60FPS is the main reason for streaming, specially fast games. Looks way better.
We have so many options right now, even youtube livestreaming (beta) supports 1080p 60fps with high bitrates. Welcome to 2015.
Not when you have to work within realistic technical limitations. Blind numbers-wanking is an easy trap to fall into, especially when you first start streaming. Many do (including me), and some encourage it in others, though it's detrimental. After all, there's no point in putting up a stream if almost no one can actually watch it, or will bother staying around through the buffering.
If you're on Twitch, that means 2000kbps is the sweet spot. Meaning dropping to 480p (or lower) to free up the bandwidth for 60fps. Not a great idea either, unless you're playing Super Metroid or Shovel Knight, and need the faster framerate legitimately to cap the sprite blitting properly. Otherwise, the drop in resolution doesn't justify the small increase in smoothness of motion.
But by all means. Please, limit your audience. Other streamers will actually value and respect those viewers you drive away.
Ok guys! I had some success tonight! Let me detail my stream for tonight. I set the Bitrate/Buffer to 2000, set the encoding speed to "Medium". No viewers got stuttering, viewers that got buffering last night had NO buffering to night. So I am stoked that it more watchable for people. Oddly enough my CPU never went above 60c and the usage for OBS never went above 10% on medium, kind of surprised me.
One issue I am having is still quality. As an example I played Life is Strange and it looked great, but before that I was testing the settings with The Witcher 3 and it was a pixelated MESS. I'm wondering if there anything else I can do hmm. Any more suggestions or is this something I have to live with? I'm not totally sure what I can do with fast movement games.
Here is tonights log for anyone wanting to help!
http://pastebin.com/WuDnt8J4
Also here is a link to the VoD -
http://www.twitch.tv/crabby654/v/11944868 (I only played the witcher 3 for like 30 seconds before I switched it off)
That looks like a testing log, it's only 8 minutes long, with around 3 of testing. Have to exit OBS and reopen it to close out the log file from your most recent cast. :)
That's actually a disturbingly low load number... 720p@30 on Medium should be eating quite a bit more CPU. You're also duplicating a lot of frames in that testing log for some reason (anything over 1% should be looked at).
Yeah, Witcher 3 is going to be pretty hard on the encoder if you're constantly moving and spinning the camera like that... it's a TON of full screen high-variance movement with lots of ground clutter and detail. DayZ does the same kind of thing with its grass and the like, and it munches it too. Not much you can really do about that one aside from downscale to 480p@30 while casting Witcher; it'll devote more bitrate per pixel, and alleviate at least some of the blur. Tradeoff is the lower resolution. Not too much of a problem as many viewers don't fullscreen, just leaving the video popped-in, and may not even notice.
This is the sucky part of working within realistic limitations though. The game needs more bits-per-pixel, and to avoid having your viewers buffer, you can't bump the bitrate.
Life is Strange is much better-looking as there's less full-screen motion and the game is more stylized with cartoony graphics, that are a lot easier to compress.
