Question / Help How to increase Quality for Home Recordings?

B

Belial88

Member
Hey, so I used OBS a lot about 2 or 3 years ago, it's been a while and I've forgot a lot of things, but I used to stream a lot of starcraft 2. Now I mostly use OBS for home movies.

i7-4770k
7950
2x4GB RAM
Samsung 840 evo
z87x-ud3h

Now I remember how to increase quality of video for online streaming - increase bitrate (which requires a higher upload speed) and increase x264 CPU preset (which requires a faster CPU).

Both of these as I recall, had diminishing returns, but I recall streaming from veryfast to 'fast' with an overclocked i7, I think I was doing 720p because I dont know, everyone said 1080p@60fps demands too much from most viewers. I think some streamers were doing like 1080p@45fps or whatever, point being is that above 720@60fps you need an upload above 3mb/s, which was higher than what the average download speed of most people were so therefore your stream would become less viewable by the general public.

I imagine that's not true anymore, I don't know, right now I'm more concerned about increasing quality for local recording. I don't have to worry about the bandwidth of other people.

So. How do I do that. I can overclock my CPU to about 4.6ghz with 2800mhz RAM stable. My upload speed is 5mb/s+ easily too by the way.

Thanks.
 
Belial88 said:
Hey, so I used OBS a lot about 2 or 3 years ago, it's been a while and I've forgot a lot of things, but I used to stream a lot of starcraft 2. Now I mostly use OBS for home movies.

i7-4770k
7950
2x4GB RAM
Samsung 840 evo
z87x-ud3h

Now I remember how to increase quality of video for online streaming - increase bitrate (which requires a higher upload speed) and increase x264 CPU preset (which requires a faster CPU).

Both of these as I recall, had diminishing returns, but I recall streaming from veryfast to 'fast' with an overclocked i7, I think I was doing 720p because I dont know, everyone said 1080p@60fps demands too much from most viewers. I think some streamers were doing like 1080p@45fps or whatever, point being is that above 720@60fps you need an upload above 3mb/s, which was higher than what the average download speed of most people were so therefore your stream would become less viewable by the general public.

I imagine that's not true anymore, I don't know, right now I'm more concerned about increasing quality for local recording. I don't have to worry about the bandwidth of other people.

So. How do I do that. I can overclock my CPU to about 4.6ghz with 2800mhz RAM stable. My upload speed is 5mb/s+ easily too by the way.

Thanks.
Click to expand...
If we are talking local recording only, set your buffer to 0 and set preset to super fast (presets dont matter as much with local recording since the buffer of 0 allows the encoder to set it's own bitrate. you should be able to do 1080@60 then

If we are talking streaming
1080@30 or 720@60 is about the max the majority of streamers should stick with. 720@3060 requires 3500 bitrate just like 1080@30 does. any lower and you'll notice the quality drop.

the higher the bitrate and the more risk you have of having your viewers buffer all the time. this isn't a twitch issue that will just go away. this is the routes to and from the respected ISPs from the twitch site yet some channels will buffer, some wont. over time, I notice that the streamers that buffer at high bitrates for me it tends to get better the more that I watch and suffer through.
 
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There really hasn't been any big improvements in this area unfortunately. Maybe more viewers have slightly faster internet speeds because of Netflix and other streaming video than a few years ago. But that might be offset by more people using mobile devices that are still bandwidth starved in the same timespan.

Maybe when Twitch supports H.265 and/or VP9 and those encoders are fast enough for live streaming at half the bitrate for a given quality, we'll have something worth talking about. That's still 2-6 years away if I had to guess.

For local recording the easiest thing to do is just use Quicksync, NVEnc, or the alpha of the AMD equivalent of NVEnc for OBS.

Alternatively try OBS x264 encoding on SuperFast preset with a high bitrate or a CRF in the mid to low teens.
 
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You mean in Encoding Check Use Custom Buffer Size - Buffer size (kbit): 0?

or do you mean in advaned -> scene buffering time (millliseconds)?
 
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