Streaming settings

defunkt · November 11, 2013

I am using Open Broadcaster to stream to Twitch for the fun of it, but the video is laggy and the quality isn't great. Twitch says my settings are perfect but meh.. What bitrate and such should I be running at? I have 60Mbs down and 3Mbs up

What advanced video settings should I be using? My specs are in my signature.

Also advanced network settings.

Also things like scene buffering time I have no clues about.

Thanks, That Cat...

DarrenP · November 11, 2013

I'd suggest either Upgrading your internet, or Upgrading what you use to stream. I found using Xsplit worked better then OBS for streaming and recording. Like i did a test and i was getting frame rate lag on the video, when i wasn't streaming.

defunkt · November 11, 2013

If you've got a stable 3mb up at all times, you should be able to push it to 2400k-2600k. I have 3 up too, but my internet is rather unstable, so I have to set my bitrate to 2100k. At this bitrate some pixelation is bound to happen.

Click this link > Upload Test > Select Test Size > 6 MB. Let it run and adjust your bitrate approximately 500 kpbs lower than your result. Keep in mind that audio is also added to this mix, so 2500k video +160k audio = 2760k total.

Video: 864p/720p is usually good enough for all games, but some games you can easily push it to 1080p. Depends if you're playing high tempo games like CoD / Battlefield / racing games, etc. with a large amount of movement. If you play LoL or Dota 2, 1080p / 45fps / 2500kpbs is decent. Also remember to use Lanczos filter.

FPS: I found 40-45 to be a the sweetspot between all things. It's not too demanding on your CPU and it doesn't require the extra 15-20 frames to be encoded (which requires more compression per second = shitter quality), all while keeping a smooth looking stream which isn't too laggy (30 fps) nor too demanding (60 fps).

Advanced: This is the fun part. x264 CPU preset should be adjusted to take advantage of as much CPU power left over when playing games. Do you have a second monitor so you can have task manager open when playing? If not, run the game in windowed borderless (if possible). I don't own an i7 CPU, so I don't know how live encoding works with games running, so it's up to you to dick about with the settings. Record snippets of a minute locally and watch them and judge the quality. Every time you're done with a one min segment, up the CPU preset once (ex: from veryfast to faster, medium to slow, etc.) starting with veryfast. Super- and ultrafast look like shite, so don't bother. Find a nice balance between game performance and quality. My FX-8350 struggles a bit at faster whilst playing BF4, as it quite often reaches 90%+ CPU usage. Less CPU intensive games leaves more CPU power to encode!

Other settings: Enable CBR + CBR padding (Encoding tab), Enable Use Multithreaded Optimizations (of course), enable Use CFR (Constant Frame Rate) (Advanced tab).

If you're feeling adventurous, you can enable Custom x264 Encoder Settings and do some fun optimisation yourself using valid commands from this website. "Valid" means not many of these output commands actually work. For example, 2pass will not work with live encoding / streaming. Usually it's best to not touch this as it can do more harm than good.

Side note: I'm not familiar with Shadowplay by nVidia, but I do believe your 670 should be able to use it. (Kepler based, right?)

You could try it out instead of OBS. Maybe it'll run better, performance to quality wise.

Holy hells bells, thank you. As for shadow play, you can not yet stream with it. They will hopefully be adding it in at a later date And for the speed test, I get 360kb/s and as i'm a bit of a tit i'm getting confused with different measurements. And what about the scene buffering time?