Bitrate

[Sonoma931]

Forgive me if this is the wrong place for this but I couldn’t find out where to put it. 
I have 15mbps download and 1mbps upload. 

On average it’s 12mbps down and .62 up.

Also I use LAN and I’m the only one that uses the internet source when I stream to maximize results.  

With that being said, I’ve been trying to stream on twitch and can’t get my bitrate right. I have to do 360-480p at 25fps due to the slow internet. Sometimes the stream gets blurry then clears up. I set the bitrate to 540kbps but I lowered it to 400kbps and it cleared up a bit but not much. 

 

I use OBS don’t like the look of stream labs. Someone said set the output from my gpu instead of cpu but idk how big of a difference it would make. Every YouTube video says something different so i don’t know who to believe. 

 

Any suggestions would be helpful!

 

 

[DarkLord76865]

I'm not really an expert in this, but from my experience, 1 mbps upload is really not enough for streaming. Blurry images probably appear when the scene changes and bitrate is too low to contain info about all changes to frame, so it take few frames to clear image. 

You should probably try to use GPU, and if you have newer GPU, try to do it directly from GPU program (Geforce Experience for nvidia or AMD software for AMD GPU). GPU encoders are usually better optimized for streaming (especially low bitrate) but nothing is gonna give you good image with that upload speed (sorry xD)

[Enigma147]

I agree with the DarkLord, your upstream is just too low for streaming.  GPU encoding is much more efficient, but in this case it would not matter.  

 

[mariushm]

For smoothness, you'd want the upload to not exceed around 80% of your maximum upload bandwidth. 

Your maximum upload speed is 1 mbps or 1000 kbps, but the maximum speed will also depend on what server you connect to, and how far away from you it is, and how good of a connection your ISP has to that server. 

If you are matched with a Twitch server in your town, you may get that full 1 mbps, if it's across the country from you it would be much less. 

 

If your average is 0.62 mbps upload bandwidth, then I wouldn't configure the upload bitrate higher than 500 kbps (in TOTAL, including audio). 

 

Hardware GPU encoder on your video card is optimized for real time or faster encoding, not for best quality, and it's optimized for higher resolutions and bitrates ... 720p and 2-3 mbps or more. The hardware encoders don't do so well with low resolutions and low bitrates. 

 

For 400-500 kbps bitrate, I would recommend playing the game at 720p or 1440x900, capture the game in OBS at that resolution and use the resize to 50% to get exactly HALF the resolution (640x360 or 720x448 - crop 4 lines to make the resolution 1440x896, then do resize to 50% to keep both width and height multiple of 8). Because it's 50% resize, you can use the fastest lower quality resize, bilinear, because it doesn't matter - the higher quality resizers only give better quality when next resolution isn't an exact 1/2 or 1/4 or 2x or 3x etc. When you resize to 50%, all the resizing algorithms simply take 2x2 pixels and calculate the average between them to produce 1 pixel, so all resize algorithms will produce same result.

You'll get better quality using the software x264 encoder instead of hardware encoder, and configured properly to one of the slightly more quality profiles (not ultrafast or very fast, go closer to fast-medium)

 

Also, at such low bitrate, you should experiment with less bitrate for audio ... instead of mp3, see if you can use AAC, and for some games you could even try mono instead of stereo.  For stereo, you could try aac 48-56 kbps, would leave more room for video.  With mp3, 56-64 kbps for mono, 80 kbps for stereo... 64 kbps may be doable but will sound worse than aac.

Depending on game, you could squeeze it down to 32000 Hz instead of 44100 Hz or 48000 Hz but won't make much of a savings in bitrate.

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

3 minutes ago, Enigma147 said:

I agree with the DarkLord, your upstream is just too low for streaming.  GPU encoding is much more efficient, but in this case it would not matter.  

 

GPU encoding is far LESS efficient, if you have enough CPU power to use higher quality software encoding.  The benefit of GPU encoding is that you're more likely to get a smoother frame rate as it wont be impacted by any CPU spikes in the game.

 

eg NVIDIA GTX 1660 and higher, 20x0 and 30x0 cards are as good as CPU Medium quality, older cards are like CPU Low quality.