Question / Help Youtube Live Quality

[unseeingeye]

Managed to enable one of my Youtube accounts to do live streaming last night so thought I'd test it out.

I've got a nice upload speed (18.8Mbps) so had OBS bitrate set to 5000. Created a private live event and Youtube reported the stream health as good.

However when I went to the watch page the quality was awful, I tried both the 1080p and 720p versions. It was the same poor quality using the embedded public video on the live event control page.

Now after I stopped broadcasting and watched the video back it was a great quality 1080p. I'd just streamed one of my monitors with a couple of websites open and a small logo graphical overlay, everything was crisp, text was perfectly readable etc.

Is this normal for the actual live stream while broadcasting to look lower quality? I know that youtube needs to encode, though I assumed that was partly why there is a delay. Was I just seeing it poorly because I was the one streaming it? I've tried googling for an answer but unfortunately trying to search for anything with youtube live tends to return loads of live performance recordings that have been uploaded to youtube.

EDIT: Just read further down https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/guide-how-to-stream-to-youtube.4333/ and noticed I hadn't set profile to main rather than high. I also put keyint=60 in the custom box rather than using the keyframe interval box that was added. Would the main vs high have caused this, what's it do?

 

[unseeingeye]

Well just tested a second attempt after changing the encoding profile on the advanced screen from high to main, I also removed the custom keyint=60 bit left the Key Interval input box at 2.

I'm unsure if that should be changed to 60 as per step 15 from https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/guide-how-to-stream-to-youtube.4333/ Youtube recommended settings say Keyframe frequency: 2 seconds. Are they the same thing or should the keyframe interval be 2 (seconds) * the FPS I've got set?

Either way the stream appeared to be in 1080p this time on the preview window.

 

[Lain]

I don't know how it's parsed on youtube's end, I think they do automatic transcoding if needed.

Save to file while streaming as well, and check the file. If the file looks top quality while youtube doesn't, then you know it's on youtube's end, because saving to file uses the exact same data as is sent out for streaming.