How To FIX Your Laggy Twitch Stream (Best Encoder, Bitrate Settings, And More)

streaming has never been easier anyone can do it but not many people can do it right laggy footage blurry footage or maybe your game just looks like wet hot garbage today we're going to show you all the settings to make your quality amazing crisp and clear both your game your mic your webcam all of it in OBS or streamlabs on any platform you choose to use but more importantly I'll show you how to diagnose your specific problems using the magical stats panel no more Googling furiously trying random advice from random people one look at this panel and you'll instantly know what to fix we'll also cover how to run test streams without actually going live so you don't bother your audience and most importantly I will show you how to turn off Dynamic bit rate because it is the worst and I mean worst setting in the world all of that more is coming up but first thank you to our sponsor owned owned have officially done something amazing they've created an entire scene editor and integrated it for free into owned Pro this means not only can you get full overlays from webcam borders alerts labels and more set up in literally three clicks but you can also use their chatbot Auto moderator and try any of their full free overlay packs without paying anything and if you want to use literally any of the packs on their website you can upgrade from the free version to the paid and get access to their entire library and for a little extra a month also get access to all of epidemic sound gaining over 40,000 songs and 990,000 sound effects that's kind of the deal of a century so if you want to support me check out the link in the description to try out own Pro for free with their scn editor and if you want you can upgrade later thank you so much to own for supporting the channel straight out of the gate let me show you how to diagnose what type of lag you have and then I can show you where and what the best settings are for streaming on Twitch or YouTube today I'm doing most of this inside OBS because if you're having issues with lag and you aren't using OBS well that's your first mistake to fix other software such as streamlabs twitch Studio Etc aren't optimized as well as OBS and I found often increase your CPU usage by a minimum of 8% just by being open so get OBS from the link in the description and boom you've already saved a chunk of resources so there are three very common issues you'll face dropped frames skipped frames and lagged frames all of these are caused by different things and most of the time new streamers will call all types of lag just dropped frames so let's diagnose these in OBS and then we'll cover streamlabs in a second first open OBS click View and click the stats panel you will get a lot of information such as CPU usage storage space current FPS which are all helpful but the three I want to focus on are drop skipped and lagged frames which you can see here first dropped frames these are when your internet or network are having connection or stability issues imagine like you're trying to send video over the Internet through a big tube and the frames keep leaking out of the holes if you have dropped frames then to fix it you'll want to adjust your bit rate to match your stream settings or your upload speed try a more stable connection such as Ethernet or turn off a setting called Dynamic bit rate which again is literally the worst setting in the world and yes I'll show you where that is in a second next is lagged frames these are seen here and these are caused by high GPU usage which means to solve these you need to free up room on your GPU by lowering your game settings such as resolution frame rate or potentially lowering your webcam resolution at OBS from 1080p to 720p also you can generally lower your stream resolution General video settings or other encoding settings as well you can try closing other software that might be taking up your GPU resources and again I'll show you where all the settings you can change for this are in a second below that is skipped frames which are high CPU usage and again this can be fixed by lowering your resolution your general video settings other encoding settings and trying to close other software that might be taking up CPU resources or if possible you can switch to enbank or AMD encoding to utilize your GPU to encode instead of your CPU now if if you're a streamlabs user I'm sorry they removed the stats panel when they took OBS and built the streamlabs skin over it I don't know why but now you only have the notification bar if you look in the bottom left you'll see a small graph button click this and here you can see dropped frames but it won't tell you anything else unless an issue already occurs so if you get lagged or skipped frames it will tell you after the problem has occurred personally if I ever have an issue while streaming I check these two locations first but I will also open my task manager to help diagnose what is actually taking up my CPU or GPU resources but with that now you've diagnosed your type of lag let's cover where the best settings are now