BITRATE Explained | Best Settings in OBS

what is bitrate if you're a live streamer or you use OBS or a program like it to record video you need to understand how to adjust bitrate for streaming or recording so that you can control the quality and also the performance of your live stream or your recorded file it's not the easiest thing to explain but I'm going to try to do it in the least technical way possible so that it's just easy to understand and then you can walk away from this video knowing how to set the perfect bit rate for what you're doing so there's a metaphor that I like to use that I think explains bitrate picture a sink in your home now the final output of the water coming out of your sink is basically two factors the first one is the width of the pipe that's servicing the faucet and then the second thing is how open or close you adjust the knob to allow water to flow through we can think of a data stream coming out of your streaming software out to the live platform or the amount of data going into your recording file when you record in in the same way so let's start with the metaphor of the width of the pipe that's serving the faucet so you have your scene and within your scene you have all these sources uh webcam and game capture and all kinds of stuff making your layout and what people see you also have your microphone and audio sources and those also contribute to the total data load in order to present your scene you may have a really high quality microphone and be using stereo you may have a 4K game or video capture really high quality webcam and you may have set the properties of some of those sources to capture a lot of information so in simple terms let's consider that the most amount of data that you've placed into a scene and could go out into a live stream or a file that's the width of your pipe now we'll move over to the second component of the metaphor which is the handle that you adjust to open or close the amount of water that comes out of that faucet ultimately that's the final output that your audience gets when they're watching your stream or they're watching your video file if you open it a little bit then only some of the total data will make its way out to the viewer if you open it all the way then all of that data tries to get out now that could be actually pretty harmful if you try to open the faucet all the way up I'll explain that a little bit later and how to avoid that I'm also going to show you OBS in just a second on where to set your bit rate and other things that you need to also set and consider but the basic Point here is that the bit rate that you set is basically how much you decide to open or close that to determine the performance and quality of what finally gets to your audience or in your recording file hopefully that makes it not sound too crazy and if you're like some sort of video expert and I've messed up some part of the explanation please mention it in the comments chance but hopefully my explanation just kind of makes it practical so how do you go in OBS Studio set your bit rate and ensure that other settings are really optimized for performance and quality so first we'll open up settings and once we're here there's a couple tabs that we need to pay attention to the main one is the output Tab and in there you're going to see a field for video bitrate but I actually want you to first go to output mode at the top and change that to Advanced there's a lot of reasons for that that may become obvious as we go through this now we have a streaming Tab and a separate recording tab because you may want those settings to be different so if we go through streaming first one of the things that you want to check is your encoder that is basically whether or not you're using software through your CPU or Hardware if you have a dedicated graphics card and if you do have a dedicated card you want to set it to that so that your CPU is not trying to run your whole computer and process your graphics that's what a graphics card is for so click that drop down and if you see something with like an H then that's suggesting it's hardware and you'll probably see the name of the brand of your graphics card mine is an Nvidia so I want to select that now you're going to see a whole bunch of additional settings because your graphics card is capable of a few more things so here's your bit rate field and that's where you're going to enter your bit rate for live streaming because we're in the streaming tab now remember when we talked about how much you want to open or close that's bitrate and there's actually one factor that I did not mention in the sort of faucet metaphor that's actually super important and that is your internet service provider and how much upload is available to you now how do we check that really easy let's go open a browser it can be Firefox or Chrome or Edge or whatever you use and we're going to type in speedtest.net now before you hit go you probably want to close as many applications that are consuming internet bandwidth as possible so close any other tabs and browsers that you've got going going on hopefully you don't do this while you're live streaming and that way you have as little data consumption happening while you do this test so really easy you're just going to click go and you're going to let this thing run and it's going to check three things first it's going to check your ping which is just how quickly a piece of data goes out and comes back to you then it's going to check your download rate of what is the maximum speed you can download something get something from the internet to you and then it's going to check your upload rate which is how quickly you can send data from you out to the internet now this is going to be expressed in Megs basically that's a thousand bits so six Megs would be 6 000 bit rate now I have a fiber internet connection here at home so my download and upload rates are pretty awesome everybody's gonna have something different because we all have different service providers and different packages or plans basically what you're doing by checking this is to figure out where your ceiling is for live streaming which is your upload so whatever upload number is here is basically the maximum amount of data you can try to push out without running into performance issues like buffering lag and stuff like that now you need to know that ceiling because if you try to set your bit rate higher than your ceiling you're going to have issues you're going to lag your stream is going to buffer it's not going to be great so you need to set your bit rate below that ceiling and I recommend that you actually leave a gap so let's say for argument's sake that your upload rate is 6 Megs well you don't want to set your bit rate to 6000 because you're touching that ceiling and the data output you're going to have on your live stream is actually going to fluctuate a little bit so when it fluctuates above six it's going to suck so you want to leave a gap I would say if your speed test is telling you you have six Megs of upload then you probably want to set your bit rate to like four at Max 5000 because now you have a one to two thousand ceiling Gap to account for any fluctuations in data and prevent yourself from having occasional lag but again this is going to be different for everybody if I streamed with a 6000 bit rate but I have a 715 Meg upload ceiling I'm more than likely going to have no problems now there's another thing that's worth understanding which is that various platforms will have a data ceiling of their own so for example if you're streaming to Twitch twitch can only receive a maximum of a 6 000 bit rate so if you were to set your bit rate above 6000 in OBS it's not going to contribute to any improved quality for your audience that is their ingesting maximum so what you'd be doing is only harming Yourself by