Question / Help 3 Seperate OBS Camera Instances - Which CPU?

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ztillow

New Member
Hey there! New to OBS so I apologize in advance for my lack of knowledge. Fairly simple question here:

3 cameras, 3 capture cards, 3 cams in YouTube live, 3 instances of OBS. How beefy of a CPU do I need. Most info I’ve seen is obviously in regards to gaming but my cpu won’t be taxed with that- just 3 camera feeds. Is a Ryzen 1700/ i7 8700k enough or do I need to go threadripper/ i9? Next question is upload bandwidth...I have 15mbps upload -> my gut says I’m going to have to downscale to 720p30 with that limitation- am I right?

Thanks!
-Zac
 
Z

ztillow

New Member
So if I’m following correctly, even if I got a 16 core/ 32 thread cpu it couldn’t handle 3 1080/720 camera feeds?
 
A

Alaistair Deacon

New Member
I have 3 Avermedia Live Gamer Exteremes running HDMI feeds from 3 1080 cameras into OBS - and using OBS as a vision mixer. I can create scenes with all 3 cameras simultaneously and logo overlays and record at 1080 30fps on my HP Spectre X360, Gen 8 i7, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD
 
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ztillow

New Member
That makes sense, however I can’t switch between streams in a scene - I need a seperate stream for each feed, hence 3 instances of OBS...
 
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Alaistair Deacon

New Member
Not sure I'm following. I have three sources - mixed as different scenes - going out to a single youtube live stream (I use to stream live video of our church services). I'm not sure why you want three separate streams going out? Simultaneoulsy? To three different sreaming services? In that case you may need three instances, but then you may run into performance issues encoding that many simultaneous outputs? But I'm not sure I'm getting your use case.

Even with me processing 3 1080 inputs - I was testing my laptop to the max, I created a scene with the three 1080 sources tiled, with logo/channel overlays - outputting to projector and record/stream - and I had to move from the standard x264 encoder to the QuickSync encoder to get a stable 30fps
 
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ztillow

New Member
Now I need to explain more so you can follow correctly. Also, thanks for your help!

I’m going to be streaming a tournemant match, the top 3 games will simultaneously be streaming using YouTube live’s event settings, where you can add more cams as they provide you with more stream keys. In the viewer window there is a drop down for cam 1, cam2, etc. Switching the streams back and forth is a hard no unfortunately.

That being said, CPU requirements?
 
Harold

Harold

Active Member
You're going to be best off with 3 separate computers for the separate feeds.
Trying to get that to run on one computer is going to run into pci-e bandwidth limits.
 
Harold

Harold

Active Member
Desktop i5 or laptop i7 from haswell generation (4xxx) and newer or equivalent processing power. Prefer desktop and prefer current generation as much as possible.
Intel Integrated graphics is fine if you're not running games on the computers at the same time.
 
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Alaistair Deacon

New Member
Ah - I understand now. I didn't know youtube could allow you multiple streams for the viewer to select (a bit like interactive TV selecting the cars on Formula 1).

I would agree that 3 separate machines my be the best way to go - you'd also ned to make sure your upload bandwidth is enough to deliver those 4 streams (I normally use 6,000 upload on 1080 for a single stream - so you are looking at needing about 18,000 - which is quite high)
 
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