I know a lot of videos just give you a bunch of specific settings to copy without explaining in detail why but I hope you'll forgive me as I've always said I hated my math teachers for doing this to me so instead I'm going to make this simple for beginners while also trying to make sure you don't leave this video with no idea what to change if something goes wrong if you understand what you're changing and why you'll be far more likely to get better stream quality so head to settings click video and first things first we're going to pick a resolution now personally I stream 1920 x 1080p on both my base canvas and my output the difference between these two settings is essentially base canvas is your preview window size inside OBS or streamlabs and the output is what your final video size is going to be when it goes to your stream the two main resolutions you'll pick between are 1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720 these days 1080p tends to be the standard but if you're on a low-end computer 720p will be a better option for you so if you find your OBS struggling later thanks to the stats panel and task manager you can come back here and drop the output to 720p that way scaling 1080 down to 720 for a lower resolution but not terrible quality below that is our FPS or frames per second you'll set this to either 30 or 60 most of the time however if you're say Australian like myself European or another country that uses what's called pal you might want your FPS to be set to 25 or 50 depending on where you're sending the footage I'm in Australia and still use 30 to 60 because it doesn't matter most of the time anymore as it's all going to YouTube streams or twitch streams with that we're moving on to our output personally I use advanced mode but if you're experiencing lag you can solve all of this with just the simple settings so if we're doing this in the simplest form let's start with bit rate this will determine most of your stream's quality there is a link in the description to an article by twitch and another by YouTube to show you bit rate settings for different resolutions personally if you're doing a fast action gameplay on Twitch I recommend 720p output and between 4,500 to 6,000 bit rate if the gameplay is slower and lacks a lot of movement then 1080P and 6,000 bit rate will work just as well twitch bit rate is technically soft capped at 6,000 and hard capped at 8,000 1,000 bits is 1 megabit so you need an upload speed that can handle the bit rate you set plus wiggle room so for 6,000 bit rate around 10 to 12 megabits to stream at the soft cap safely if you're not sure what your upload speed is go to speedtest.net Linked In the description and click test as long as this comes up saying you have 10 to 12 steady you should be okay for a YouTube stream you're going to want a much higher bit rate than twitch both because YouTube has better technology behind it so you'll have better quality but also because it transcodes every stream this means you'll need a higher bit rate to make it look nice but this is a good thing because your viewers can watch at lower resolutions no matter what size of a Creator you are twitch will only let big creators have transcoding whereas YouTube gives it to everyone for 1080p 60 frames per second I'd recommend 12,000 bit rate and 720p 60 FPS I'd recommend 7,000 to 8,000 bit rate but again your own internet speed and stability will control this so keep an eye on dropped frames and use the fact sheets in the description as a further guide now you won't need to touch audio bit rate most likely so we'll keep moving now for encoder this used to be so simple but it's gotten a lot more confusing as more graphics cards have become decent and OBS has added more options to itself so I'll try to keep it simple for you by focusing just on three nank h264 x264 and A1 to make this straightforward if you're using any Nvidia card past the GTX 600 which was released in 2012 so likely any Nvidia card being used on a semi new pc you're going to pick nank h264 this means you're using a special chip on the graphics card to encode the footage this chip is separate and just used solely for encoding and decoding so it won't affect your gameplay performance and if you're using a graphics card from before that likely use x264 which will be using your CPU to encode and decode finally ab1 is a newer encoder and I'll be honest I am still learning the best case for using it and I'll link directly a video in the description by epos Vox who has done extensive testing if you want a deep dive now if you're using an AMD card instead of an Nidia card there will be AMD encoders here instead of Nidia obviously so pick those if you want to encode on your AMD GPU encoder preset is below this if your PC can handle it you can set this to be best quality and then use the stats panel to see if it's too intense for your CPU or GPU and L lower it until you see the issues resolved that is all the simple settings done but we need to turn off the dreaded Dynamic bit rate the worst setting in the world so stick around still while I quickly cover some other advanced settings for you