- I'm getting a lot of comments from people who are struggling
with their stream settings. They don't know what
bitrate they should choose, what resolution they should choose, if they should choose
Hardware NVENC encoding or Software X264 encoding. They don't know why everyone says that your viewers internet
speed also matters. Well, I will go over all those things and much more in this video. (upbeat music) What's up everyone and
welcome to the Streamlabs OBS master course playlist. This is a playlist in
which I explain everything you need to know about Streamlabs OBS. If you're not in it, you can click the link in the description and watch this video from there. And then after this video,
you might find something else that you want to learn
about Streamlabs OBS. Once a video in this
playlist gets outdated, I make a new one and I just replace it so you can always find
up to date information in this playlist. Right now, we will go over all
the Streamlabs OBS settings and I will tell you
which of these settings are very important. and how you can make
your stream look good. But first, I would like to thank
our sponsor for this video, which is OWN3D.tv. They have the best stream
graphics in the industry, there's no doubt about that. They have a big library
of stream packages, but also separate elements
like alerts, webcam borders, panels, stinger transitions,
everything you can wish for. You should definitely
check out their website if you're in the market
for a stream package because they look amazing. They are fully animated,
fully customizable, and they also have a
previewer on their website that lets you test how the
overlay will look on your stream. You can trigger alerts,
trigger transitions, etc. to really see how it will
look once you buy the package. All the packages also come
with a quick import file so you can just open that
file with Streamlabs OBS and everything will be set up. You just need to add your gameplay, your webcam and you're all set. If you're interested in stream graphics, definitely check out their website. The link is in the description. Now it's important that
you don't skip too much during this video, and I'm not saying this for my watch time, but I'm saying this because some settings are pretty crucial, and if you miss them, it
might affect your performance. So just follow along with me, and I will go over
everything that's important. And the first crucial thing is that you need to open Streamlabs
OBS as administrator, so make sure you just left click it. Let's search for Streamlabs
OBS that you left click it and then you run as administrator. Another thing you can do,
let's spin it to the taskbar, and then just right click it, then right click Streamlabs OBS again and go to Properties. Then on the bottom, click on Advanced and then check this box
run as administrator. Click on OK. And then if you just click Streamlabs OBS, it will ask you if you want
to run it as administrator. My screen will be black for you right now, but I will just click Yes, and then Streamlabs OBS will open. And this little thing can fix
a lot of performance issues. So right now, let's go to the settings because that's what
this video is all about. The first thing in the
General tab is right here, you can click on Delete,
Cache and Restart. If you are playing with these settings and they are all over the place, or if your stream stops working
and you really can't fix it, then right here, you
can delete your cache, restart the program. You will lose a lot of things, but you will be able to
start from scratch again. And in some cases, that will allow you to get your stream back online. When we scroll down a bit right here, you see that you can also
enable automatically record when streaming, and this is something that a lot of people asked me, if you can record while streaming. And yes, you can. You can just record and
stream at the same time. But remember that if
you have a slow computer and your computer is already struggling to stream and game at the same time, well, if you record at the same time too, you will probably get a crash. So make sure that your PC can handle it, but if it can, then you yes, you can record and
stream at the same time. And by checking this box, you will automatically
record when you go live. I will disable it right now. And then this is not for
the performance settings. So let's go to the Stream tab. And right here, you can
link your streaming service. Now I linked Twitch right here. But if you're streaming
with something else, you can also follow this video, because these settings will
at least at a basic level work for all the streaming services. There are some minor
things you could change while streaming on YouTube,
or streaming on Facebook. But in general, these settings
will definitely give you a good looking stream on all platforms. So then the Output tab, this
is the most important tab but I will first go over all
the minor settings right here. If I forget it in a minute, make sure you are in the
Advanced Mode right here because this simple
mode has less settings. Okay, but let's skip this for now. Let's go to the Audio tab. And right here you need
to link your microphones, so mic auxiliary device one. This is my audio interface that is the nic that I'm
recording with right now. So just select your mic right here, and then the desktop
audio will be at default, and this works just fine. Then the Video tab right
