Question / Help OBS Video to Youtube downgrades in quality

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Crimsic

New Member
Hello all,

First, OBS (Studio) is a great program and I love using it. However, I started making video's for fun and as I recorded the videos, they look way better on my PC than on Youtube. I've read multiple forum topics about this problem but all of them got pretty deep into stuff I have no idea what they mean. It would help a lot of someone could write down some settings (for OBS studio) I can change to optimize the way Youtube renders it.

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!
Crimsic
 
That is the reality of youtube, quality is lost because every video you upload is re-encoded by them.

But, if you make youtube encode your videos in VP9 that will provide a big improvement in quality. For example all videos uploaded at 2560x1440 will be encoded by youtube in VP9.

(Assuming your videos are 1080p)

One way to achieve this is to upscale your video from 1080p to 1440p before uploading to youtube, the loss in quality from upscaling is nowhere near as bad as directly uploading a 1080p video to youtube that is not encoded in VP9 by youtube.

You could use a video editor to upscale your videos or have OBS upscale whilst you are recording. Depends on your hardware.
 
I believe they do that also with live streams because I have noticed my webcam live stream being streamed at 1280x720 is slightly blurry. I don't notice any degradation through when streaming to Twitch.
 
Osiris said:
Ofcourse they look better on your PC, Youtube reencodes the video.
Click to expand...
I know what he is talking about. It's one reason I was not a fan of the old obs. Other programs seem to have better quality, especially when loaded to youtube. I use an editing program and use the same settings. I use video fx sharpen medium, level computer RGB to studio RGB and depending on what I am recording I may use color correction. The videos I put on youtube with other recording devices look a bit better than the OBS ones. Not all the time but most and I take that over shadow play because I can split audio and things like that but with the issue that has popped up now, I am starting to look for another device if I can't find a solution for the strange issue that is happening since the update where the video freezes but it continues to record sound.
 
Back at my PC, changing to 1440p didn't help. However, I did find out what might have caused the problem. I've never set the bitrate and just found it it was set on 3500. I've read that bitrate is quite important, especially for putting it on youtube. What bitrate would you recommend for 1080p?

Edit: Here's a screenshot of my current settings: https://imgur.com/a6x0HKA
 
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For recording as high as you can, but something between 20-80Mbit(20000-80000kbit) should do the job with NVENC(below 10k NVENC is just terrible)
 
Over 2.5 years ago, I recorded over 1000 hours of gameplay recorded with OBS (classic) using NVEnc set to 1080p60 at 20Mb/s to create this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WURh4w5vjhk .

30Mb/s looks slightly better IMO, but I didn't know how many terabytes I would need to hold that much "footage", so I compromised on 20Mb/s. I tested but couldn't really notice the difference at bitrates over 30Mb/s.

Here's the settings YouTube publicly recommends: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171

But I recommend reading this article as well which describes the reality of YouTube re-encoding that they don't publicize that readily: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Artic...ouTube-How-to-Get-the-Best-Results-83876.aspx

That article is 5 years old though, and more recently YouTube has been allocating higher bitrates for videos that are over 1080p. Upscaling to 1440p won't increase the quality of your uploaded video (and if you don't assign enough bitrate, it can hurt it), but when YouTube re-encodes it (which YouTube always does no matter what you do, as described in the previous link), YouTube will assign a video uploaded at 1440p more bitrate. Even the 1080p download will look better after re-encoding, despite 2 extra lossy encodes, if you upload it at 1440p instead of 1080p (assuming your upscale was decent), because of the extra bitrate assigned to it.

One of the frequent posters here harps on this issue frequently, if I can remember his name I'll edit my post to summon him.
 
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