Question / Help Can't get video quality to a satisfactory level?

[Beizsley]

Hey guys, so I've been having some issues getting OBS set up to a standard that I'm happy with.

Basically, I want to use OBS to both record and stream games. I own and have used a few different recording programs before (Fraps, DXTory and Mirillis Action!), but none of them were particularly great in my opinion. Fraps was just awful, DXTory was reasonable quality, but pretty barebones imo and Mirillis Action! just had bad quality video output.

So, I decided to try OBS, as it's a pretty awesome program. I had had some experience with it before, but that was before I really understood anything about the settings.

So... my problem. Basically, I want to set OBS, preferably, to a point where one profile is reasonably good for both streaming and local recording. I'll be streaming to Twitch most likely, but I've had a YouTube channel for a while - and while it's tiny, it's something that I just enjoy doing, and I'm pretty finicky about my video quality.

Now, with Twitch, my understanding is that the maximum bit rate I can use (not sure if it's a hard limit yet or still just a 'plz don't go higher than that' thing) is 3500kbps. That's fine. I have an upload speed of 20Mb/s and my computer is fairly powerful. The settings that I've been using are;

Quality Balance 10 (When CBR is off - my understanding is that I need that on when I'm actually streaming)
Max Bitrate 3500kb/s
128 Audio encoding
720p input, no downscaling (monitor is 768p at a 16:9 ratio, but I play all games in windowed mode at 720p)
30fps
Faster CPU preset
High encoding profile

I capture gameplay through game capture, with a hotkey to assign the application.

I rarely have any issues with performance, so don't need to worry too much about that. There was a little lag in the video test, but that was just because I literally opened the world and hit record, so there wasn't time for chunks to pre-load.

I'm fairly sure that everything else is set to default. I've read a tonne of guides, and my settings are fairly consistent with the averages, I think.

What's gotten me confused, however, is that most people will state that at 720p 30fps, a bitrate of even 2k is great quality. I don't know if it's just me being super picky, or if I'm missing something, but it's really not very good in my opinion, even at 3.5k.

Here's an example of a video recorded with the above settings, in Minecraft. I do normally have a small web cam capture in the top left too, but it's set to 240p and yeah.

As you can see (I hope), the quality is super grainy (if that's the right word) when I'm moving. I know that there's a fair bit of motion, and I don't know if I'm setting my hopes too high, but I'd really like to improve it. If getting the kind of quality I want isn't possible through this route, what would be my best bet? I want to record while streaming, at a good quality - so, if the bitrate is the primary limiting factor and I can't change that as Twitch would throw a hissy fit, what would be the best route to record and stream at completely different bitrates?

For bonus points, can anybody tell me why the color seems off in videos from OBS? Still from the start of the video below. Is there anything I can do to correct that? It's not awful in Minecraft with a vanilla texture pack, but when you're using a different texture pack, or are in certain games, it can become very noticeable.

Thanks in advance - and I'm sure I'll thank you again if you can help out in any way. :)

 

[Jack0r]

OBS converts the colors to a 4:2:2 format which can slightly alter them. (Its a necessary step for streaming as full 4:4:4 colors need more space)

The quality in the youtube video looks very normal to me for the mentioned settings. Youtube also often has a negative effect because of its re-encoding. They themselves recommend around 5mbit for 720p, and 8mbit for 1080 (which is a joke), but anyway, for Twitch you can pretty much only increase the compression to get a better quality.

To do a recording at a different quality you can run a second instance of OBS and set this up for a low cpu usage but high recording quality (check our guides). Or you could still use dxtory at the same time with OBS (I did this for some time). In the future OBS will probably allow you different settings for the stream and recording but currently the rewrite is still in progress and will take some more time.

 

[Beizsley]

OBS converts the colors to a 4:2:2 format which can slightly alter them. (Its a necessary step for streaming as full 4:4:4 colors need more space)

The quality in the youtube video looks very normal to me for the mentioned settings. Youtube also often has a negative effect because of its re-encoding. They themselves recommend around 5mbit for 720p, and 8mbit for 1080 (which is a joke), but anyway, for Twitch you can pretty much only increase the compression to get a better quality.

To do a recording at a different quality you can run a second instance of OBS and set this up for a low cpu usage but high recording quality (check our guides). Or you could still use dxtory at the same time with OBS (I did this for some time). In the future OBS will probably allow you different settings for the stream and recording but currently the rewrite is still in progress and will take some more time.

Thanks, dude. I'll probably go for the two instances of OBS - I've been having an issue with DXTory for a while and nothing I do seems to fix it (used to be able to record most games at like 120fps - and then suddenly DXTory is incapable of recording more than 20fps, whatever settings, whatever game. Some people have said that it might be to do with drivers for my AMD graphics card, but I'm not willing to downgrade.