Question / Help I just don't get why it is blurry...

[Aaron Cahn]

So, I've been trying to stream WoW for a little while now. I have a pretty good computer, with a 3770k, and a GTX 680. I'm trying to stream in HD, but for some reason, it is always blurry. I use CBR, with a bitrate of 3500. I stream in 1080p with no downscale at 30 FPS, and my Process Priority Class is Normal, and CPU Preset is Faster. I've messed around for hours, but no matter what I do, it always has this blurry/grainy texture to the image when I load up the stream. Can anyone please help? Thank you!

 

[Lain]

You'd have to create a vod of the issue. However WoW is kind of a high motion game, and thus 1080p at 3500 bitrate will probably cause motion blur.

 

[Cryonic]

WoW is pretty hard to encode, specially if you are raiding or doing BGs with more than 20 people on the screen.
Your settings should look pretty good. And you can ask other people who stream WoW what they use. Just search for AffinitiiBL (raid streamer) or Towelliee on Twitch.tv and try to ask them. Its usually looking good - not perfect, but this is WoW.

 

[Aaron Cahn]

http://www.twitch.tv/bac9999/b/521254765 Here is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It doesn't necessarily look bad, it just looks grainy.

How would I go about fixing the motion blur then?

 

[Lain]

Either by using downscale, or increasing the bitrate (though be warned - increasing bitrate will cause problems for viewers with poor internet)

 

[Boildown]

http://www.twitch.tv/bac9999/b/521254765 Here is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It doesn't necessarily look bad, it just looks grainy.

How would I go about fixing the motion blur then?

That looks great, you need to lower your expectations.

 

[dodgepong]

When you have high-motion content on a stream, such as a game like WoW where there is a lot of movement and particle effects going on all the time, then each frame of video will have more data in it. Thus, the encoder has to dedicate its limited pool of bandwidth toward making sure all the frame-to-frame differences are included, rather than dedicating that bandwidth to making the picture quality look better.

The easiest ways to fix this problem are to a) increase the bandwidth pool (bit rate) that the encoder has to work with, or b) reduce the size of each frame so that the encoder doesn't have to devote as much bandwidth to only getting frame differences. The problem with the first solution is that higher bit rate makes it harder for viewers to watch, and Twitch doesn't want you to go above 3500kbps, which you are already at. So the better solution is to downscale your resolution to something around 720p if you really want to reduce the graininess.

 

[Cryonic]

Changing the x264 preset can help too but this will result in heavy CPU load - check how far you can go.