zeus.olymp
New Member
Hi there,
have you ever wondered why your livestream or upload to Youtube looks so ugly, even if you are using high bitrates? Then you should continue to read and find out!
First of all you should know, that YT always re-compresses (transcodes) your livestream or upload to different resolutions and bitrates. Unfortunately the bitrate of the transcoded video is independent of the bitrate you deliver. It will happen, that the transcoded video on YT has a bitrate of 1.500 kbps at 1080p, regardless if your livestream or upload has a bitrate of 3.000 kbps, 6.000 kbps or 12.000 kbps.
But, will the quality of the transcoded video not be better, if you deliver a higher quality source (means higher bitrate)? No, it won't. Regardless of the bitrate you deliver, the transcoded video will always end up in the same quality.
To understand how to work around this obstacle and how to improve the quality of your livestream/upload, you should know that YT uses two different codecs to compress video feeds. Up to a resolution of 1920x1080 it uses H.264 to compress, but for higher resolutions (starting from 2560x1440 which is 2K) it uses the higher quality VP9 codec. That means, if you can trigger YT to use VP9 to encode your video feed, you will get transcoded video in a higher quality even at lower resolutions. Once again: when your video feed has at least 2K resolution, it will look much better at 1080p compared to a livestream/upload at 1080p and watched at 1080p. That is the lifehack. If you want to dive deeper into this topic, take a look at VMAF comparisons for 2160 upscaled Content on YouTube.
So, how do you trigger this lifehack for YT in OBS? Go to Settings/Video and enter "2560x1440" for Output (Scaled) Resolution. You can enter it manually if it doesn't appear in the drop-down list. That's it.
Have a nice day.
have you ever wondered why your livestream or upload to Youtube looks so ugly, even if you are using high bitrates? Then you should continue to read and find out!
First of all you should know, that YT always re-compresses (transcodes) your livestream or upload to different resolutions and bitrates. Unfortunately the bitrate of the transcoded video is independent of the bitrate you deliver. It will happen, that the transcoded video on YT has a bitrate of 1.500 kbps at 1080p, regardless if your livestream or upload has a bitrate of 3.000 kbps, 6.000 kbps or 12.000 kbps.
But, will the quality of the transcoded video not be better, if you deliver a higher quality source (means higher bitrate)? No, it won't. Regardless of the bitrate you deliver, the transcoded video will always end up in the same quality.
To understand how to work around this obstacle and how to improve the quality of your livestream/upload, you should know that YT uses two different codecs to compress video feeds. Up to a resolution of 1920x1080 it uses H.264 to compress, but for higher resolutions (starting from 2560x1440 which is 2K) it uses the higher quality VP9 codec. That means, if you can trigger YT to use VP9 to encode your video feed, you will get transcoded video in a higher quality even at lower resolutions. Once again: when your video feed has at least 2K resolution, it will look much better at 1080p compared to a livestream/upload at 1080p and watched at 1080p. That is the lifehack. If you want to dive deeper into this topic, take a look at VMAF comparisons for 2160 upscaled Content on YouTube.
So, how do you trigger this lifehack for YT in OBS? Go to Settings/Video and enter "2560x1440" for Output (Scaled) Resolution. You can enter it manually if it doesn't appear in the drop-down list. That's it.
Have a nice day.
Update 2023
