Question / Help Can't seem to get a decent looking stream

M_Nation

M_Nation

New Member
I hate to post here asking for help considering there are so many threads already, but I have been tweaking settings and searching the forums for many days now and I just can't seem to get something that looks halfway decent. I have followed tutorials online and looked at how their streams look and mine look nothing like it despite having a high end system and the same settings.
For starters, my system specs

Windows 10 x64
i7-6800k @ 4.3Ghz
GTX 1080
16GB DDR4

My upload speed is somewhat low at just 5Mb/s

I will attach a photo of my current settings as well as a video streamed to youtube using those settings.
Would it help to play the game at 720p as well as streaming it at that resolution? I'm at a loss honestly, I've tried also using NVENC as well and that looks even worse, even with b-frames at 0. I've tried setting OBS' affinity to 8 threads and the game to 4 in an attempt to prevent the game from taking resources from OBS, lowering my FPS, lowering my resolution, but nothing seems to help.

LOG FILE: https://gist.github.com/aae9393022d5fc84d72e99d4f5f62086
YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imV28ANKKEA
 

Attachments

  • Capture.JPG
    Capture.JPG
    51.5 KB · Views: 54
M_Nation

M_Nation

New Member
I forgot to include this but it wouldn't allow me to update my post for some reason.

I also tried lowering my framerate and resolution in an attempt to scavenge a little more bandwidth for a good looking stream
 

Attachments

  • Capture1.JPG
    Capture1.JPG
    18.4 KB · Views: 42
Harold

Harold

Active Member
The provided log does NOT show a streaming attempt.

And most of the guides you've been following to get your settings you should not have been following.
 
M_Nation

M_Nation

New Member
Harold said:
The provided log does NOT show a streaming attempt.

And most of the guides you've been following to get your settings you should not have been following.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you mean by does not show a streaming attempt. Would that be because I changed my stream settings before posting the log?

Yeah I've gotten that feeling. I just realized there is an auto configure setting, I'm going to try that and post back with results.
 
Last edited:
M_Nation

M_Nation

New Member
well I saw somebody had replied but for some reason I'm not seeing his reply now. Anyway, by his suggestion I upped my bitrate to 3700 and changed my keyframe to 2. I also changed my framerate to 24 again to save bandwidth and put my CPU preset at medium instead of the suggested faster because that's the max setting I don't experience lag at. Here is the result, I shared the video later in because I was playing with settings before that and it all got mashed into one stream. Let me know if this looks right for the settings I am running please and thank you.

YT: https://youtu.be/tWr9fGgjlqI?t=1285
 
Harold

Harold

Active Member
Going from faster to medium increases your system's cpu usage.

The guy's suggested guide should be avoided, there are several settings they recommend that make the guide classify as FAIL SETTINGS.
 
M_Nation

M_Nation

New Member
Harold said:
Going from faster to medium increases your system's cpu usage.

The guy's suggested guide should be avoided, there are several settings they recommend that make the guide classify as FAIL SETTINGS.
Click to expand...

Yes, and increases quality, correct?

You keep telling me not to follow these guides, but you haven't told me what I should do yet. Can you tell me if my stream is representative of the settings I'm currently using or offer me some tips? Thank you.
 
A

AnubisAkaLee

New Member
Let me start with, you say you have a 5 MB internet speed. That is not a correct way of saying your speed, and is not super helpful for giving advice. I'll read that as 5 Mbps, which is what you should have received from a speed test. 5 MB and 5 Mb are different by a factor of 8 (8 times smaller). The alternative is that you DO have 5 MB internet in which case you have 40 Mbps speed and you don't need advice, I need to stream at your house.

Well, some immediate observations, you are setting your space to 1080 and scaling to 720. There is not one scaling option that will not result in some loss of visual quality, when we consider how low of a bit rate you are working with, every bit of quality loss you experience is a detriment. Change your space to 720 and do not use scaling. Play your games at 720 natively. I know 720 may not be as appealing as 1080, but is perfectly acceptable when the settings are set high. This is the price you will have to pay for quality at low bit rates. You should be able to work with 29.97/30 fps. The next lowest you could try is 24, but anything lower won't be getting you any viewers.

Next, you shouldn't use either NVENC or x264. You have a Haswell processor, use your Quick Sync (enable your onboard GPU, but don't play games using it). NVENC is known both to lower your gaming performance since you are taking power away from the part of the computer being asked to do the most work already while playing games AND is also known for producing poor quality at low bit rates. You really have to throw data at it to get decent quality, and it still has issues with artifacts even at relatively higher bit rates compared to the other encoders. You can check out Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas forums to see all the complaints of encode artifacts. X264 isn't bad, but it's not going to be as good for what you are doing. You also need to keep your expectations in line with what you are trying to record. The video of a plane you linked to that looked good is essentially a static image. The plane was not moving in such a way that it's shape was changing much and the back round was very low detail. The simpler the scene the easier the scene can be encoded with a small amount of data. Even complex scenes can look good if there is not a lot of movement. The more movement, the worse it will end up looking. I will make a quick video and show you. Note that Youtube and Twitch will take an extra byte (funny computer joke) out of your quality no matter how much care you put into your video.