here, we will also skip it because together with the Output tab, these are the things that will determine your stream quality. But first, the Hotkey tab. This is straight forward, you can add a bunch of hotkeys right here, read through it and see what you need. Then the Advanced Step, right here you don't
need to change anything but know that you can add
a stream delay right here. If someone is trolling you on stream because he can see your positioning game or something like that, it doesn't happen a lot,
but it definitely happens, then you can add a stream delay right here to prevent things like
that from happening, and there's nothing that's
important right here. Then the Game Overlay, this is an experimental
feature, we will just skip this. Scene Collections. In the intro I told you that our sponsor has a quick input file. And well, this is where you
can import things like that. You can just click Import Overlay File, and then search for something that will import a whole
overlay all at once. You can also export an overlay file. So if you have a whole setup right here and you want to export it
to import it somewhere else, or to send it to someone
or something like that, you can just click on Export Overlay File and then save your whole overlay
somewhere on your computer. Okay, then next, the Modifications. You can just leave this at default. Then the Appearance tab right here, you can change to light mode right here or to dark mode by selecting Night. And of course, that's
what most people will do. Then the Face Masks, we will skip this. And Remote Control, this is pretty handy. You can download this
Streamlabs eck application, I think that's the name, I will put it on screen
if it's something else. And with that application, you can just scan this QR code right here, on the screen and that will allow you to control Streamlabs OBS with your phone. You just position your
phone in front of you, and then you can just swap scenes by clicking them on your phone. And that's really handy. It's a budget version of
the Elgato Stream Deck. But it works. You can mute certain sources like your music or your microphone, you can swap scenes
like I already told you. So it's really handy. So now it's time to go to the Video tab. And right here, you need
to select your resolution that you will stream in. Now before doing that,
we need to determine what resolution we will stream in. And this goes hand in
hand with the bitrate which you can see in the
Output tab right here. And of course, before setting
those and everything else up, we need to determine what exact quality we want to stream in. So the first thing when doing
that is doing a speed test. And let's do it really quickly. So I will go to Google Chrome and then go to speedtest.net, okay. It fills out automatically. Let's click on Go. So actually, while it's doing the test, I can show you why we
want to do a speed test. So let's see open a new tab and then search for
Twitch and Coding Chart. Let's open the first thing that pops up. And right here you can see
a bunch of stream settings. And which of these you choose,
depends on a few things. It depends on your internet speed, it depends on the power of your computer, and it also depends on your
viewers internet speed. Now, why does your viewers
internet speed matter? Well, it's because of how streaming works. So when you are streaming a game, you are sending your footage to the streaming servers
to the Twitch servers. Then when someone is watching your stream, they are downloading your
video from the Twitch servers. And of course, if some of your viewers have a low internet speed, they will have trouble with downloading a high quality stream from the servers. So because of that, you want to stream any
quality that looks good, but it's not too high
because then some people will not be able to download your stream because the file size or the
bitrate will just be too high. Now of course Twitch has something that's called transcoding, and it's just allowing viewers to lower the quality of the
stream that they are watching in case they have a slow internet speed. And this would fix all of our problems. This would allow us to just stream in whatever quality we want, because viewers with a slow internet speed can lower the quality. But the problem is that not everyone gets these transcoding options. Partners are guaranteed to get it, but affiliates and just Twitch streamers that are not affiliated yet are not guaranteed to
get transcoding options on their stream. So if you just stream
in the highest settings, which is as we see
right here, 1080p 60 fps and a bitrate of 6,000
kilobits per second, while you're streaming look amazing, but maybe not everyone
will be able to watch it because if transcoding
options aren't available for you that day, then people will not be
able to lower the quality. So because of that, a lot
of streamers will stream in a lower quality, like
720p 60fps or 720p 30fps, because then they can
stream in a lower bitrate and this will allow everyone
to watch their stream. Of course, there are people who are saying that this is unnecessary, because in this day and age, people's internet speed is
strong enough to download it, except for like a few people and that you don't need to
take those people into account but that's your decision. If you don't care about the few people that will not be able to watch the stream and your PC and your internet
