my memory might be a little off there, I might be thinking of youtube bitrates (16-24M at 1440-p depending on frame rate), and that's not enough for snow.

https://stream.twitch.tv/

Like I said, on 720p30, anything over 3500 would be placebo. So on 720p, I don't expect you getting much more value with over 4500kbps bitrate.

 

But really doesn't matter if you are going for audiences with high network connections. Just gonna point out that most mobile connections will lag with full HD Twitch streams.

[porina]

38 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

https://stream.twitch.tv/

Like I said, on 720p30, anything over 3500 would be placebo. So on 720p, I don't expect you getting much more value with over 4500kbps bitrate.

 

But really doesn't matter if you are going for audiences with high network connections. Just gonna point out that most mobile connections will lag with full HD Twitch streams.

Put away 720p30, it is not under consideration. I must have missed or just forgot about Twitch's own recommendations. So basically my choices based on that page are either:

Remain at 6000 and increase resolution to 1080p60.

Remain at 720p60 and reduce bitrate to 4500.

I think I'm leaning towards the first option.

[porina]

Just had a shower, and as it often is, it proved a good time to think about random things and this topic was one of them. I didn't want to test every setting in future streams, but then I realised, I don't have to. Twitch appears to be using standard codecs, so I can just use video editing software to recompress at different settings and see how they differ in practice. There's only 4 settings on the previous twitch page, so I'll try all of them. To recap:

1080p60 6000

1080p30 4500

720p60 4500

720p30 3000 - yes, even this setting mentioned by @LogicalDrm

 

I also think I forgot to take my own advice, not to let perfect get in the way of good enough. Watching a stream is not the same as playing it. I have existing footage from several games, although I'll need some new footage from one or two I haven't routinely recorded, then I could do a comparison across them. It wont be exactly the same as the twitch stream because I'll probably be using much better (non-real time) software encoding, but it'll do for an indication I think.

 

Implicitly I already accept 30fps for gaming videos, since that's what I target for youtube. However the two games I target are not exactly fast moving, and my opinion may change depending on title. I'd still ideally want one setting that suits everything.

 

Edit: I'd need new footage for the old titles anyway, since they're done at 30fps! I'll need fresh at 60fps

 

Edit 2: I got some new footage, plonked it into an editor and... fell at the last hurdle. Software I'm using doesn't allow me to specify specific bitrates, only a selection from a drop down list. 4000k is on there, but not the others.