Question / Help Streaming at medium preset 720p60

[Videophile]

Hi Guys,

I stream using the medium preset at 720p60, and I'm wondering what settings I could increase to squeeze out the last bit of quality. Someone previously recommend I make "subme" higher. My goal is to make the stream sharper. Any settings that would directly affect sharpness? maybe the amount of reference frames?

Thanks,

Shrimp

 

[FerretBomb]

Are you using a downscale? The best way to increase sharpness is to stream at native resolution (no downscale). What bitrate are you running on that 720@60 stream? If it's too low, you may either simply need to raise bitrate or drop fps down a bit. Also, what type(s) of games are you playing on-stream?

 

[Sapiens]

Assuming your base resolution is 1920x1080 you're pretty much throwing out half of the pixels in the scene by downscaling to 720p. Filtering may help, but there isn't any magic x264 param that's going to restore the sharpness.

 

[Videophile]

My bit rate is 3.5mbps.

Im not downscaling. I have my Xbox One at 720p into a Micomsoft Xcapture-1.

And damn, sometimes I wish magic was real.

 

[Sapiens]

If you aren't downscaling then really the only clarity loss would be from the compression and color space conversion. If you still have CPU headroom left over at medium preset, bumping up subme is your next step. Also at that level of compression and bitrate your viewers aren't even going to notice so don't sperg over this too hard.

 

[Videophile]

I have a problem with perfectionism, especially when it comes to streaming.

:P

-Shrimp

 

[FerretBomb]

Sadly, you'll never get a true 1:1 stream. Compression has to happen with current-day technology, and so there will be quality loss. The only ways to counter it (but again, never eliminate it) is more bitrate, or slower compression.

Managing expectations.

 

[Boildown]

It would be interesting to see a log file to see that you really do have more headroom above and beyond Medium preset.

Assuming you do, you can try Slow preset.

Assuming then that Slow is too much, you can try to get something between Medium and Slow by looking here and turning on some but not all of the Slow features: http://web.archive.org/web/201208140410 ... rence.html . Check your log file to see if your stream has been negatively affected or not by each new setting.

For example, Medium has "me=hex", but you could try "me-umh" from Slow. Badapt=2 would be another good one. Some people like to set badapt=2 and crank the bframes to 16 for some reason, even though that's skipping steps.

 

[Sapiens]

He should find the preset his CPU can handle and then adjust subme higher if he's able to do so. Monkeying with the other settings is not worth the time and effort as subme tends to give the best "bang for your buck" in terms of overall quality increase for CPU usage increase. Setting bframes=16 and b-adapt=2 at the same time is completely insane, there is a reason that combination is only used by the placebo preset.

Also you can update your bookmark, beandog's reference has resurfaced at http://dev.beandog.org/x264_preset_reference.html