potentially running into performance issues by trying to exceed that ceiling so if you're going to stream to Twitch the maximum you should ever set your bitrate to in OBS is 6000 but that doesn't mean just go ahead and put six thousand in OBS because like I said you have to know your internet speed and you have to know where the ceiling is at if your ceiling is four Megs and you put it at six you're gonna have issues so now let's return to OBS and actually decide on some settings in here is the default and like I said if let's say for example you have 10 Megs or better upload rate then you're streaming to Twitch they might as well set this to 6000 and then do a test stream and see how it goes if you run into performance issues you can start by reducing your bit rate I would say maybe reduce it by 2 000 at a time so if you're lagging out at six go down to four and see how it goes and you can actually adjust bitrate while you're live you don't have to go offline there are other settings in OBS that you would have to go offline in order to change but bitrate is not one of them it will update in real time time and you'll start to see an adjustment in performance after a few seconds or so another thing to keep in mind is if you're streaming and gaming from a laptop they just don't have very powerful graphics cards and sometimes you can only choose software as the encoder so it's not very powerful and you may want to actually start off even if you have a great upload rate for your internet service at a lower bit rate like a 1500 or a 2500 yeah it doesn't sound great but performance is more important than quality an audience can handle watching a lower resolution stream but they cannot handle watching a stream that lags buffers and crashes alright so the next thing you want to look at here after deciding on a bit rate is your preset and that's basically saying what does OBS prioritize when making decisions about how to process your data is it going to prioritize quality right the the visual quality but that may mean that it might sacrifice performance in order to try to give you that quality I like to actually set performance when I'm live streaming because like I said stability to me and an audience is probably going to be a lot more important than quality now let's talk about recording we'll go into the recording tab there's a lot of decisions we can make here and we're talking about deciding on a bit rate and other settings with recording really ultimately what we're thinking about are two things file size of that recording and then the quality in that recording right how sharp how many pixels stuff like that um just how clean and beautiful it looks now one major thing that I highly recommend if you're going to use OBS to record is for recording format to actually use MKV instead of changing this to MP4 yes setting it to MP4 is going to make that file immediately usable you can play it you can edit it but if you select MP4 here and then the power goes out or OBS crashes unfortunately your recording file is going to be gone so what if you were streaming recording for like four or five hours and it was really important you're recording a great YouTube video your power goes out file is gone and you have to start over MKV however will save wherever you were in your recording process so your power goes out you're gonna get a file even though everything crashed that has all of that data up to that point now you have to convert MKV files after you're done recording I'm going to show you how to do that you can also do that in OBS so again we want to check encoder right are we using software to encode like this x264 where your CPU is doing the work or are we going to use Hardware you should always select Hardware if you can and then down here is your bit rate here you don't have to think about your ISP and your upload speeds because this is for recording it's not going out somewhere else it's gonna write a file on your computer so this is like I said the maximum amount of quality visually that will exist in your recording and you can kind of think of it as the amount of pixels within a frame of your recording basically more is better but the higher you set this bit rate the larger your file size is going to be for that recording and you want to make sure you don't set this insanely High because you may run out of disk space while you're recording if it's a huge file if you're going to do 1080p where your canvas is 1920x1080 we'll look at canvas settings in a second there's kind of a range where increasing your bit rate no longer results in an improvement in quality that's perceivable by the viewer of your video and the other thing to think about too is that even video platforms where you upload your video file have maximums just like streaming platforms do so if you're going to go on YouTube for example you can go onto their help page and you can look up what that maximum is and then I just recommend you set your bitrate to that if that's the platform that you're recording for because why exceed that if they're just going to scale it back down if you're really concerned about file size then do some test recordings and change the bit rate from one to another and then see what the resulting file size is difference between those two bit rates and then make a decision that's practical for you again you have a preset selection where you can choose quality or performance and that's really all about whether or not your Hardware is really strong then you can set it for Quality if you have weaker Hardware you're on a laptop or something like that you may want to set up the performance that way you don't have chop and lag and drop frames in your recording because there's nothing you can do about that in editing that stutter is in your file I personally use performance even though I have a really great graphics card because ultimately again stability in the visual to me is more important than quality so if we go to the video tab now we're gonna see the base canvas resolution which is the size and quality of these preview screen in OBS where you build your scene and the output scaled resolution is the last little bit that OBS is going to do to your data on the way out in terms of the physical size so whether it goes out to your stream or it goes into a recording file that's going to be the physical size of the window now if you want a 1080 file you need to change this because the default usually an OBS sets to 720. you want 1080 if that's what you're doing but you have to check to make sure that these match so they're both 1920x1080. now I mentioned if you're recording and you're going to use MKV as the file format which I highly recommend you're going to have to convert that file to MP4 through OBS or somewhere else but it's convenient to just do an OBS if you go to Advanced and you go to this recording area you can actually check this box that says automatically remux to MP4 so when you hit stop recording you're going to see a window pop-up that's going to convert that file for you and then there you have it now you have the original as a backup and you have the MP4 which is immediately viewable uploadable editable all that stuff but I finished recording where did my file go if you go back to the output Tab and you go to the recording tab you can see the path that the file is going to save to and you can click browse and change the destination make sure you hit apply and ok now that you understand bitrate you should also understand how to improve the quality of your webcam and your microphone so make sure you check out these two videos and I'll see you around foreign

Channel: OBS with No BS

Views: 18,078

Keywords: bitrate, obs studio, obs, what is bitrate, bitrate for streaming, bitrate for recording, how to decide bitrate, obs settings

Id: LfZIn6AykKc

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022