Question / Help Trying to figure out the settings to use for streaming

HotelCharliHill

HotelCharliHill

Member
Hey guys, totally new to this, and yes, I've read other stickys here about "what settings to use for recording," "what to use for streaming," and of course, "what to use when streaming AND recording..."

I'm recording mkv's at crf 20 in superfast while streaming crf 28 in veryfast and getting decent stream quality (pixelated, but workable, and no mic popping which is good). Maybe I shouldn't be trying to stream at 1080p at 60fps... i mean what's the point if it's only sweet looking while standing still? Also kinda wondering if I should set the FPS in OBS to variable and whatnot, or "match FPS" rather than 60... what do you guys think?

It's all workable but I'd love to be able to put out something of good quality...

Also, my CPU never really went much abouve 50% but there were times it went up to almost 90 when I was trying higher bitrates, and the video went crazy and the mic was popping like mad... just weird becaue I'm streaming with a dedicated PC and I have an i7-7700k... that's supposed to be EIGHT cores... shouldn't it be handling this all like butter and my only limitation being my upload speed? (which is 15megabits/sec upload)...

Just bizarre.. anyway, here's my log if someone could look at it. I ran a lot of recording tests so it's probably quite long. Had better results about 80% of the way through...

Thanks anyone :)

https://gist.github.com/719ed62636ca2bead26c098989f23466

oh, this might be helpful too, it's the 47 minutes of me stopping and starting my stream while trying to adjust settings to see what's working best (if you want to watch and tell me what timestamps were the best, that'd be good), and no this wasn't a shameless plug of my channel.... I genuinely that this might help.
https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=Penj40XbQLo
 
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Mroczny_Gustaw

Mroczny_Gustaw

Member
yeah i think its possible to top this cpu with 2x x264 at 1080p60. i would try to use quicksync for recording to save cpu for x264 stream. QSV ICQ=23 mode works really nice.
check my calculator and included reddit post. this will be good start to fix such oddities like 1080p60@2,5k :P
HotelCharliHill said:
while streaming crf 28 in veryfast
Click to expand...
for streaming you always need CBR
 
HotelCharliHill

HotelCharliHill

Member
for streaming you always want CBR? Okay. and with quicksync, I have to turn that on in my bios first, don't i?...

I think I'll stream at 3500 bitrate. Isn't that what you're supposed to stream at?

Just thought I'd add my specs because you mentioned me using quick sync to help with the CPU usage during recording....

Streaming Rig:

CPU - Intel - Core i7-7700K 4.2GHz Quad-Core Processor
MOBO - Asus - STRIX Z270H ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
RAM - Team - Dark 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory
OS HD - Samsung - 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
Stream database HD - Toshiba - X300 5TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
PSU - EVGA - SuperNOVA G3 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply
CPU Cooler - Coolermaster Seidon something AiO (crappy but good enough!)
GPU - old ATI Radeon 5800 Series 2Gb (with mini HDMI outs)
AverMEdia Live Gamer HD2 GC570

I'm using this as a dedicated streaming platform, do I really need to alleviate stress on the CPU? most of the time last night it never went over 50% unless I was trying a really low CRF number (which didn't give good results anyway) and again, if i've got 8 cores shouldn't it be doing all the encoding a lot faster and a lot easier?
 
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HotelCharliHill

HotelCharliHill

Member
Mroczny_Gustaw said:
yeah i think its possible to top this cpu with 2x x264 at 1080p60. i would try to use quicksync for recording to save cpu for x264 stream.
Click to expand...

Hey dude, I looked into quicksync and how to activate it. Went in my bios and didn't see a setting to turn it on. Looked online and read that maybe my drivers were out of date. Sure enough, my CPU driver is from 2009 and my mobo driver is from who knows when so I dloaded the ROG driver and the Intel drivers etc... went to install and it said "Your computer does not meet the minimum requirements for this update." uh okay. Investigated that and apparently its sometimes cause cause BIOS is older. So now I gotta try and reinstall that. Kinda wary seeing as a BIOS install can go poorly and really mess stuff up. Here's hoping!
 
HotelCharliHill

HotelCharliHill

Member
Mroczny_Gustaw said:
i would try to use quicksync for recording to save cpu for x264 stream.
Click to expand...

Alright, so after looking around at how other people were installing these drivers I noticed a pattern - their display adapter settings all referenced the intel chip graphics processor and NOT a separate GPU... meanwhile, I had this old 2GB radeon card installed... So I took it out completely (after uninstalling the device and drivers for it), restarted the computer and was able to run the driver updates for the chip AND the VGA settings for the strix MOBO. Sweet. Now I've got QuickSync set up for my recording. I didn't see the QSV ICQ setting but I saw LA ICQ and set that, left it at 23 like you said and left the LOOK AHEAD in default 40 (I'll turn that down if I notice issues.)

I set my streaming to CBR 5000 (and hope people can keep up) and I'll give that a go tomorrow night when I can dedicate some testing time :) THX
 
Mroczny_Gustaw

Mroczny_Gustaw

Member
HotelCharliHill said:
I didn't see the QSV ICQ setting but I saw LA ICQ and set that, left it at 23 like you said and left the LOOK AHEAD in default 40 (I'll turn that down if I notice issues.)
Click to expand...
I was thinking about ICQ. LA ICQ was giving me some problems but it was some time ago and you have different cpu. One important thing - QSV in obs is a little buggy. Watching mp4 recording from qsv in VLC results in gray screen bugs when skipping. record to flv or mkv and later remux in OBS itself (FILE menu) to mp4. it fixes the recording
i wish qsv had same level of support in obs as amf has from Xaymar...
 
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