Question / Help Quality Control

[David Besser]

Hi all,

My stream seems to be having serious quality problems, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. The two most glaring problems are as such:

1) The stream is extremely fuzzy. I'm not sure if this particular log will show you all the different settings combinations that I have tried, but I've tried playing with the preset, bitrate, downscale, etc. without luck. I did find one combination that didn't look like my dog threw it up on the screen, but it still wasn't what I'd call "good" and it greatly amplified the second (main) problem.

2) The stream stutters worse than Scatman John. I haven't been able to coordinate with anyone in real life to see if their streams are fine, but in tests on my second monitor and second desktop showed me streams that would be interrupted every few seconds to buffer. Again, the log might show all the different combinations I used, but I'm pretty sure I played with just about every setting without luck. Literally nothing I did fixed this problem. Probably the best result I had was a stutter about every 15 seconds when I was using 1000 kb/s instead of every 5-10 seconds, and the stream looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.

I'm totally at a loss here as to why this is happening or what I can do to fix it. I've tried following this guide, Log Analyzer didn't find any problems, and Estimator is telling me that I should be able to run things in 720-1080p. While that would be ideal, I'd honestly be happy as long as I could get a stream going that doesn't stutter every few seconds. If it helps at all, I have noticed (while writing this, actually) that the stream seems okay and does not stutter at 1500 kb/s while I'm streaming a window in Chrome.

I really appreciate any help you guys give me. Thank you so much for taking time to read this!

 

[Jack0r]

I think I read another thread by a Titanfall player yesterday or something. He even used 4mbit's and Titanfall still looked a bit blurry. The Game is just very bitrate hungry as it has a lot of details, fast movement and on-screen action as well as different textures and lightnings, (I mean going from dark to very bright etc)
A lot of similar games BF4/CoD/CS seem to be a bit easier to stream, just when it comes to the encoding part of things. So you will probably have to live with some fuzzyness. The presets can unfortunately only increase the overall quality but they will not remove the blurr/fuzzyness unless they have enough bitrate to do so.
http://www.helping-squad.com/wp/recordingstreaming-choose-your-bitrate/

Now to the buffering, without looking at your log file, you tried streaming to twitch? Then that is the reason for the buffering.
Unless you drop frames (noted at the bottom of OBS while streaming) your stream is send out correctly. But the twitch servers often cannot keep up with bitrates above 2mbit, and unless you are partnered your viewers can only select your main stream, so they get buffering similar to you. You can try set up a stream to Hitbox.tv and see if it buffers there as well, even on higher bitrates.

Now taking a look at your Log file, you seem to have quite a lot of duplicated frames in many of your tests. As another user mentioned Titanfall's optimization, could be better. I would probably recommend to try it one more downscale(1.75) and just 30fps for the stream, then test with a bitrate of around 2000 for twitch, on hitbox you could test 3000. Definitely keep the preset on veryfast for streaming. Increasing it would increase the cpu usage, which we dont want, but decreasing it would reduce quality, which we dont want either.

 

[David Besser]

This is fantastic. I had no idea that Titanfall was having troubles specifically. I'll try tinkering with the settings ASAP, as well as trying out a few other games and let you know. Thank you!