All this is being done from OBS Studio 19. 20 appears to have some issues ATM.

Output:
Encoder - QuickSync H.264
Target Usage - Quality
Profile - High
Keyframe - 5
Async - 4
Rate control - VBR
Bitrate - 4500
Max bitrate - 4800
Audio bitrate - 96

Audio:
Sample rate - 44.1 Khz
Channels - Mono

Video:
Canvas: 1280x720
Output: 1280x720
FPS: Either 29.97 or 30 (they are essentially the same thing, 29.97 should be first choice)

Advanced:
Renderer - DX11
Color format - NV12
YUV color space - 709
YUV color range - Partial (These other settings already set you to 8 bit 4:2:0 sub sampling, if you set full range you are simply lying to the destination player and it will result in a very dark image with bad color representation)

Here is the video. Since I stood still through most of this the final bit rate of the .mp4 was 4,066 Kbps (4 Mbps).
 
Last edited:
A

AnubisAkaLee

New Member
Due to forum restrictions I have to double post to show another example, sorry if this offends anyone's sensibilities.

I made a separate video in the same game and in the same area where I swung the camera a lot more and just got into some fights to show off artifacts you can expect at that bit rate and to give the encoder a chance to use all the data available which put the final bit rate of the .mp4 at 4,637 Kbps (4.6 Mbps). That video is here.
 
M_Nation

M_Nation

New Member
AnubisAkaLee said:
Let me start with, you say you have a 5 MB internet speed. That is not a correct way of saying your speed, and is not super helpful for giving advice. I'll read that as 5 Mbps, which is what you should have received from a speed test. 5 MB and 5 Mb are different by a factor of 8 (8 times smaller). The alternative is that you DO have 5 MB internet in which case you have 40 Mbps speed and you don't need advice, I need to stream at your house.

Well, some immediate observations, you are setting your space to 1080 and scaling to 720. There is not one scaling option that will not result in some loss of visual quality, when we consider how low of a bit rate you are working with, every bit of quality loss you experience is a detriment. Change your space to 720 and do not use scaling. Play your games at 720 natively. I know 720 may not be as appealing as 1080, but is perfectly acceptable when the settings are set high. This is the price you will have to pay for quality at low bit rates. You should be able to work with 29.97/30 fps. The next lowest you could try is 24, but anything lower won't be getting you any viewers.

Next, you shouldn't use either NVENC or x264. You have a Haswell processor, use your Quick Sync (enable your onboard GPU, but don't play games using it). NVENC is known both to lower your gaming performance since you are taking power away from the part of the computer being asked to do the most work already while playing games AND is also known for producing poor quality at low bit rates. You really have to throw data at it to get decent quality, and it still has issues with artifacts even at relatively higher bit rates compared to the other encoders. You can check out Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas forums to see all the complaints of encode artifacts. X264 isn't bad, but it's not going to be as good for what you are doing. You also need to keep your expectations in line with what you are trying to record. The video of a plane you linked to that looked good is essentially a static image. The plane was not moving in such a way that it's shape was changing much and the back round was very low detail. The simpler the scene the easier the scene can be encoded with a small amount of data. Even complex scenes can look good if there is not a lot of movement. The more movement, the worse it will end up looking. I will make a quick video and show you. Note that Youtube and Twitch will take an extra byte (funny computer joke) out of your quality no matter how much care you put into your video.

All this is being done from OBS Studio 19. 20 appears to have some issues ATM.

Output:
Encoder - QuickSync H.264
Target Usage - Quality
Profile - High
Keyframe - 5
Async - 4
Rate control - VBR
Bitrate - 4500
Max bitrate - 4800
Audio bitrate - 96

Audio:
Sample rate - 44.1 Khz
Channels - Mono

Video:
Canvas: 1280x720
Output: 1280x720
FPS: Either 29.97 or 30 (they are essentially the same thing, 29.97 should be first choice)

Advanced:
Renderer - DX11
Color format - NV12
YUV color space - 709
YUV color range - Partial (These other settings already set you to 8 bit 4:2:0 sub sampling, if you set full range you are simply lying to the destination player and it will result in a very dark image with bad color representation)

Here is the video. Since I stood still through most of this the final bit rate of the .mp4 was 4,066 Kbps (4 Mbps).
Click to expand...

