Question / Help My stream looks worse than the others, why?

[BigPoon]

Hello,

I've an

I7-4930K CPU @ 4.5GHz
32GB DDR3 Ram

I'd like to stream same games on youtube but my stream doesn't look as good as others.

I checked few streamers on twitch and their settings are 720p60 between 4000-5000 bitrates.
I set mine 4000.

The question is why is my stream doesn't look good?
https://gist.github.com/c7f97394bd4cacfb1bb4e9a770c7d29a This is the log file.
The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMZWeo3LdJM As you can see it's blurry.
I don't know what to do to fix this issue.

Thank you.

 

[SumDim]

Not blurry to me at 720@60.

Check your Quality setting by clicking on the YouTube wheel in the lower right hand corner. You probably have it set to less than 720@60....

 

[BigPoon]

I don't know. Maybe I'm just overreacting it. Yesterday I was watching a girl on twitch. She was streaming the same game and she used 3500 bitrate and her stream looked lot better than mine on full screen. In my video the hot bar and the health bar are very pixelated even if I stop. Same with the numbers and texts. Her was clear and sharp.

Here is an other streamer I just found:
https://www.twitch.tv/zombie_barricades/videos/all
All his videos are looking a lot better than mine.

 

[vencabot]

Are you scaling your video with Lanczos? I find that's pretty important. Are you encoding with x264 or Nvenc? Nvenc will look much worse than x264 at the same bitrate.

Are you playing a game with weak / no antialiasing? This is what I've found to be the biggest surprise factor in my time streaming. Blurry games (!!) compress much better than sharp games. I've learned that, even if a game's antialiasing is crappy (the blurriness negatively impacts my experience with the game), it's important to turn it ON, because it makes a huge difference in keeping the stream from looking blocky.

I tend to be pretty picky about anti-aliasing, otherwise; I often eschew it completely if I don't like what AA method the game uses. I find that I can't afford to do this while streaming; just gotta go for whatever makes edges less aliased.

Good luck, sir!

 

[Adrian Schofield]

This could be related to the resolutions that you are using.

Base is 2560x1080
Downscaled is 1704x720

These are not proportional (although it's pretty close) to one another which means that when you downscale you won't get the best result, even using Lanczos which I can see you are in the log.

It also doesn't help that Youtube expects a 16:9 video which is why you have the black bars in your video

I expect you are comparing with someone who has a Base of 1920x1080 a Downscale of 1280x720 which are all 16:9 resolutions and so the downscaling works well.

My suggestion would be to play in Windowed modes at 1920x1080 and downscale to 1280x720 if you want to have a nice clean presentation, keep the 21:9 for your own enjoyment :-)

 

[SumDim]

Don't get caught up in bitrate. Its going to vary depending on many factors...

Your CPU
Your GPU
Software or hardware encoding
Your capture card
Your audio interface
Your video capture devices (webcam, projectors, DSLR's, etc.)
Your Internet upload speed
Your intra network speed (10/100/1000Mbps)
Your routers and hub support (10/100/1000Mbps)
Your in home/office (how many devices using it?)
What applications you are running
Speed and connection quality of ingest server
Etc. Etc. Etc

Bitrate is the resultant AFTER taking into consideration all the combination of factors above.

For example, my streams on YouTube are 1080@60fps. My bitrate? Anywhere between 8500-10000Kbps. Why the variance? It depends on many things like the time of day, if YouTube is having a good day or not, congestion at my neighborhood cable box, etc. Most are very much network related. There are some things that are constant and some that are variable. You can always control the constant factors by throwing better hardware at it. But when it comes to the variable factors, sometimes you can't do anything about it and have to live with it.

Some streamers I know have outstanding quality streams simply by having a very high upload speed three times mine. However, one day it looks extremely good. On other days it looks terribly crappy.

The take away is, if you want the best, you have to pay for it in hardware and connectivity. And, you have to learn how to tweak your settings painstakingly to make it look just right. Much of it is trial and error and carefully documenting your settings.