speed are strong enough to stream 1080p 60fps, then go ahead, use those settings while we
are setting everything up. But I will be setting up
the stream in 720p 60fps because that will be what
most people will be choosing. Okay, this was a long explanation, but I'm glad that it's out of the way and we can go back to
our speed test right now, because I'm sure it will be finished. So I see that my upload speed is, well, 19 megabits per second. Now when we go to the Twitch Chart, we see that the bitrate
is in kilobits per second. So because of this, we need
to convert our upload speed from megabits per second
to kilobits per second. And that's very easy, because it's just multiplying it by 1,000. So when I do that for my speed, I see that I have an upload speed of 19,000 kilobits per second. Then when we go to the Twitch Chart, we will see that I can stream
in whatever quality I want because my upload speed
will be fast enough. Now there's one more important thing and that's that you need to keep a margin on your upload speed. So my total upload speed is
19,000 kilobits per second. But you really need to keep
a margin of like 20% to 30% for other internet activities, like a video that's
playing on your stream, a YouTube video or people in your house that are downloading things, or watching Netflix or stuff like that. So then for my internet speed,
let's open the calculator, 19,000 kilobits per second. We will multiply it by 0.7. So that leaves me with an upload speed of 13,300 kilobits per second that I can use for streaming. And since we chose to
stream in 720p 60fps, I will need 4,500. So that will definitely work for me. If your result right here, which is multiplying your
upload speed by 1,000 and then multiplying it by 0.7, if this result is lower
than the 4,500 we need to stream in 720p 60fps, then that's very bad for your stream. You can lower it and then stream in 2,000 kilobits per second and try to make it look so much good. But it will be harsh for your stream. And also if your internet
speed is slower than this, then probably the upload
volume that you're getting from your internet service provider will quickly run out when streaming. But most people's internet
speed will be fast enough. So let's set up everything for 720p 60fps. Okay, let's go back to
the Stream Lab settings and I can position it right
here so we can see both. So let's go to the Video tab and the first thing we need
to select is our resolution. So our resolution will be as
we see right here, 2080 by 720. Okay, so let's select that right here and then also right here. Now, there is some debate
whether you should choose your maximum resolution, your screen resolution as the base canvas. I'm not going into detail on this, you can just select the resolution that you want to stream in and then select it for
both of these drop downs. Then the downscale filter, we will set it to
lanczos, and then the FPS as we see right here, we chose 60. If you have slow internet, choose 30. You can select 30 right here and then still choose the 4,500 bitrate, and the stream will look better because you will be able to
allocate more data to one frame because you're only sending
30 frames per second to the servers instead of 60. But if you're playing a
game with a lot of movement, then I really advise you to select 60 because it will look much
smoother for people to watch. Okay, then let's go to the Output tab. This is giving people nightmares, but let's just go through it. It's actually not that hard. So the first thing audio track, if you're having trouble
with streams being muted. people not hearing you, etc., it can be because you
selected the wrong audio track right here. Now what is this? You see that you have six
tracks to choose from. Let's click on Done and
go to Streamlabs OBS, it pops up right here. Let's go to the mixer right here, click on this settings icon. And then right here you
can see all these sources that are linked and here on the right, you can see the six audio tracks that we saw in the stream settings. So make sure that track
one is enabled right here for all these sources that
you want people to hear and then in the output
settings, right here, to make sure that you choose track one to send this to the stream. And the next option is
the encoder setting, and this is a very important one. Now what is encoding? Well, when you're streaming,
you are capturing your game, you are adding your webcam,
you are adding your graphics, your overlay, your alerts, etc. All those things will need to be converted into one small file to
then send to your stream. Well, the converting of all those thing into one small file is called encoding. And so in this encoder setting, you need to choose if
you wanna do the encoding with your graphics card,
which is Hardware NVENC for NVIDIA graphics card or with your CPU, with your processor and
this is software X264. And you definitely want
to choose Hardware NVENC because that will use a separate chip on your NVIDIA graphics card to Ruby encoding and because of that, you will see almost no
loss in gaming performance because the encoding is handled
on a whole separate chip on your graphics card. It doesn't affect your gaming performance and of course there are exceptions, people who have a very
old NVIDIA graphics card will not see this option and people who have an AMD graphics card will also not see that option. For those people, what do you need to do, well, you need to choose
