When streaming live, you may encounter options in your software or hardware encoder that impact the quality of the streaming video and audio, along with the bandwidth required to keep it going without any skipping or dropping out.

An encoder is software or hardware that converts the video and audio signals into a stream-ready format. The following information is adapted from our OBS Studio setup guide, which is a free software encoder for Windows and MacOS.

 

Bitrate

• This is the most important setting related to stream quality. The higher the number, the better the quality. But if your internet upload speed is not fast enough, your encoder will drop video frames, and your stream will skip a lot, and lose audio sync.

• Recommended Bit-Rates:
  Facebook - 3000-4000 Kbps
  YouTube - 4000-6000 Kbps
  • If your connection is not fast enough, try a lower value.
    
    
  • Kbps is Kilobits per second, and not KBps or Kilobytes.
  • Mbps is Megabits per second, and not MBps or Megabytes. 
    • 8 kilobits make a kilobyte, and a megabyte is 1000 kilobytes, or 8000 kilobits.
    • This is an important difference. You may hear people say they have an upload speed of 12 Megabytes on their internet connection, but they actually mean Megabits.
  • If you stream for 60 minutes at 4 Megabits per second, you will upload roughly 1.8 Gigabytes.
  • If you plan to stream with a bit-rate of 4000 kbps, you should have a 10 Megabit or higher upload speed on a dedicated network to be safe.
    • Run a speed test online and divide your resulting upload speed by 2.5, this should be your bit-rate in your encoder.
    • For example, if you have a 20 Mbps upload speed, you can safely set the bit-rate to 8000 Kbps.

 

Keyframe Interval

• Both YouTube and Facebook recommend setting this to 2.

• Keyframes are full frames of video in the compression scheme. They are also known as I-frames.

 

CPU Encoder Speed

• If you have a powerful computer, you can choose a slower speed to improve encode quality. The default is Fast. Consider using that or Very Fast.

  • The difference in quality is less noticeable than the difference in CPU load, as is shown in this comparison video.

 

H.264 Profile

• High Profile is recommended over Main Profile.