Question / Help Best Minecraft Settings for My PC?

zent

New Member
I want to stream minecraft at really high quality.

Here's my specs:
i7 4770K
GTX 660
8GB RAM

5Upload Speed

What can I do to maximize my minecraft quality?
 

Kharay

Member
zent said:
What can I do to maximize my minecraft quality?
Nothing much really, Minecraft is really challenging to capture properly. I've been toying with it for quite a while now and still haven't gotten it to look 100% right. I'm close, I would say my capture of it is very nice but it's still not completely game-like.

Anyhow, in what resolution do you play it and do you play it windowed or fullscreen? It would help to specify what settings should work well for you.

And could you run an upload test here? Be sure to pick a server near yourself (and do the same in OBS once you start streaming). Just to know what your real world upload speed is like.
 

zent

New Member
Kharay said:
zent said:
What can I do to maximize my minecraft quality?
Nothing much really, Minecraft is really challenging to capture properly. I've been toying with it for quite a while now and still haven't gotten it to look 100% right. I'm close, I would say my capture of it is very nice but it's still not completely game-like.

Anyhow, in what resolution do you play it and do you play it windowed or fullscreen? It would help to specify what settings should work well for you.

And could you run an upload test here? Be sure to pick a server near yourself (and do the same in OBS once you start streaming). Just to know what your real world upload speed is like.

I play it windowed and default size preferably. Upload is 4.78 it goes up and around 5 so from what I've heard, it should be enough. Do you have any quality tests I can maybe see?
 

Kharay

Member
http://www.twitch.tv/kharay1977/b/437186298 -- http://pastebin.com/3fgEMxWQ

Yes, some of the settings are weird but they work for me in most titles. In fact, Minecraft is the only title that doesn't like 90+% game like with them. As I said, it is a very challenging title to get to look exactly right; the large, flat surfaces (such as water surfaces, large grassy areas, etc.) tend to mess things up a bit but I know of no Minecraft stream that looks 99% game like, to be honest.

In fact, most look far worse than that example of mine.
 

zent

New Member
Kharay said:
http://www.twitch.tv/kharay1977/b/437186298 -- http://pastebin.com/3fgEMxWQ

Yes, some of the settings are weird but they work for me in most titles. In fact, Minecraft is the only title that doesn't like 90+% game like with them. As I said, it is a very challenging title to get to look exactly right; the large, flat surfaces (such as water surfaces, large grassy areas, etc.) tend to mess things up a bit but I know of no Minecraft stream that looks 99% game like, to be honest.

In fact, most look far worse than that example of mine.

Which settings are the ones that mainly set the quality? I feel like my quality isn't sharp and crisp. I feel like it's a little smudgy.
 

Kharay

Member
Resolution, Downscale Resolution (the filter specifically, Lanczos) and the bitrate. Do you have a VOD example and a log to go with it?
 

alpinlol

Active Member
looks fine to me tho you could try something like 3k bitrate or lower the quality a bit (8-9) since your bitrate looks 2k'ish and only starts to lose quality when you move a lot.
 

Kharay

Member
Looks mostly fine and actually better than some other Minecraft streams; I do however agree it could look a bit better. Could you make another recording at those settings and then paste a log for it? Just to see if there are some specific settings you have that we might improve upon, just to make it look ever so slightly better?
 

zent

New Member
Kharay said:
Looks mostly fine and actually better than some other Minecraft streams; I do however agree it could look a bit better. Could you make another recording at those settings and then paste a log for it? Just to see if there are some specific settings you have that we might improve upon, just to make it look ever so slightly better?

Quick question. What's the difference between CBR and Quality at 10?
 

Kharay

Member
CBR -- Constant Bitrate, which is exactly what it says; the bitrate that OBS streams at will mostly hover around the number specified.

Quality 10 -- It's just the maximum quality you can assign to VBR (Variable Bitrate); the Twitch.TV staff prefers people streaming at CBR actually. Which is why I recommend it to most people. VBR has the potential to look (slightly) better but it also has the potential to cause traffic spikes for yourself, for Twitch and for the viewers. What VBR will do is use little bitrate if the scene is somewhat static and it will spike in bitrate whenever the scene becomes more active or complex.

In my case you could call it an experiment; as I said, I've tried numerous different combination of settings in an attempt to get Minecraft to look better and these somewhat specific settings I arrived at (it's not just the VBR, it's everything, including the custom buffer size, the x264 custom parameters) seem to have peaked its streaming quality for me.

Although I probably will end up going back to CBR, since it's recommended by Twitch. And I'd rather not be another reason why its service has dropped sharply over these past few months -- You see, it is a lot easier to load balance CBR streams than it is to load balance VBR streams. Even if the CBR streams have a constant throughput that is higher, it is mostly constant. So can easily be balanced out across the entire infrastructure. VBR streams are unpredictable, erratic. Which makes it far harder for the system to deal with. Which is part of why Twitch has been performing less than stellar lately.

Quick question, long-winded answer... :P
 

zent

New Member
Ah okay. I'll keep messing around with the settings and hopefully I get something good out of it.
 
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