Question / Help Bad bluriness streaming @480p. Is better internet the solution?

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mcswift101

New Member
I recently noticed that my stream gets very blurry/ pixelated when I play any game where the scene changes often. I have crappy internet, so the highest I can stream at is about 700 kb/s (I know that this is a bit on the low side for 30 fps and 480p, which is what I stream at).

Here are some examples of the problem:
http://www.twitch.tv/mcswift101/c/4291873
You can see in the above highlight how things get much less blurry at night when I'm not moving around.
http://www.twitch.tv/mcswift101/b/530864395
If you go to about 3:20:00 in the above VOD, you'll see that things get REALLY pixelated when I play Borderlands. I realise that this is normal, because there is constant motion in FPSes and thus what's in view is constantly changing.

My question is simple: will a better internet connection (about 3mbps upload) certainly solve this problem? I have read several threads on this same topic, but I'm still not sure what the source of the problem is exactly. I know that I can try putting x264 down to fast or medium to improve things, but is that the best solution? Or is the ability to stream @ 720p the what will make the most noticeable difference?

I realise that there is always SOME bluriness, and that the more motion there is, the worse it is. I can live with that. I just want to know if I can get it down to an acceptable/ watchable level.

Here is a log file showing my specs and settings, if that is helpful: https://gist.github.com/077f4c1c1d283bb4f1b8

Thanks in advance!
 
Xphome

Xphome

Member
The solution is higher bitrate (or lowering resolution/FPS/preset), 3Mbit/s would definitely help.
 
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mrasmus

Forum Moderator
A higher bitrate will definitely improve blurriness. 480p can look *very* sharp; a good way to test this would be to set up a local recording at a higher bitrate, and do high-motion stuff to see the difference yourself.

The reason that bitrate matters here is that the more motion there is on the screen, the more data the encoder needs to fit into your bitrate. High motion = a lot of bits changing = a lot to communicate, but the pipe you've given it to communicate through is very small. Depending on what you're streaming, you may want to make the jump down to 360p and see how you like that quality. But yes, a higher bitrate will definitely fix blurriness at 480p; 3k upstream should be able to do 720p30 as well, even, if you want to explore that possibility (again, try out local recordings to see how they'll look in practice -- that'll put mostly the same stresses on your machine as streaming, but you can see what things'll look like without actually having the connection to support it.
 
Hopewithinchaos

Hopewithinchaos

Forum Moderator
That Bitrate is absolutely the problem. 600 kbps for a 30 fps stream, Especially of a high motion action game? Yeah, even at the lower resolution you definitely need higher than that. 3 Mbps up will definitely do the trick. You'd be set, pretty much.
 
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