Question / Help How to squeeze the best quality from my setup

[Videophile]

Hey guys,

I stream to twitch mainly using my Xbox 360. My setup is as follows:

Capture card: Micomsoft Xcapture-1 720p60 to my PC
PC: Intel core i7 2600k@4.0Ghz and 7970.
OBS Settings: X264 preset is: Medium. opencl=true.
Bit rate= 3400
CPU priority = high
Anything else I can do to make the stream quality better? I think I'm pretty out there in terms of good quality.

Here is my twitch+vod's: http://www.twitch.tv/ltroyalshrimp

 

[dodgepong]

Honestly, you're doing pretty much everything right. As long as your computer can handle the Medium preset, and OpenCL is working for you, then there's not much else to do on a basic level. If you really want to hyper-optimize, I recommend reading up on x264 settings and start experimenting.

The presets are basically pre-determined packages of good settings that work well together to scale CPU usage vs. quality. You can see what those presets mean here: http://dev.beandog.org/x264_preset_reference.html

 

[Boildown]

I agree with Dodgepong. The only thing I'll add is:

If you think the quality has an issue, post a log file. Otherwise, experiment with threads=x setting on the advanced page. I have a capture card and an i7 2600k, like you, and in my experience it runs better at threads=9 or threads=10 than left to the default, which for this CPU would be threads=12.

Also experiment with Fast instead of Medium, I didn't notice it at first, but when I preset Medium the video came out choppier even though no problems were shown in the log file. Increased to Fast and it went away. This was a while ago so could have been a problem with an old OBS version. Currently I run two instances of OBS simultaneously: one for capture to disk at high bitrate, and other for streaming at normal bitrate, so I can't go back to Medium to test it again in any case.