Best quality OBS settings and tutorial for new Twitch Streamers! Bitrate, Res, Downscaling, etc.

so you want to be a twitch streamer well that means you've got to do some setup so for this video i'm going to be using obs studio but a lot of it will apply to streamlabs obs as well if that's what you use i do personally recommend using obs studio but that's potentially a future video and or rant on my stream uh but as i said we're gonna focus on obs studio for the most part uh if you have questions about um any of the settings that i do and you use streamlabs obs feel free to leave a comment below and i'll be happy to answer it i have a lot of experience using both i'm vile shrew you can catch me streaming on twitch and i will put the address here and then also it'll be in the description this is obs studio this is the program that i personally use to do my personal twitch stream it's also what i recommend you use but a lot of the settings and a lot of the way that this works is uh pretty similar if you're using streamlabs obs or any other streaming programs but i am currently using obs studio this is uh 26.1.1 which is the most recent update at the time of this video so just a quick quick overview of what we've got going on over here in case this is the first time that you are seeing it keep in mind that this video is more focused on settings so this is just going to be a real quick overview of this part over here you have kind of the scenes these are where you create basically each scene of your stream which will consist of different sources uh over here different components that go into each of those scenes so just for an example i have this one here which i have a transition that i've had set up here and this goes to a recording of me just uh my camera recording my face this is the source right here which i can turn on or off and then mic audio everything like that this is your audio mixer and then your controls uh this is kind of the default setup of that what i've got up here is i've got my alerts through the stream labs um uh alerts pinned into my obs which you can do you can kind of customize a lot of these things move them around kind of whatever uh is tickles your fancy i guess uh but as i said the main thing that we are going to be getting into is settings when you first open up the settings you will see the general tab most of this is actually pretty cosmetic you can change your language here you can change the theme of obs this will not affect your actual scenes that you're outputting to twitch this is just literally to change the look of obs i personally like the default i think it's real nice and clean but take a look at each of them you might disagree with me and that's totally fine it does not matter uh the rest of this as i said um is all preference so go through these you can change these as you want for the most part um but for them i i kept most of this at default and i found that to be fine then we move on to the stream tab when you first start up obs studio it'll give you the option to log into the service so first you select the service i'm choosing twitch and then you can literally just log in you can basically just type log in to your account the other option that you have is to set it up through a stream key which you can get from the twitch settings but easiest way you just log into twitch and give it permission the biggest um first section that we're gonna be talking about and this will be broken out into a couple parts is going to be the output settings uh and this is where we're gonna start to set the settings that are actually affecting the twitch stream so first off look in the output mode up here make sure this is on advanced so that you get all of the options that we're looking for here we're gonna skip down we'll do i'll talk about the audio when we get to that part but first we're gonna start off setting the encoder there are two options here uh there is this one and this one so x264 is going to be our software encoder and the nvidia invent is going to be our hardware encoder so what that means is the x264 is going to use the cpu to encode your video and the hardware encoder uh if you have an amd one this will be different uh but the hardware encoder is going to offload some of the encoding process onto your gpu um the picking one of these two is going to depend on a couple of things you could have a dual streaming pc which means that you have a if you have a separate gaming pc uh there's probably you're probably going to be wanting to use this one and that is because uh you overall this one gives you a decent amount of quality it looks really nice at like a lot of different bit rates it's really really good um and if you are already offloading all of that um processing power by having a second pc it's probably the best one that you should go with if you have a single pc setup and you have a net nvidia rtx card i'm going to recommend you use the nvidia encoder and the hardware encoder does a lot to alleviate some of that um stress off of your cpu by having a there's actually a chip in the rtx cards that helps uh it's specifically there for stream encoding so it's not it's it's not using a ton of resources from your gpu and in general you're going to get actually better frames and things like that on the stream by using this so before we set our bit rate and resolution and things like that uh you're going to want to make sure you take an internet speed test so i'm going to link that right there uh it'll also be in the description uh there you can do the google one or the ukulele does not matter uh but what you're going to be looking for is your upload speed you'll notice that the upload speed is measured in megabits per second so mbps but your bitrate is measured in kilobits per second so the conversion there is that one megabit per second is equal to 1 000 kilobit per second right so if your speed is 10 your upload speed is 10 megabits per second that means that your max bandwidth is 10 000 kilobits per second right so you should just set that to 10 000 right no don't do that that's wrong so there are a couple reasons why you don't want to do that one twitch is absolute max uh if you are an affiliate or lower is 6 000 uh for your bitrate so that's the absolute max that you