Best settings for live streaming football from an airdome

O

olliraa

New Member
Hi all.

Been reading through the guides and posts, but I'm still not quite sure what would be the best possible settings to get maximum picture quality regarding the circumstances. I hope you could help me here :)

We are streaming live kids football from an airdome. The setting is kinda challenging, because the distance between the camera and the farthest corner of the airdome is ~70m. Currently we're using only one can, because there's noone to act as a "director" for the stream and watching football stream with multiple cameras displayed at once (split screen in OBS) is not really very entertaining... To overcome this, I figured to use maximum resolution/bitrate to get as much details as possible with that one camera. Here are the technical specs:

-4K camera (RTSP), H.264/H.264B/H.264H/H.265, maximum bitrate is ~16000Kbps.
-Ryzen U3500/8GB/512SSD laptop with Win10
-250/50 Mbps internet connection
-Latest OBS
-Platform: Youtube (or something else, whatever gives the best results and is easily accessible for the kids parents etc.)

I've tried different settings, but I still think I cannot get the best possible picture quality :/ How should I setup the whole "stream pipeline" for optimum picture quality?

-x264 or AMD hw encoder?
-4K from camera -> 4K to Youtube or 4K from camera downscaled to 1080p by OBS?
-Bitrate settings in OBS?
-Other settings?

Could you experts help me to get the best possible experience with this setup :)
 
Is there going to be a camera operator? ie someone to follow action, zoom, etc. or just a static shot of entire field?
AMD GPU encoders don't have a good reputation for use with OPBS from what I've read, and nVidia's NVENC is often recommended for GPU encoding offload (with a GTX 1650Super or better being recommended for performance/value and longevity (ie vs older generation chips)... but that laptop you are stuck

That 4K camera bitrate seems low. I'm guessing only 30fps? and even then seems low.. is that the H.265 bitrate?

First, pick your target streaming platform (ex YouTube supports much higher resolution video than Facebook.. but there are others). And consider things like:
- are you looking for community discussion or simply watch video only (no commentary)?
- *IF* you have a computer than can handle 4K streaming, that would be your likely best bet (hopefully others will correct me if I'm wrong). As most (all?) platforms then re-encode the video to a more data efficient standards for their content delivery networks. H.264 often used as less compute demanding. see Choose live encoder settings, bitrates, and resolutions - YouTube Help But YouTube and others don't stream to end users using H.264. so they most likely will re-encode regardless. so you want to find setting that causes least video quality degradation with re-encoding.

If you want higher quality video, that laptop is unlikely, in my opinion, to get you there (maybe, but...). Online references indicate that is a mid-range 4c/8t CPU with built-in GPU. And you want to do real-time video encoding (one of the more demanding PC workloads) and you are low on RAM ... so beware the conflict ..

Hopefully others on here who know intricate settings better than I can advise you.
Oh, if you do use that laptop, I'd expect you'll need to spend some time learning to optimize the OS settings to minimize CPU impact (background processes/tasks, basic settings, etc.. definitely not the default Win10 settings).
 
Lawrence_SoCal said:
Is there going to be a camera operator? ie someone to follow action, zoom, etc. or just a static shot of entire field?
AMD GPU encoders don't have a good reputation for use with OPBS from what I've read, and nVidia's NVENC is often recommended for GPU encoding offload (with a GTX 1650Super or better being recommended for performance/value and longevity (ie vs older generation chips)... but that laptop you are stuck

That 4K camera bitrate seems low. I'm guessing only 30fps? and even then seems low.. is that the H.265 bitrate?

First, pick your target streaming platform (ex YouTube supports much higher resolution video than Facebook.. but there are others). And consider things like:
- are you looking for community discussion or simply watch video only (no commentary)?
- *IF* you have a computer than can handle 4K streaming, that would be your likely best bet (hopefully others will correct me if I'm wrong). As most (all?) platforms then re-encode the video to a more data efficient standards for their content delivery networks. H.264 often used as less compute demanding. see Choose live encoder settings, bitrates, and resolutions - YouTube Help But YouTube and others don't stream to end users using H.264. so they most likely will re-encode regardless. so you want to find setting that causes least video quality degradation with re-encoding.

If you want higher quality video, that laptop is unlikely, in my opinion, to get you there (maybe, but...). Online references indicate that is a mid-range 4c/8t CPU with built-in GPU. And you want to do real-time video encoding (one of the more demanding PC workloads) and you are low on RAM ... so beware the conflict ..

Hopefully others on here who know intricate settings better than I can advise you.
Oh, if you do use that laptop, I'd expect you'll need to spend some time learning to optimize the OS settings to minimize CPU impact (background processes/tasks, basic settings, etc.. definitely not the default Win10 settings).
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply Lawrence_SoCal :) Here are some answers:

-No camera operator, as nobody "works" at the airdome and teaching that stuff to all the teams/coaches is unfortunately impossible.
-Only one static camera.
-Yes, I'm stuck with AMD at least for now :/
-The maximum bitrate is ~30000 Kbps and yes, it's only 25 fps (PAL) as it was impossible to find a camera with a higher framerate, which can handle sub aero temps (the airdome is warmed up only when there are teams practicing), can be permanently mounted, spews out RTSP, has a ~130 degree FOV etc --> the settings are really challenging regarding the camera.
-I also remembered the CPU wrong, it's actually Ryzen 4500U, which has a Passmark score of ~11000 points, roughly 1.6 times faster than the 3500U.
-We don't need any "social media platform" features, just reliable streaming, which people can easily access :)
-The Windows has all the unnecessary stuff disabled/uninstalled :)

Is the RAM really a problem? The maximum is 12 GB for the laptop :/
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top