We’ve covered how to set up recording and streaming profiles in previous videos, but
let’s focus for a bit on just bitrate considerations in this video.
What should you pick for your bitrate and why?
What even is bitrate?
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I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun, and welcome back to my OBS Studio
tutorial course.
I have many, many more videos on the software in the playlist linked in the description.
Check that before asking questions, and check the introduction video to learn how this course
works, if you get confused.
A word that gets frequently thrown around when discussing video recording and editing
is “bitrate.”
What does that mean?
This phrase refers to the data rate of your video recording or stream.
Usually referred to some amount of bits per second.
Don’t confuse this with bytes – we normally measure files in bytes, megabytes and gigabytes,
but bits are different.
Size-wise, bits are one eighth of the size of a byte.
This actually makes it easier to talk about when it comes to streaming, as if you run
an internet speed test, it measures this in megabits instead of megabytes.
A higher bitrate equals more bits per second which generally means higher quality.
But depending on your upload speed, computer specs and so on – you may not be able to
use a higher bitrate.
Or, if you set it absurdly high, eventually any quality increase might be insignificant
especially compared to the cost of the high file size that will be created by such high
bitrates.
There’s a few things you need to consider when choosing a bitrate for streaming or recording.
Let’s take a look at streaming first.
With streaming, you must primarily take your internet connection into consideration.
As I’ve mentioned before, due to packet loss, interference, and other issues, the
most reliable upstream connection will be through a wired internet connection – not
over a wireless signal.
Go to openspeedtest.com or speedtest.net and test your upload speed.
For live streaming, the highest recommended bitrate is roughly equal to 75% of your total
upload speed.
Regardless of your upload speed – be it 300, 30, or 5 megabits per second – you
can’t push the whole speed all the time.
Other things run on your network and require the bandwidth, and if you’re playing games
they’ll need some room or it will be a laggy mess, too.
This bitrate includes audio, too.
So if your upload speed is 5 megabits per second, the most I’d recommend your total
bitrate for a stream be is 3.75 megabits per second, with roughly 200 being allocated for
the audio.
Of course, as with anything, you’ll need to do some test streams to make sure your
connection can actually handle pushing that many bits for hours on end and that you aren’t
dropping frames or not pushing data enough.
OBS Studio now shows color indication for your stream health – which shows how well
your connection is maintaining the stream settings.
With Twitch, you’ll also want to keep your viewers in mind.
Generally speaking, transcoding – the process of providing converted versions of a stream
broadcast at lower qualities so it’s easier to watch – was something only reserved for
Twitch partners.
They’ve made great strides since then in making transcoding available to more people.
To see if you have this available, once you’ve begun streaming, sneakily pull up your stream
page (muted, of course, so your viewers don’t hear an echo) and click the gear icon and
see if you can change the quality from “Source” to High, Medium, Low, and so on.
If so – you’re good to go.
If not, then your viewers are stuck with only the option to view the quality you are streaming.
That means that if their internet connection can’t handle downloading that kind of bitrate,
then their stream view will just keep buffering and they will leave.
This leads many streamers to only stream at a maximum of 2 megabits per second (or 2000
in the bitrate box) so that just about anyone can view it.
If you don’t seem to be getting transcoding when you start streaming, you might want to
consider doing this too – especially if you’re a new streamer and need to attract
new viewers.
Otherwise, if you have transcoding, you can stream at the full 6 megabits per second that
Twitch allows – or whatever your internet connection can support, if below that.
YouTube doesn’t have such limitations, so run free if you stream to there.
Just keep in mind that it is hard for any internet connection – no matter the speed
– to seriously maintain higher than like 10 megabits per second upstream consistently
for multiple hours on end.
On the other side of the coin, recording bitrates work a little differently.
See, when you stream, you can really only use super low bitrates – the quality is
acceptable for streaming, but isn’t super great for final videos.
Those bitrates are just child’s play compared to what you can record at.
Your hard drive can handle way higher data rates than your internet upload speed.
But, depending on if you’re recording on a desktop or a laptop, and if you have a secondary
hard drive available – you may not be able to totally max out on recordings.
If you’re on a laptop and only able to record to the main C:\ hard drive – your recording
data stream has to compete with your operating system reading and writing constantly, any
programs running, as well as any games running on your computer.
This means that it may struggle with recordings.
Modern hard drives can maintain high speeds of data transfer, but bouncing back and forth
between far away parts of the disk platter is not the strong suit of mechanical drives.
SSDs, on the other hand, can handle this way better.
Ideally, you’ll want to record to a second hard drive – either inside your computer,
or a USB 3.0 or faster drive hooked up to a USB 3 port.
Those can usually sustain recording bitrates – but USB 2.0 ones cannot.
Choosing a recording bitrate is all about balancing video quality with file size.
More bits equals more quality, but also equals bigger files.
Now here’s the kicker – you can always compress your video later to make it smaller,
either in a compression program or when you render your video edit, but you cannot add
more quality back in.
Record at too low of a bitrate and your video file will remain crappy quality forever.
Record at a really high bitrate and you can compress it smaller when you edit and render
so it’s easier to upload.
For easy reference – these are the recommended upload bitrates for YouTube videos.
For 1080p, YouTube recommends between 8 and 12 megabits per second, depending on your
frame rate.
For 4K, that number goes up to 35 to 68 megabits per second.
However, keep in mind that this is the recommended bitrate that you upload your final files at
– generally you want to record higher than you render at.
Again, you can always compress your video more in editing and rendering, but you can’t
add more quality back into a video.
As far as my personal recommendation goes, for 720p or lower, I recommend recording around
8 to 10 megabits per second, higher if you’re doing any major editing.
For 1080p recording, I recommend 25 megabits to 40 megabits per second.
For 1440p or higher, I definitely recommend recording at 45 megabits per second or higher.
For 4K, you’ll wanna go 50 megabits per second or higher, but I recommend 100 megabits
per second or more if your computer can handle it.
At that point you absolutely should be using Nvenc or AMD VCE encoding instead of x264.
If you’re doing a strictly recording profile, your audio bitrates should all be set to 320
kbps.
Having top audio quality is important, and there’s no reason to record at a lower bitrate.
Again, the ultimate rule with changing any settings is to perform multiple lengthy recording
tests before starting a real recording session.
You want to make absolutely certain that your settings are solid and reliable before committing
to a proper session.
One last factor to consider is how long you plan on recording.
See, my normal recording profile for videos involves recording at massive bitrates – 200
or more megabits per second – but when I started live streaming, I couldn’t use my
overkill bitrates anymore, as my multiple-hour-long live streams were generating files that were
hundreds of gigabytes.
Kinda hard to maintain that on a 3x weekly schedule if you want to maintain the VODs.
So my stream recording profile is set to 30 megabits per second.
This maintains a good balance of quality to file size for my stream VODs – and is about
the maximum bitrate supported by the original Elgato Game Capture HD, so the file sizes
are competitive enough for just cutting out quick stream highlights and is still way better
quality than the original stream was.
Hopefully this helps you make a solid decision when it comes to choosing a bitrate for your
recording or stream in OBS Studio.
For other videos on setting up recording or streaming profiles, we cover this more in-depth
in other videos in the course.
I hope this episode of my OBS Studio tutorial course has been helpful for you.
If it was, drop-kick that like button and subscribe for awesome tech videos.
If you like game streaming, come follow me on Twitch and drop a message in chat.
Until next time, I’m EposVox, Happy Streaming!
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