can get to so if you have a ton of speed and you want the highest quality possible then you're going to set it to at a maximum 6 000 but it's also going to depend on a couple other things if you are an affiliate or lower keep in mind that you might not always get source options so you know how like you can check and click on the source options and in a stream and you can get like 1080p 720p etc etc etc um you don't always get that and so what that means is uh that people are going to be locked at whatever bit rate you are streaming at so if you choose too high of a bit rate you have to understand that people with a slower internet than you might not be able to watch your stream and when you're growing you want as many people as possible to be able to view your stream so sometimes setting the bitrate too high will occasionally get rid of viewers in a time when you want to be getting as many viewers as possible into your channel right so it's just something to keep in mind if you regularly are getting those source options because of the time you stream because i believe how it works and i could be wrong with some of this but this is to my knowledge still how it works partners always have source options and then whatever is left over in their bandwidth to allow them allow you to do that rolls off into the affiliates if you are not an affiliate you almost definitely do not get source options period unless i think you are just extraordinarily lucky but in the affiliate program you sometimes are going to get them you sometimes aren't so it's just something to keep in mind um so in general as a maximum as well instead of just going as high as you can with your internet speed take about 25 of that number that we figured out before and you use that as your absolute maximum possible so for example with 10 uh 25 of that i believe would be 2500 right um as your absolute maximum bit rate and the reasoning behind that is that you're not only using the internet for streaming you have other devices using your internet you're going to be looking at your game which could be going online you want to leave some wiggle room there so with all of this information uh i think a good place to start for most people is to end up downscaling your stream into a 720p stream at 60 frames per second uh keep in mind with the bitrate uh if your bitrate is too low and you have your resolution too high if you're playing any game that has some sort of like fast motion you're gonna get these kind of like blurry like pixelated looks that you may have seen before just like looking at streams on twitch so to avoid that if you're downscaling to 720p at 60 frames and you have a bitrate that can keep up with that chances are your stream is going to look better than trying to go for a 1080p uh stream with a lower bitrate and even at 6000 i find that i don't necessarily want to do straight up 1080p at 60 frames i actually on my stream do downscale a little bit even though i do personally stream at 6 000 bid right so keep all of that in mind this is a setting that you're going to probably end up tweaking a little bit um even past this because it really depends on your system your internet things like that but keep in mind as well that the bit rate will affect performance and the amount of frames it's doubling the amount of bit rate that you need when you go from 30 to 60. so keep all of that in mind when you pick your settings and i'll put a little graph up here to show kind of just some recommended things with a bit rate and resolution but make sure you pick one and then i'm going to keep going through the rest of these settings okay so starting off in the streaming output uh we're going to look at the encoder let's uh do it first on the nvidia encoder and we're going to keep this rescale output unchecked for now the rescaling we're actually going to do in the video setting so we'll do that in a second first we're going to look at the rate control we're going to keep this at cbr the reasoning for that is it's going to keep a constant bit rate throughout our stream you can technically do a variable bit rate here if you for some reason needed to do that that is where you would be able to change that i would not necessarily recommend it i think it's better to find a constant quality that's going to stay consistent throughout your stream and just give yourself the best quality option there so i'm going to record recommend for most people to just pick cbr uh here you're going to enter your bit rate whatever you chose in kilobits per second so enter that here as you can see for my stream i do use 6000 now for presets this is going to depend a little bit on your gpu if you have an rtx gpu i would start it off at max quality and the reasoning for that is max quality will actually give you better results overall if you have that rtx card because it's going to enable to pass encoding uh you can we can get in really nerdy terms with all of this but basically what you should know so try starting out with max quality if you're seeing a quality loss or when you try your stream if you're seeing like you know skip frames things like that then you can maybe try going into quality but i wouldn't necessarily try and go any lower than this they're both pretty efficient and quality or max quality are just going to give you a better looking stream overall profile i keep that for most people i would recommend at high um this allows you to use full hardware acceleration for better encoding so just keep that at high there are other settings you can lower um try lowering if again if you're using a lower mpc technically you can try and do that but but for most people i think high is going to be good uncheck look ahead check psycho visual tuning and then do uh gpu 0 max b frames 2 and that's what i'm gonna recommend uh for this output setting on this encoder if you're using the x264 same idea um rate control exactly the same here bitrate we would be entering six 6000 for the cpu usage keep in mind this cbr or sorry for the x 264 this would be our software encoder so it's using a lot of processing power here is where you can kind of change the thing if you're using a dual stream pc or something like that and like you can dedicate a lot of processing power you really don't need to