software X264 encoding. Now AMD also has a version
of hardware encoding like Hardware NVENC from NVIDIA, but it's not nearly as good. And you will almost
always see better quality with Software X264. And then one extra thing for people who have an AMD graphics card, if your computer can barely handle gaming and streaming at the same time, now when you ask your processor
to also do the encoding, your PC will just crush, your stream will lag, your game will lag, it will not work. So if that's the case, if
you have an AMD graphics card and you have a really slow CPU, then you will also have
the option to choose the AMD version of NVENC,
but it won't look that good. But of course, if you
have no other option, that's what you should do. So in general, if Hardware
NVENC is available for you, choose this, if it isn't,
choose Software X264. I will now go over the
Hardware NVENC settings. If you are choosing Software X264, which is encoding with your processor, skip to this time in the video. Okay, let's set this
to Hardware NVENC new. And then make sure you do not enable Enforce streaming service encoder settings because this will overwrite most things that you're doing right here. Set your rate control to CBR, which stands for constant bitrate. And then the constant
bitrate that we are choosing is this one right here. And when we go to this chart, we go to the NVIDIA
NVENC column right here to 720p 60fps because
that's what we chose, and the bitrate should be 4,500. So let's go back to the settings
and enter that right here. Then the Keyframe Interval, let's move this right here,
it should be two seconds. So let's enter two right here. The Preset should be set to
quality as you see right here, and then the Profile, they
don't explain it right here, but just leave it at high. Disable Look Ahead, enable Psycho Visual Tuning. And then the GPU can be
zero and the Max B-frames as you see right here,
B-frames should be set to two, as it is by default. I will now go over the
Software X264 settings, so you can skip to this time
if you're not doing that. Okay, so all these Software X264 settings, let's change the encoder to Software X264, then do not enable Enforce
streaming encoder settings, do not enable Rescale Output. Set the Rate Control to CBR, and then the bitrate is dependent on which resolution you chose right here on this chart. We will go to the X264 column right here, then to 720p 60fps because
that's what we're setting up in this video. And then you see bitrate should be 4,500. So let's go to the setting
and then add that right here. Okay, do not enable
Use Custom Buffer Size, then the Keyframe Interval, as we see right here on
this chart, should be two. So that's add a two right here. And then the CPU usage, this is a setting that's
specific for Software X264. And this is pretty important. Now what you're selecting
right here is how hard your CPU will work to get a
certain amount of quality. Now, the lower you go in this list, the harder it will be for your CPU, but the better the quality will be. So if you have a really slow processor, then select ultrafast,
superfast or veryfast. The lowest quality is ultrafast, but this quality will be low. So if you can go higher, definitely select superfast or veryfast, but make sure that you leave some room for your CPU to breath. In case there's a loading
screen that's texting the CPU or a program launching on your computer or just a spike in CPU usage, you will definitely want
to prepare for that. How do you prepare for that? Well, let me show you. Just press Ctrl Shift
Escape on your keyboard, and then go to the Performance tab. Right here you will see the CPU usage. And you should test this once we're done with setting everything up. So let me quickly go to the settings. So once we're done setting everything up, you will want to launch your stream, go online, start your game, start playing, and then see on this graph right here, what your CPU usage is. If the CPU usage is around 50% or 40%, that means that you
still got a lot of room and you can change this veryfast option, for example, to faster or fast. It's also possible that
when you set it to fast, you start your stream and your game, then you will see that
your CPU jumps to 90% and that it stays at 90
for the whole duration. That's not good because that means if something ask a little
bit more of your CPU that it will peak at 100 and that you will get
some lag spikes, etc. So you definitely don't want that. You don't want to let
your CPU usage to go above like 70% or 80%, let's say 70. So adjust this right here
so that your CPU usage stays at around 70 and then you will be good. So let's set it to veryfast for now. This is the basic option, then set the Profile to high, and then you do not
need to change this tune or add anything right here. So we can just click on Done and then our settings are done Now, if there is anything
else you want to do with Streamlabs OBS, if you want to add a countdown timer, if you want to add alerts, if you want to change your overlays, etc., all those things will be found in the Streamlabs OBS master course which I will link right here. So if you want to learn
anything Streamlabs OBS related, go to that playlist, and you
will probably find it in there. Thank you so much for watching. And I hope that I will
see you in that playlist. Have a nice day.
