You know that feeling when you’re so prepared that you’re bursting with confidence? Well, that wasn’t me, but as an eager first-time Twitch streamer with the usual prep work – OBS setup after countless YouTube tutorials, meticulously configured green screen and an okay set of tech skills – I thought I can pull it off and do a rough but operational first stream. Well… I could not. 🙂
The thing is, my setup is overcomplicated. I have a dedicated streaming PC – my main interest is retro consoles, so there’s no easy way around this added complexity. But that’s actually an advantage, because I played on a fairly old PC with an ancient GTX 970 graphics card, and it definitely could not handle encoding & uploading & recording while rendering the gameplay. The streaming PC I’m using is a repurposed media PC, which has a Ryzen 5 3400G onboard – the first in AMD’s lineup that supports HEVC-encoding – so it should deal with H264 fairly easily, right? Wrong! AMD produces utter garbage at 6,000 kbps. But that’s still not the main issue. Thing is, I really wanted to have the stream recorded – upload to YouTube perhaps, but most importantly to watch it back and learn from the mistakes. So what do you do? Setup video settings for streaming, then copy it over for recording. That should work… Well, it should not. 🙂 There’s an explicit setting OBS for using the actual stream-encoded video for my recording, but I smartly missed that option. So there is my PC, struggling to keep up with 1080p@60fps, and it’s trying to do that encoding twice in rapid succession – one for the stream, on for the hard disk. Guess what happened…
Sure I was stupid not to look back the stream in real time on my phone, but OBS happily reported all green, no frames dropped, CPU at 10-15% max.
Second Attempt Tonight
I tested things out yesterday, and the following settings seem to work fairly well with my streaming PC:
- Stream settings: x264, 6,000 kbps, CBR, 1080p, 30fps, CPU encoder @ faster
- Recording settings: HEVC, 10,000 kbps, hardware encoder
- Audio AAC, 160 kbps, only encoded once (that’s a really nice setting in OBS that you can use the audio from the live stream for your recording!)
Plan, Fail, Repeat
Well, no worries. I’m prepared to broadcast to my biggest fan only (hello me) for quite some time, so it was fairly easy to laugh it off. Tonight I’ll do a short test stream, checking things out on my phone. Let’s see how I fail this time! 🙂
