Question / Help How can I record high quality streams without making my viewers suffer?

[podonnell]

I very much like to archive my streams and therefore quality is a must for me. However, with higher bitrate, viewers report constant buffering.

What can be done to make the experience optimal for viewers without making my quality suffer?

I currently record at 720p/45fps with 2500 bitrate. Please let me know what other info I can provide.

Thanks!

 

[Osiris]

https://obsproject.com/forum/thread...oads-constantly-for-my-viewers-but-why.18465/

 

[Foboh]

Well you could have two OBS windows streaming and recording at different settings, but that means you'll need double the processing power to encode. To do this, right-click your OBS shortcut, go to properties, and add -multi to the end of the target.

so for me it's "C:\Program Files (x86)\OBS\OBS.exe" -multi

 

[Boildown]

For the local record, you can use NVEnc or Quicksync, and a high bitrate, if you have the right hardware. This minimizes the additional processing power required to run OBS twice.

 

[podonnell]

Well you could have two OBS windows streaming and recording at different settings, but that means you'll need double the processing power to encode. To do this, right-click your OBS shortcut, go to properties, and add -multi to the end of the target.

so for me it's "C:\Program Files (x86)\OBS\OBS.exe" -multi

Really? Never assumed this would work. How would the stream appear to viewers on my channel? Wouldn't I only be able to have one "active" stream to my channel? Will I need two channels to set this up?

For the local record, you can use NVEnc or Quicksync, and a high bitrate, if you have the right hardware. This minimizes the additional processing power required to run OBS twice.

I assume a local record would require a large amount of hard drive space?

 

[Boildown]

One OBS instance sends your stream and doesn't record, the other OBS instance doesn't stream and only records. Its probably easiest to use the 32 bit install for one task and the 64 bit install for the other.

You can set the local record to use whatever bitrate you want. The higher the bitrate, the more disk space it uses for a given recording time, and the higher quality the recording will be (subject to diminishing returns of course).

 

[podonnell]

One OBS instance sends your stream and doesn't record, the other OBS instance doesn't stream and only records. Its probably easiest to use the 32 bit install for one task and the 64 bit install for the other.

You can set the local record to use whatever bitrate you want. The higher the bitrate, the more disk space it uses for a given recording time, and the higher quality the recording will be (subject to diminishing returns of course).

Understood. Are you and Foboh talking about the same thing you think? Ideally I'd like to avoid recording to my computer, as I unfortunately do not have much disk space to spare. Is it possible or advisable to run two streams to two separate channels? This will double my upload requirements as well I assume, but I have a large amount available.

 

[Boildown]

To what end? You could, but I don't think its a substitute for saving to your hard drive.

 

[podonnell]

To what end? You could, but I don't think its a substitute for saving to your hard drive.

As in, you both meant one stream was to the Internet while the other was to my hard drive.

Why though do you not believe it is a substitute for saving to my drive? Essentially what I do is save any footage to my Twitch channel as well as my YouTube channel, so it never touches my hard drive.

Again, my goal is to preserve a high quality copy of my recordings as well as broadcast a version that is not too high of quality that viewers with poor bandwidth will have a bad experience.

Initially I did not see any option to do this, but the multi-stream idea seems to be the only way other than finding the middle ground. I just really wish all viewers had a dynamic bitrate changer.

 

[Deleted member 30350]

If you are streaming to Twitch and don't have tens of viewers active at the same time, chances are it's Twitch that's causing all the crap.
My favourite streamer (who is from U.K.) only gets a few viewers most of the time, and the stream is absolutely unwatchable for me (I am from Czech republic). For some stupid reason, no matter where you stream from, if the number of viewers is less than 10 or so, everything goes through Twitch's San Francisco server. Once the number increases, other servers get it as well.

 

[Boildown]

Why though do you not believe it is a substitute for saving to my drive? Essentially what I do is save any footage to my Twitch channel as well as my YouTube channel, so it never touches my hard drive.

Again, my goal is to preserve a high quality copy of my recordings as well as broadcast a version that is not too high of quality that viewers with poor bandwidth will have a bad experience.

Initially I did not see any option to do this, but the multi-stream idea seems to be the only way other than finding the middle ground. I just really wish all viewers had a dynamic bitrate changer.

What bitrates do you plan on using for each stream?

Unless you can stream 10-20kbps to YouTube or whatever your secondary streaming site is (besides Twitch), it won't look much better than the 3500 max you can send to Twitch. For example, a 5.0 Mbps stream to YouTube using NVEnc will probably be worse quality than a 2.5 Mbps stream to Twitch using x264. You might get a small gain by using Quicksync IF you have a Haswell generation CPU, but not by much.

If your upload rate and receiving stream provider can handle 10Mbps or more, then I guess it could work. I just don't think this capability actually exists without spending a lot more money than it costs to buy a hard drive.

 

[podonnell]

What bitrates do you plan on using for each stream?

Unless you can stream 10-20kbps to YouTube or whatever your secondary streaming site is (besides Twitch), it won't look much better than the 3500 max you can send to Twitch. For example, a 5.0 Mbps stream to YouTube using NVEnc will probably be worse quality than a 2.5 Mbps stream to Twitch using x264. You might get a small gain by using Quicksync IF you have a Haswell generation CPU, but not by much.

If your upload rate and receiving stream provider can handle 10Mbps or more, then I guess it could work. I just don't think this capability actually exists without spending a lot more money than it costs to buy a hard drive.

I have 75,000 kbps to use, as well as a Haswell CPU, so it sounds like this could be feasible. Is it possible to have two Twitch channels, or is it better to use a different site? I could at least give it a shot as a test.

 

[Boildown]

Sure you can have two Twitch channels. The problem is that Twitch won't accept bitrates higher than 3500 or so. If you go much beyond that, they'll flag you as using a denial of service attack on their network. So Twitch isn't a viable option for your plan.