A lot of streaming tutorial content - my own included - assumes that you have a high-end
streaming PC.
How to get the highest resolution out of your webcam, capture card, and so on.
While this benefits quality, I don’t see a lot touching on how to really optimize the
nitty gritty details of a streaming setup to use less CPU load, or generally be more
resource-efficient.
We’re going to tackle optimizing your webcam today, though this will also apply to capture
cards as well.
Let’s jump in.
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I’m going to be tackling a few points in this video, starting with simpler stuff and
working up to a more technical point with decode formats and such.
The goal is to reduce overall system load required by using a webcam and reduce the
impact it has on your stream quality.
Firstly, just make sure you’re using enough light with your webcam.
The more light you have, the cleaner your image can be, and the less compensation it
has to do or the driver has to do to make the footage look good, especially if you’re
using a green screen.
This will help keep your webcam smooth and looking high framerate.
Also, consider using a designed background instead of chroma keying.
While it has been trendy recently to chroma key yourself into your game stream - it takes
a lot of system resources to chroma key and a well-crafted setup to get right in the first
place.
Having a decent-looking background physically behind you can add a lot more character to
your facecam shot and help you stand out.
A big point is to not run your webcam at its highest resolution.
This is especially key if you’re streaming.
If you’re streaming, viewers aren’t going to see a crisp clean 1080p image anyway, so
there’s no reason to run your camera at the highest resolution most of the time.
If you’re scaling your webcam down for a tiny facecam preview anyway, that is extra
work your CPU has to do, for no reason.
In your Video Capture Device properties in OBS Studio, tell the webcam to come in at
a lower resolution - 720p, 480p, maybe even 360p - and that scaling is done (mostly) within
the webcam itself, saving you on system resources and USB bandwidth.
Hell, in most cases you can even set the webcam to a 4 by 3 aspect ratio as well, as you usually
don’t need a super widescreen view of your room - and most people crop off the sides
anyway.
640x480, 480x360, and so on.
You might even discover that your webcam can support higher frame rates at lower resolutions!
That’s always a fun bonus - some webcams support 60fps at low resolutions, which will
keep it looking smooth with your stream, if you’re streaming at 60fps.
If you’re game streaming and running your games on one of the new high refresh rate
monitors, such as 120hz or 144hz - that can cause some performance issues with webcams
while streaming.
While it might suck, you can usually give your viewers the best possible experience
by limiting your monitor to 60hz in your graphics driver settings while streaming.
A more technical thing to look at is the available decode format of your webcam.
This also applies to your capture cards, though they usually have different decode formats
available.
Formats like H264 and MJPEG are very compressed - designed to operate on the lowest possible
USB bandwidth - and require your CPU to decode them before adding to your scene in OBS, and
then re-encoding with the stream.
And some webcams don’t even work with H264 format in Windows 10 anymore.
These formats are solid if you’re trying to use multiple webcams on one PC and need
to optimize for available USB bandwidth, but need a fast CPU to handle it.
If your device supports the YUV, YUY2 or NV12 modes, this is a more uncompressed feed, which
requires more bandwidth but is much less CPU intensive to decode and add to your stream.
Not all webcams support this, but those that do would benefit greatly from this mode.
They might look a bit better, too.
This applies to capture cards, as well.
RGB decode format looks the absolute best, but is both bandwidth and CPU resource intensive
to use, and usually not worth it.
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So there you go!
Here’s some optimization tips for squeezing the most resources out of your streaming setup.
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I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun, and I’ll see you in the next one.