Question / Help What factors affect stream quality?

S

sDgotto

New Member
Hi guys

I have been considering streaming for a while now, and have been busy asking for help in other forums.

My question is, what exactly affects stream quality? For the longest time I have always thought it was my upload speed. However I stumbled upon a forum where people say that internet speed is quite irrelevant when it comes to stream quality, what matters instead is the CPU, or the power of your CPU.

Could someone confirm this? What will affect my stream quality? CPU? Or upload speed like I have been told many times, or both?

Thanks in advance
 
Not really sure where you read that, but a combination of resolution and an appropriate bitrate have by far the biggest effect on quality. x264 preset (which relies on CPU power) cannot compensate for proper bitrate allocation.
 
CPU won't really affect picture quality in a big way, but obviously if your CPU is weak your system won't be able to keep up with encoding and skip lots of frames. Picture quality wise, bitrate is far and away the biggest determining factor.

edit: I guess an exception to this is if you're stuck using Ultrafast x264 preset because your CPU is too weak, that will affect quality in a big way, especially because you're rather limited to what bitrates you can use for livestreaming. Recording locally would still be ok.
 
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