go any slower than medium here um medium would probably be like the best quality to performance ratio after this you take an insane hit um but basically the faster you go here uh the higher um like higher up here the less cpu you're using so best quality overall medium and then you can kind of move up depending on how much cpu you're using um here right and everything else you can kind of keep here uh at none at default but as i said this is what i use here for my settings um so i'm gonna keep it there then moving on to the video tab this is where you set your resolution for base resolution uh you're going to for the most part for most people you want this to be whatever your monitor is set at so my monitor is 1920x1080 and this is where we're going to downscale so for a lot of people you're going to want to do 1280 by 720 and i think that's a good especially starting out this is a great place to be at 60 frames per second using the uh landscapes uh scaling right um i'm not gonna go too too into what all of this means uh but basically this is your downscale filter right here uh if you are getting some performance hits uh you can try bicubic but overall this one here actually doesn't do as much of a hit as you would expect for the downscale filter and in general this right here is going to be using your gpu as opposed to your cpu to downscale because it's the most efficient way to do it in this video tab as opposed to doing it up here so i recommend trying out this one first this is a setting you can try down checking if you are getting some issues on a lower end pc but yeah let's uh try that here for my personal stream i'm actually streaming um downscaling uh to 1536 by 864. they're both 16x9 aspect ratios but that's kind of what i'm working with here now we're gonna go uh back to the output settings and we're gonna start looking at audio um so this top part right here in the streaming section is gonna be the audio track that you're streaming on you're gonna put that at one now what this second part is here is this is your twitch vod track so i can enable this and have a separate track to stream on and pick a track that i can put like music or things like that on so this is something that they added to kind of give you the option to play a music track that doesn't show up on your mod i do not use this at the moment and i'll tell you why when we go over here to the audio section so twitch used to at by default have this at 160 but since they added this kind of option they've actually allowed you to now stream double this because they needed to allow more room for the second twitch vod track but so what i do instead is i basically treat this as a free audio upgrade and i move from 160 which was the max bitrate you can stream on twitch over to 320 on track one so now i'm actually streaming at a higher audio uh bitrate which is giving me overall i think better quality for recording you have some options here as well uh this would be separate from your streaming tab so if you remember you've got you know start streaming start recording here in the controls so if you wanted to record separately you can choose which encoder kind of similar uh an easiest way to probably do this is just to hit your stream encoder right there it'll keep it the same as the streaming unless you wanted to have a separate encoder so for example right now i was actually streaming over here uh recording over here to uh for the video so that's separate from my live stream but i this again same principles that we used before um so sticking with audio you've got that there 320 is what i set that up and then when we move down to the actual audio tab here uh i keep my sample bitrate at 48. now i'm using for my global audio devices a go xlr so i actually have all of this disabled and for here i'm using this broadcast remix because i'm doing a lot of this stuff externally with my mixer for you you if you are not using if you're using a usb mic and just like your regular computer audio then your desktop audio should be your default and then your mic should be your mic um pretty simple right there everything else for the most part um you can just keep all of that at um at the default settings right here uh anything else that you want to do in here you can choose like the renderer it's pretty much going to give you that one option you can pretty much leave this all at uh default the process priority you can choose and you can have this go a little bit higher so that obs is the main thing being used for your uh in the in your computer so if you want to if you're getting like certain games or kind of like dropping things you can try and put the pros process priority so it's going to prioritize obs over other things and move that over to high as well so that's another kind of option that you can do here but that's something you can kind of play around with as you're tweaking your settings okay you're a streamer now congratulations welcome to the club wow [Applause] remember um this is more of a guideline than like a definitely do every single thing that i did but it should be a start treat it as a starting point right so take all of this tweak it up or down depending on what you've got and the goal is to get as high of a quality stream as you can run yourself and get people into without sacrificing you know your gaming performance and things like that so you want to strike that kind of nice balance but that's it that's what i got for you for this one uh so if you liked what you see uh comment subscribe like all that stuff and uh follow me on twitch if you guys want to hang out i stream all the time and we do really fun content with a bunch of really cool peeps uh so come hang out with the community uh and yeah if you have any questions leave them down below i'd love to know leave me some feedback etc etc thanks so much i'll see you later why am i doing this what is this

Channel: VileShrew

Views: 14,727

Keywords: obs, settings, obs studio, streamlabs, twitch, stream, best, setting, tutorial, streaming, how to stream, open broadcaster, software, how to, quality, tutorials, vileshrew, vile, shrew, audio, video, bitrate, downscale, downscaling, resolution

Id: CjLbbRQRygQ

Length: 21min 51sec (1311 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021