Best OBS Settings for Streaming and Recording (Works on PC + Mac)(2024)

settings settings in OBS having your settings right will make or break your live streams and recordings viewers don't want to watch content that looks as blurry as a 100 year old person's eyesight or even videos that are so choppy it's like you're watching a still picture slideshow which is why today I'm going to be showing you the best OBS streaming and recording settings whether or not you're on a Windows computer an Intel Mac or an M1 M2 Chip silicon base Mac the settings I'm about to show you can be applied across all of these devices let's go foreign now I'm going to show you guys two different ways that you can configure your OBS settings the first way is going to be the easy simple method and what you guys are going to want to do here is go into your OBS go to the left hand side where it says profile select that and we're going to create a brand new profile I'm going to go ahead and name this best encoder settings make sure that you have checked off show Auto configuration wizard then go ahead and select OK from here you're going to get a window that'll pop up for what you're going to be using this profile for are you going to be mainly using it for live streaming or are you going to be using it for recording I'm going to go ahead and keep it for streaming select next here you're going to choose what you want your resolution to be so I want to go with 1920 by 1080 and I like having a 60 FPS stream from there I'm going to go ahead and select next again on this screen you want to put in your stream information whether that's by using the custom option or by logging into the services that are available here within the drop down with that information and keep the two check boxes below that checked off and then go ahead and select next and from there your computer is going to run a bandwidth test to see how good your internet is versus your computer to see what your best settings will be my test results are in it took about 30 seconds to complete and based on my computer specifications streaming to YouTube I'm good to stream at a 10 000 bit rate using my dedicated Nvidia graphics card that is the hardware encoder that I'll be using for live streaming and recording and now at this point we can just go ahead and select apply settings and that will apply directly to our OBS profile so that when we stream and record we'll have the best settings configured now without us having to do anything else to go live or do recordings for the second method I have to show you for setting up even better settings in my opinion is if you go to your settings and then first head over to video and then make sure that your base canvas and your output canvas are set to where you want them to be so if you want to do a 1080p stream or recording you're going to want to make sure that you have both of these resolutions set to 1920 by 1080 like you you see for my settings if for example you're trying to do a 4K resolution recording or live stream then you're going to want to change your base canvas resolution to 3840 by 2160 and do the same for the output scale resolution as well now let's say that your base canvas is 1920x1080 but you're going to have your output canvas be 720p in that case you're going to need to set a downscale filter for the best quality you're going to want to set that to 36 samples but if your base canvas and output canvas are both 1080p then you won't need to set a downscale filter at all just don't value which a lot of people like to set it at 60. next we're going to head of settings that we set earlier in the video when we first set up this profile if you go to the top you're going to see that our output mode is simple but we're going to want to select that drop down and head over to Advanced and the first thing that we'll be presented with is our streaming settings for the audio track you can keep that at one for the audio encoder you can keep this at default it'll most likely say ffmpeg AAC or for Mac users it'll say Core Audio AAC Core Audio compresses the audio a little bit better than ffmpeg but you'll be good with either one of those under that you have the video encoder and this is the most important part of the entire process of setting up your live stream in recording settings so for Windows you're gonna get a bunch of options but let me tell you the most important ones that you're going to want to pay attention to on your computer if you know you only have a CPU with integrated Graphics within that CPU then you're going to want to go with the x264 encoder option because that's an encoding feature that a lot of streaming platforms like to ingest such as twitch YouTube Facebook Kik you'll be good using that if you do not have a dedicated graphics card if you do have a dedicated graphics card on the other hand then you can go with the invec h.264 option so whether or not that's for your Nvidia card or for your AMD card you're going to want to go with the h.264 encoding format for those of you guys using M1 M2 silicon chip based machines you're good to go with the Apple VT Hardware encoder even with OBS having official silicon support now the hardware encoder still shines above the others in terms of efficiency and performance with your video encoder selected now below that there is no need to rescale the output if we go to the encoder settings the first thing we're going to see is the rate control now across Mac computers and windows CB R is going to be an option that wasn't in the past for at least the Mac silicon computers but CBR which stands for constant bitrate is the best option that you're going to want to go with here next up you have your bitrate and this is the second most important thing that you're going to want to pay attention to before we set this for live streaming we're going to want to know our internet upload speed so we can go to Google type in speed test then run the speed test and this is going to give us some insight to how fast our internet is the speed that we're going to want to pay attention to is the upload speed I'm clocking in about a 23 megabit per second upload speed so if we compare that number to this bitrate stream guidelines chart that I put together we can see that I can stream up to a 2K 60fps quality pretty freely so if you're going to be streaming in an 8 000 kilobit per second bitrate that means you need to at least have a 10 megabit per second upload speed that way you have a little bit of buffer between your 8 mag and 10 mag upload speed so that if your bitrick fluctuates you'll be okay and your stream won't go down after you set your bitrate you can set your keyframe interval to two preset if you're using a dedicated graphics card I would stick to P5 which is good quality if you have a really good graphics card you can experiment with the slower or the slowest quality if you're on x 264 keep that at very fast for your encoding preset once you start taking it down to faster or fast unless your CPU is an absolute Beast it's gonna struggle trying to encode in those speeds you're going to get the encoding overload error so just stick with very fast in this case for your tune you can keep that at high quality multi-pass mode is good at two passes profile this is usually good to keep at high or main high will give you better quality when it comes to compression do not check off look ahead and then keep psycho visual tuning turned on people who have more than one graphics card in their settings can either keep this at zero or modify it to one for your Max B frames you want to keep this at two now if we jump over to the recording tab this is where we can set our recording path for where we want our videos to be saved on our computer below that you're going to have your recording format which by default it'll be an MKV which is great if you don't want to potentially lose footage that you're recording in case OBS crashes but there is a lot of compatibility issues with using MKV V so my recommendation usually to most people is to either use an mp4 file or dot mov for your video encoder pretty much the same thing that we covered in the streaming section if you're on an M1 M2 Chip based Mac and you have your recording format set to a mov then I highly recommend taking advantage of the Apple VT prores Hardware encoder to get better looking footage for this setup on the Windows computer since I do have the dedicated graphics card I'm going to go ahead with the Nvidia h.264 Hardware encoder option and yes I did test to confirm that you can stream and record off the same graphics card at the same time and you won't get performance issues even if you set your bitrate pretty high for doing a 1080p 60fps recording you can feel comfortable setting this bit rate up to over 20 000. that obviously will not apply to all computers so if you are having issues continue to decrease your bit rate by intervals of 500 until your issue is gone all the other settings below this you can keep those exactly the same as what we applied on the stream setting side and you'll be good to go hopefully all those settings will help you guys out and can be used as a baseline to at least get you started for how you need to configure your settings and it will need to be adjusted depending on your exact build in the description below I did put some details in about the encoder so that you guys can learn a little bit more about them instead of me kind of going in the weeds in this video about it also check out this video here if you want to learn how to multi-stream completely for free within OBS and with that I'll see y'all in the next one thank y'all for watching peace

Channel: MidnightMan

Views: 96,287

Keywords: midnightman, ps5, playstation, tech tutorials, stream tutorials, best obs studio settings, how to setup obs settings, how to setup obs recording settings, how to setup obs studio for streaming, how to setup obs studio for twitch, best obs settings twitch, best obs setting mac os m1, best ob settings mac, how to setup obs studio on mac, how to record on obs studio windows 11, windows 11 obs studio settings, what is the best stream obs labs reaction settings, obs studio fix encoding

Id: 41jKfmU0o1g

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2023