Question / Help Stream Quality Improvement Questions.

[Dug]

Hey All,

First off, I want to thank everyone who posts stuff on this forum. The general wealth of knowledge and helpful people around here is awesome. Also I want to thank the people who have put time into creating the amazing piece of software that is OBS. Lurking around and reading threads has really helped me push my stream to the next level as far as visual quality goes, so thanks.

With that said, I am wondering if there is anything I can do to improve my stream quality further. I have a pretty beefy streaming PC (Specs are here). Right now I am streaming Far Cry 4 and it can get really muddy and blocky at times (archived stream here). I don't know if it is the dense foliage and visual clutter of the scenes coupled with fast moving FPS gameplay, or if I am missing something with my OBS settings. I have head of people having good luck with some custom x264 settings, but for the life of me I cannot figure out which ones might give me the quality bump that I am looking for. Is there any custom command that will give me a bump in quality at the cost of CPU? I do have the processing overhead.

OBS log here: A few things about my OBS settings:

• I normally stream at 1.25 Downscale. Tonight I did 1.50 to see if that would help.
• I am using the Medium x264 preset. My CPU usage sits around 40-60% which seems fine.
• I am aware that my bitrate is a little high, nobody has complained yet, so unless something changes ill probably hover around 3700kbps

I could just be setting unreal expectations with the current quality of streaming video. Or just being too hard on my own stuff.

Any and all feedback is welcome. Thanks for your time.

 

[Dug]

Should I just give up on finding that "magical" custom setting?

I have so much CPU headroom, there has to be a way to capitalize on that, right?

 

[Boildown]

18:35:26: Using directshow input
18:35:26: Scene buffering time set to 700
18:35:26: Using custom x264 settings: "keyint=30 scenecut=90 rc-lookahead=80 subme=6"
18:35:26: ------------------------------------------
18:35:26: Video Encoding: x264
18:35:26: fps: 60
18:35:26: width: 1280, height: 720
18:35:26: preset: medium
18:35:26: profile: main
18:35:26: keyint: 30
18:35:26: CBR: yes
18:35:26: CFR: no
18:35:26: max bitrate: 3600
18:35:26: buffer size: 3900
18:35:26: ------------------------------------------
18:35:36: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
18:35:36: New Scene
18:35:36: Using Window Capture
18:35:36: Using Video Source
18:43:51: Total frames encoded: 30241, total frames duplicated: 606 (2.00%)
18:43:51: Number of frames skipped due to encoder lag: 8 (0.03%)
18:43:51: Total frames rendered: 30281, number of late frames: 3 (0.01%) (it's okay for some frames to be late)

Explain why you're using those x264 custom settings. If you're not technical enough to understand what they do, get rid of them. Seeing as you posted this, I suspect you have no idea what they do.

If you're streaming to Twitch, your keyinterval should be 2 seconds. If you're at 60fps, that equates to keyint=120, not keyint=30. You've got a .5 second keyinterval. That can only decrease your encode quality. This custom setting is straight up bad and wrong, unless you're saving to disk for direct upload to YouTube (YT requests a .5 second keyint), but if that were the case, you wouldn't be using such a low bitrate.

Your duplicated frames percentage is too high. I've found that over 1% duplicated frames results in noticeably degraded quality, and your encode is at 2%. Change your custom settings (if you know what you're doing), or get rid of those custom settings and alter your preset (to Fast, for example) until your duplicated frames are less than 1%.

You're not using CFR. CFR should remain on unless you have a damn good reason. Your duplicated frame percentage is probably a lot higher, but is being disguised by CFR being off. This is not a good solution to your duplicated frames problem.

I can't tell which downscale you're using, but experiment with bicubic sharper if you're using Lanc. A lot of people like it better, and its supposed to be easier on the CPU.

You've got one of the new hex-core CPUs, but it doesn't appear to be performing like one. You claim to have CPU headroom, but the logs don't show that, the duplicated frames show that x264 needs more CPU than you're giving it. Either your game is super-CPU intensive, or you've got other junk running in the background that you should get rid of, or x264 really hates your custom settings, or medium preset is too much for even a 4930. Not sure which.

 

[Dug]

I'm not sure if the log reflects this, but they were not enabled when I was streaming. (The use custom x264 checkbox was not selected, but settings were inputted in the dialogue box.) I was experimenting with random custom settings before, just trying to figure stuff out.

I will try the bicubic downscaler, using Lanc right now.

Thank's for the feedback. I will take a look.