if you decide to use advanced settings because you're an overconfident fool a lot of this will look exactly the same as simple and work exactly the same as well the key difference to note here is that you'll be given access to a different rate control setting but as a streamer you have to leave this on CBR because twitch doesn't play nice with other rate controllers the other difference is it gives you access to the twitch VOD track which buite what you think doesn't protect you from copyright strikes and it just over complicates things so don't use it the two articles I linked about bit rate in the description actually cover the advance settings recommended as well but I hope most of you will stick to simple especially if you're struggling with lag so before I show you how to turn off Dynamic bit rate let's quickly show you how to run a test stream to Twitch or YouTube and how to test and select which twitch server is the best for you cuz this is actually something you can manually pick first to run a test stream on Twitch it is pretty simple open OBS go to settings go to stream and click enable Bend with test mark mode click apply and then go live as normal open up a game chat talk test alerts do everything that you would do in a normal stream but make sure you keep the stats panel open and also your task manager open make sure you're paying attention to both of these none of what you're doing right now is going out to your viewers it's being intercepted by twitch and simply used as a test if you're streaming to YouTube you'll need to make a scheduled stream obviously we've already covered that in several videos so you make it and then set it to unlisted this lets you not only test your stream and look at the stats panel like twitch does but also Al gives you an unlisted stream VOD on YouTube so you can review the quality later now if you think that your internet is perfect and none of the dropped frames or issues are caused by you then it could be twitch's fault or in my case I spent 6 months struggling with internet issues because my neighborhood had a massive fault no one else noticed it except for the guy trying to upload 6,000 to 10,000 bit rates a second steady this next tool literally let me diagnose it before my ISP could it's called twitch test and it lets you test all the servers near you easily I'll link it in the description you can go there download it extract the zip file and then run it it's going to need your stream key so go to your Twitch dashboard settings stream and copy the primary key paste this in here and do not share this with anyone at all if you give this to someone they can stream to your channel over on the right click test duration I like to set this to medium because I'm impatient but some smarter friends use long this is how long the tool tests each server usually 30 to 60 seconds of testing is enough to tell you if there are issues next select your region either manually by clicking these boxes or use the quick select I'm Australian so I say other now click run and it will begin testing so wait patiently when the results are in you want a maxed out bandwidth of 10,000 plus you'll want the shortest RT or round trip time and the best quality which maxes out at 100 once you know that you'll go to OBS open settings click the stream click the server and rather than automatic select the specific server that was best for you in twitch test I want to shout out nutty I'm pretty sure I learned about this tool from him 4 years ago now so credit to him with all of this done congratulations you can not only diagnose your lag thanks to the stats panel and test streams but you'll also be able to adjust your settings your game and more to help solve the problem you're dealing with but for the love of God whatever you do make sure you go to settings Advance scroll to network and finally turn off Dynamic pit rate this tool is meant to detect when your internet connection is limited and automatically reduce your bit rate to compensate rather than dropping frames the issue is it doesn't work any tiny Spike will cause this to activate and tank your quality I've alt tabbed into and out of games and for some reason it has tanked my bit rate down to nothing and then it just causes a cascading series of issues constantly recognizing itself as an internet issue and tanking itself further and repeating with that turned off and your settings all fixed up you should click here to learn how to separate all your audio sources carefully for better audio quality I'll see you guys next week

Channel: Stream Scheme

Views: 8,308

Keywords: How To FIX a Laggy Stream, How to fix dropped frames, How to fix lagged frames, How to fix skipped frames, How to fix your laggy stream, Fix Twitch Dropped Frames, OBS Bitrate Issues, Troubleshooting Bitrate, Dropped Frames, Twitch Stream Lagging, Twitch Bitrate, OBS Dropped Frames, Twitch Dropped Frames, Fix Twitch Lag, How to fix Twitch Stream, Fix Twitch Stream, Twitch Buffering, Fix OBS Twitch Stream, best encoder settings for twitch, best bitrate settings for Twitch

Id: RIgjNIh0b4g

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024