Question / Help Best settings for a dial up connection?

[ioi_xd]

I know I sound like a troll and I know this idea will likely be ridiculed, but I'm being completely serious. I've gotten the kb/s so low that I'm fairly confident that I can get it low enough for a dial up modem to run.

Basically, as a bit of a test, I've been configuring OBS for the past two and a half hours to be compatible with a dial up connection. I plan on eventually buying an actual 56k modem of Ebay to make this project as authentic as possible. This means I have to get OBS to stream to Twitch (any video site will do, though...) at a rate lower then 4.2 kb/s. This sounds easy on paper, but after 2 hours the closest I've come to is 40-45 kb/s. As of now, the settings I've had are the lowest OBS allows; any lower and I'm unable to stream due to encoder issues. Some settings, like the audio bitrate, are set through a dropdown and cannot be set lower.

Here's the latest test I've done. This is using the below settings and OBS broadcasts at 45 kb/s: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/482490669

 

[koala]

This was never done, even back in the old times where 56k modems were used. Back then there was no video streaming over dial up lines with that speed. If you wanted to handle video, you downloaded it or transferred it via diskette or CD, then watched offline. Computers were not powerful enough to encode live video.

The only thing in existence that comes near to realtime video transmission was isdn video conferencing. As far as I remember, that used one isdn B-Channel for voice and the other B-Channel for video. Each channel had a bandwidth of 8kb/s. The audio and video codecs were made for speeds that low, that means they were very constant in their bitrate. Probably much more constant that today's codecs.

You also have more overhead these days. The protocols and container formats of today need much more space in comparison to the payload than with ancient protocols. So if you create a low bandwidth stream today, much more bandwidth is used up just for overhead in comparison to the days where that low bandwidth was common. I didn't compute it, but it might be that the whole overhead without payload is already over the bandwidth of 56k.