Question / Help Blurry 720p stream

F

formatsas

New Member
Salutations, I recently tried streaming after I had my internet upgraded
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2835572489
63 megabyte download and 3 megabyte upload

However, I did some reading up about bit rate settings for streaming.
My native resolution is 1600x900 and after testing that I found out that my computer can't really handle it that well while trying to maintain a steady high quality stream, well I mean my fps stays above 30 in wow but the stream jitters a little.
So I down scaled to 720p thinking i'd find it much easier, But I was wrong.
The stream quality is really bad, can easily be compared to 640p. I did some more reading and the most common answer I found was the downscale is causing the screen to be stretched, tried multiple sources
some of those being; going straight for 1280x720, dxtory ( which did nothing ). and testing different bit rate options.

I'm completely stuck and would love to be able to stream

Pc specs
i5 3470 3.2 ghz
gtx 660 ti
8gb
dx 11


Code: 
http://pastebin.com/nzXRzUTF
 
FerretBomb

FerretBomb

Active Member
Speedtest is worthless for streaming purposes; it tests on dead-file transfer, which can run at a low constant throughput and spike high above your rated speed, so long as it averages out. Forget it exists.
Instead, go run a 6MB test at http://testmy.net/upload to get an idea of your actual throughput.

Likewise, your system specs won't help much other than saying that yes, you have a CPU that can stream, a GPU that can run OBS, and a usable amount of RAM. You need to open that logfile and copy/paste the contents (it's a textfile); you've just pasted its location on your local hard drive, which we cannot access or use.

It's very likely that you have significantly less than a constant 3mbps up; which would cause the blocking and other issues. You may need to downscale another step past 720p (use a 1.5 instead of a 1.25 downscale) as well as significantly trim back your bitrate to within what you have constant (per testmy).
Note that high-motion games will be more likely to pixelate at a given bitrate than low-motion ones; lowering your casting framerate, or dropping the casting resolution will allow more of that bitrate to be used for image clarity. Likewise, lowering your audio bitrate will free up more for image quality.

Post up the results of that test and the contents of that logfile, and we'll be able to help more. :)
 
F

formatsas

New Member
Thanks for the fast reply, I looked into the new website and I trust that's findings over speedtests as I always suspected that virgin media were hiding something from me. The website told me that I have 2.3 Mb upload

And i fixed the pastebin link :D
 
K

Kharay

Member
Could you run 2000 Kbps CBR for a few minutes and see if the quality improves? And 40 FPS is a very non-standard framerate. I would suggest 2000 Kbps @ 30 FPS. It would most likely improve the quality substantially. Just try it for a few minutes and see how you like it.
 
F

formatsas

New Member
I can see an improvement from the settings I was using but its more or less the same, Still blurry. Not entirely sure why either because I've seen people stream with far less than what I have and their quality is far superior
 
K

Kharay

Member
Play in your native resolution (1600x900), downscale the video (in OBS) to 720p (using the Lanczos filter) and be sure to use Game Capture.

Regarding the quality -- it's not so bad, actually. Yes, other streams have better quality but it really is not all that bad.
 
K

Kharay

Member
I had a look at some typical WoW streams and the quality is roughly on-par with yours. Honestly, what quality are you trying to aim for? There is a limit to what quality can be achieved on-stream. At least, while also maintaining a stream that actually is watchable. Too high of a bitrate (to improve quality) will only end up lagging and making it completely unwatchable.
 
K

Kharay

Member
formatsas said:
It gets far worse when I move around
Click to expand...
Of which you do very little in the VODs, so, really hard to tell what your exact problem is. I don't play WoW anymore myself so can't really help you out as far as a specific sweet-spot for WoW is concerned. MMORPGs are quite challenging to stream properly though, I've been having quite a bit of trouble capturing Guild Wars 2 myself.
 
ThoNohT

ThoNohT

Developer
I haven't checked the vods, but in the logs you end up using a quality balance of 10, which will cause pixelation when high movement happens. Then you switch to quality 1, which just looks bad all around. I'm afraid your quality balance is still on 1 for the tests you did after those logs, that does explain it not looking too good.

For a semi-high movement game like WoW, try setting the quality balance to 6. 720p at 3000kbps should be no problem at all, so this should fix it. You can do some tests and try going up to 7 or 8 in quality if you find that there is no pixelation anyway. Also, if 40 fps isn't an absolute must, you could switch that back to 30, will also improve image quality.

Also, 192kbps AAC isn't useful, nobody is going to hear the difference with 128 (the default). Frees up some bandwidth that you could add to your bitrate (pretty minor though, so on 3000 it's not going to have much of an effect).
 
ThoNohT

ThoNohT

Developer
Aight, I missed that, and he switched frame rate too. That's possibly the easiest way to prevent worrying about quality balance. My apologies.

Well, perhaps try going back up to 3000kbps, you had 0 dropped frames, on your two tests at 3000kbps, so your connection can handle it, and it's still within the reasonable limit of 3500.
 
ThoNohT

ThoNohT

Developer
If you're on european time, could you hop on the web chat tonight (anywhere in the following few hours otherwise) (red button on top of any page here)? We could look at your settings and test stuff as we go then.
 
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