I understand the difference between MB and Mb, that's why my post shows Mb ;)
Also, I do have a Haswell processor but it does not have an integrated GPU, the 6800k does not have a graphics processor on it.
The stream was quite long, I was hoping somebody would just click through it to see different aspects of it and give feedback, I do understand that a static image will look much much better than moving images.
I will, however, try playing at just 720p without scaling options. I will say that while playing around in the settings again last night I noticed I missed a crucial setting on NVENC and that's the quality preset (DOH!) and after setting the quality to highest and b-frames to 0 I got the best looking stream I have had yet. I will post back with links to the native 720p stream and my NVENC stream after I record a native stream here in a few minutes. Thanks for the tips!

YT video at native 720p: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmyhuzLd4vQ
YT video with NVENC downscaling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uWgvNcQ_g8
 
Last edited:
A

AnubisAkaLee

New Member
Oh, I totally misread your 5 Mb/s as 5 MB. That's what I get for reading through these things just after waking up. Just disregard that first part then. That stinks not having the Quick Sync... I actually use it for local recordings all the time and most of my game play footage on my YT channel is captured using that. I use LA ICQ for local recording, not VBR, though. Well, glad you at least spotted the quality setting, that will certainly help. Lowering B frames will definitely improve quality but can cost you performance, so you may want to keep the stats window up while you are testing and see if you drop frames. If you can get away with it, go for it for sure.

Between the 2 the scaled has softened details on textures, but that's to be expected. The hard lines of general details look ok. The overall quality is not bad given the bit rate. Even when moving and given the hard line detail like the foliage it has to draw it's doing a decent job. I don't think you are going to get much better with that bit rate. You could always locally record with a high bit rate while streaming at a lower bit rate. That way you have that option to stream if that's what you really want to do, but your archives you upload will look MUCH better.
 
Last edited:
A

AnubisAkaLee

New Member
Well, the only other tips that I can think of would be in-game vs in OBS. Your lower movement footage is pretty good. The quality is only at it's worst when swinging the camera. Sometimes enabling motion blur in-game, if that's not already on, can help with this. When the camera turns the image is at it's most dynamic, and if you can lower the detail during those times you can limit how often it hits it's maximum allowed data per second. Other settings in game with similar softening effects to the image might help overall I think. If there are setting to limit or eliminate encounters with smokey or fogy situations I can tell you at all bit rates H264 and especially Youtube's encoder HATES fog.

Other than that just speak up in those vids. The more interesting you are, the less people should care about your video quality anyway ;)
 
FerretBomb

FerretBomb

Active Member
Any downscale will induce quality loss. The one that comes with the LEAST loss is setting your Canvas to your native resolution, and using the Downscale dropdown in the Video tab. Setting the Canvas to 720p and squashing a 1080p source down in the preview window will cause significantly more quality loss, as elements will not be allowed to alias into each other; essentially using the downscale dropdown is similar to using supersampling.

QSV/NVENC/AMF encoding will be lower quality output than software x264. Not advised. Also NVENC will NOT impact your in-game performance, it is handled by a separate and devoted portion of the GPU die, rather than anything that would be used by the game.
Medium software x264 will use more CPU (and increase in-game performance hits). The default of Veryfast is recommended, and will reduce the 'lag'. At your bitrate, the quality difference between Medium and Veryfast will be minimal.
 
M_Nation

M_Nation

New Member
FerretBomb said:
Any downscale will induce quality loss. The one that comes with the LEAST loss is setting your Canvas to your native resolution, and using the Downscale dropdown in the Video tab. Setting the Canvas to 720p and squashing a 1080p source down in the preview window will cause significantly more quality loss, as elements will not be allowed to alias into each other; essentially using the downscale dropdown is similar to using supersampling.

QSV/NVENC/AMF encoding will be lower quality output than software x264. Not advised. Also NVENC will NOT impact your in-game performance, it is handled by a separate and devoted portion of the GPU die, rather than anything that would be used by the game.
Medium software x264 will use more CPU (and increase in-game performance hits). The default of Veryfast is recommended, and will reduce the 'lag'. At your bitrate, the quality difference between Medium and Veryfast will be minimal.
Click to expand...
Are you suggesting I don't use the downscale tic box in the output tab and only use the scaled resolution in the video tab?
I wanted to report back saying that I decided for the fun of it to try streaming at 1080p and got really good results! x264 with a medium preset and I get no lag. I'll post the results. Also, I'll try a stream without the scaling option ticked if that's indeed what you're saying.

Specifically,near the end, I had adjusted my bitrate halfway through
YT - 1080p no scaling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQkilG0ag9g
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top