Streaming to YouTube at 25/50 fps

V

VelvetAvatar

New Member
Hi all,

I'm after some advice as to how to configure OBS Studio for live streaming to YouTube.

I live in a PAL country, and my camera is limited to a 25 or 50 fps frame rate. However, irrespective of how I configure OBS, YouTube's "stats for nerds" reports a frame rate of 30 fps.

I read through a few threads on this matter, and there was a prevailing view that streams are always output at the original frame rate, despite what YouTube is reporting. However, I tested one of my streams in VLC, and it also reported 30 fps. I'm thinking perhaps YouTube's handling of these streams may have changed since these posts were made?

So I have two questions here:
  • Can anyone confirm that YouTube is converting all non-complying frame rates to 30 fps? Or have I misunderstood what's going on here?
  • If a conversion is indeed occurring, is there any benefit in changing the frame rate in OBS to 30 fps (under Settings > Video) to match this - or shall I leave YouTube to apply the conversion? Which is likely to give the best results? Or is there no difference?
Many thanks for any assistance with this.
 
K

konsolenritter

Active Member
The fix is to leave that works to YT as is.

I personally prefer to produce in 29.97 or 59.94 if the whole chain supports this (starting with the cameras). You should only change framerates within OBS by integer dividers, and only if needed. For instance if all your stuff produces 59.94 but you want to stream with 29.97 (half the framerate) for bandwidth reasons.

The same applies for 25fps versus 50fps.

So: You need a common base for all stuff down your signal chain. If your cameras just provide 25/50 (but not 30/60), you should produce 25/50 and leave the additional works to YT. If they (YT) decide for resampling to other rates they should have more sophisticated algorithms (and cpu/gpu power to do this) than you. One of the reasons is that YT for considerations of bandwidth, disk size and resolution does re-encoding already in existence. Every additional resampling and re-encoding step renders quality worse and worse.
 
Synergist

Synergist

Member
YouTube still supports 50p for VOD (The Slowmo Guys produce all their content in UHD 50p for example) but it seems they changed their streaming format support in 2020 meaning only 30/60 (59.94) is supported, and 25/50 streams are transcoded on ingest, which is frustrating.

Action against YouTube no longer supporting 25/50fps

Please vote to support this request - Lukas Herzog from Mainz, Germany raised a question at YouTube's community forum about frame duplication on youtube when streaming 25/50p, which is very annoying from a PAL perspective and was...
forums.vmix.com
 
K

KnutH

New Member
Hi

Would love to find out if there is any best practise for those of us streaming in a “PAL region” where we should shoot 25 or 50 fps.

YouTube transcode to 30 or 60 fps when I stream, and this makes high motion content stuttering. If I rather upload (not stream) YT will show my uploaded video in 50 fps, with zero stuttering.

Thanks for sharing best practices or tips.
 
K

konsolenritter

Active Member
I tried transcoding into 30 or 60 by means of OBS or Blackmagic hardware. They are good in rescaling the resolution with their converters, but not between NTSC and PAL framerates. Stutter is more worsen than the transcoding done by YT. So i leave it at YT. Would try to produce in 29.97 or 59.94 at all, but sometimes not all cameras support this. Then we have to stick with the PAL world...
 
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