Question / Help Best X264 Settings

[mboitnott]

Hello,
I used to use a Matrox Monarch HDX for encoding, but continually have had some issues with it. So for our company I decided to move towards an OBS/laptop solution. We purchased a New 2018 Macbook Pro with a 22.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, 356 GB SSD, and the Radeon Pro 555X with 4GB RAN, and a Intel UHD Graphic 630.

I thought this laptop would be plenty beefy enough to run a 720p stream with a local recording, which it did, but kept giving me encoder overload warnings. I am wondering what settings would be best with the x264. This time I did everything in default: no scaling, veryfast, keyframe 0, and a 2500 bitrate for the stream and record. Also it was 720p at 30 fps. More relevant info, my system is an HD sony camera, going to a BlackMagic television studio, and to an AJA UTAP SDI to USB3 converter.

Will going up to ultrafast kill the quality? Did I not get a powerful enough laptop? Anyone have any idea what quality the Matrox Monarch HDX would encode at? Any general guidance here would be helpful.

 

[WizardCM]

An i7 should be plenty beefy for encoding at veryfast.

Try this guide, and if it's not enough, please post a log. Keep an eye on Activity Monitor.

Personally I find it hard to recommend Macs for anything related to OBS due to the many limitations of macOS itself, including related to capturing and encoding. I'm a big fan of laptops with Nvidia 10xx GPUs as they're usually desktop grade and support NVENC, which barely requires CPU.

 

[mboitnott]

Thanks for the reply. The most strain seems to come from getting to video from my camera system at the start. I think receiving the uncompressed video creates some major tax on the GPU. My goal is to run two instances of OBS, so that I can have a backup stream. However this means it actually splits that camera image and reallllly stresses the GPU. I have the log if you would like to see it.

One other thing, the main concern here is that it causes my Mac to get very hot when I run two instances.