What's the best Recording and Streaming setup for my PC?

[Beastking04]

I'm new into streaming, and I'm having trouble with my setup. The internet is bad where I live, and my PC is rather old, and I don't have the money right now to buy a new one.

So, with my current setup, how can i get high quality videos, and ok quality streams.

Here's my Specs : My PC is Windows 10 64-bit, I have a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-23000 CPU @ 2.80GHz, 8.00 GB of RAM, and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 graphics card. My internet speeds are 11.38 download speed and 0.66 upload speed (Told you it was bad...).

A log file of my current setup in included in this post.

 

[carlmmii]

Your upload speed is the major limiting factor. Anything less than 3mbps up is very restrictive for livestreaming, and you have... significantly less. Even normal game traffic will be conflicting with any attempts to stream.

However, you may as well give it a shot and see what you can accomplish. You just have to be aware that you're going to seriously have to lower your expectations for stream quality.

For your recording settings, everything looks mostly good. Just turn off Psychovisual Tuning, and run OBS as admin. That will help to avoid any rendering or encoding lag.

Unfortunately, framerate is something that cannot be different between stream and recording. Because the stream output is going to be the most limiting factor, you'll want to change to 30fps in the Video tab.

For the streaming settings (Output tab), you'll want to enable the "Rescale Output" option and set this to 848x480. There are caveats with this:
- this will revert back to the "old" Nvenc method, which may result in a performance hit
- this relies on the CPU to perform the scaling, which also may be an issue on your older CPU

However, those are necessary drawbacks for being able to record at a higher resolution than you're putting out for stream. For the actual stream settings, these would be my recommendations:
- Nvenc encoder
- CBR, 400kbps (this is based on your .66mbps up... any higher will probably be severely unstable and drop frames at unacceptable levels)
- Keyframe interval: 2sec
- Quality preset
- Lookahead off
- Psychovisual tuning off


Your bitrate really is the major limiting factor here, and I'm not even sure that dropping the resolution to 480p will even be enough to compensate. You might be able to get a little bit better encoding quality by using x264 encoding instead of nvenc for the stream encoder. Normally I wouldn't recommend it for your CPU, but considering the resolution is so low, you may be able to get away with it.

 

[Beastking04]

Your upload speed is the major limiting factor. Anything less than 3mbps up is very restrictive for livestreaming, and you have... significantly less. Even normal game traffic will be conflicting with any attempts to stream.

However, you may as well give it a shot and see what you can accomplish. You just have to be aware that you're going to seriously have to lower your expectations for stream quality.

For your recording settings, everything looks mostly good. Just turn off Psychovisual Tuning, and run OBS as admin. That will help to avoid any rendering or encoding lag.

Unfortunately, framerate is something that cannot be different between stream and recording. Because the stream output is going to be the most limiting factor, you'll want to change to 30fps in the Video tab.

For the streaming settings (Output tab), you'll want to enable the "Rescale Output" option and set this to 848x480. There are caveats with this:
- this will revert back to the "old" Nvenc method, which may result in a performance hit
- this relies on the CPU to perform the scaling, which also may be an issue on your older CPU

However, those are necessary drawbacks for being able to record at a higher resolution than you're putting out for stream. For the actual stream settings, these would be my recommendations:
- Nvenc encoder
- CBR, 400kbps (this is based on your .66mbps up... any higher will probably be severely unstable and drop frames at unacceptable levels)
- Keyframe interval: 2sec
- Quality preset
- Lookahead off
- Psychovisual tuning off


Your bitrate really is the major limiting factor here, and I'm not even sure that dropping the resolution to 480p will even be enough to compensate. You might be able to get a little bit better encoding quality by using x264 encoding instead of nvenc for the stream encoder. Normally I wouldn't recommend it for your CPU, but considering the resolution is so low, you may be able to get away with it.

Streaming isn't too bad, but my recording encoder crashed twice when I streamed Left 4 Dead 2.

I don't know if it was me streaming and recording at the same time or something.

I'll put my last log file below for you to look at.