x264 Software vs H264 Hardware Encoding Tutorial - Stream School 

You're welcome! I had been running into the same issue, my CPU just wasn't quite strong enough to do everything. By moving it to the encoder on my GPU, I was able to bump up the bitrate quite a bit as well for that increased quality. Just keep in mind, the higher your bitrate, the larger your file size!

Thank you so much! Glad I was able to help you out 😊

Thank you! I appreciate that! I know it can get confusing, so I tried to break it down as best I could.

Thanks so much! Glad it helped someone :)

You're welcome! And yeah, working in my audio balance is something I still need practice with! Sometimes it sounds fine when editing, then is way too loud once I upload it!

@@ShinigamiNGChannel no problem, thank you once again, all the best in getting it right😀😁🙏🏾

I'm not sure if it's possible, I imagine it would be but I've never tried anything like that! Please update me if you get it working because that's a really cool idea.

You're welcome!

Hello! One thing I noticed with my 5700 xt was that no matter what settings I used, it would look pixelated on Twitch, so I switched back to using CPU encoding instead with x.264. I would recommend a bitrate of about 4500-6000 depending on your internet connection, and then try setting your OBS presets to Very Fast or if possible Faster. The lower you go on the presets, the harder it is for your PC to keep up but the better your stream can look. Hope this helps!

You're welcome! Glad I was able to help!

Thanks! I tried to keep it fairly simple, but also give some useful info that not everyone is aware of, especially if they are t very tech savvy!

@@ShinigamiNGChannel If your saying your not tech savvy, you sure know a ton about encoding cause it was true.. Dealt with a ton of issues myself in the past. So if you didn't help some, you might of helped most. If anything these videos don't really tend to help people as like you said at the end, each component in a Computer is different. Like for an example your computer is almost similar to my streaming PC, but my gaming PC has much different parts. so simply yes, encoding and different resolution settings will variety between each system. So you explained it all perfectly and how anyone else would of ;)

Ah sorry, I meant I tried to explain it for people who aren't tech savvy. I've worked in IT for years and am fairly knowledgeable with computers in general. I'm glad I was able to explain it in an easy to understand way though!

@@ShinigamiNGChannel Ah... All good! Atleast theres some people that explain for people who won't really understand.. **I understood as I understand tech and ive been working with it for the past few years** But like I said, it is nice that people like you go over certain details to help people even if u can't like at the end going over if you have a more powerful PC, try this cause other people would forget and only go off of the tech/equipment they have access too.

Thanks! And yeah, I have had both Intel and AMD for processor, and both AMD and Nvidia for graphics in recent years for streaming, so I at least have an idea how they both perform :)

Hey sorry, somehow I didn't get notified of this comment! Some webcams don't have a very high framerate by default, and can definitely look blurry during movement. You may need to go to the properties of the camera in OBS and see if you can change the framerate, though some cameras don't allow this and are locked at a low framerate. Another option is to try to improve your lighting on your face, lighting can make a really big difference in webcam quality. Sometimes the webcam will get blurry just because it doesn't have enough light to pick up! I hope that helps some, sorry it was such a late reply!

Hey Colin, you definitely have the power needed for a 1080p stream, so there must be something toggled somewhere to scale your resolution for the stream. I'm not at my computer right now to double-check, but I think there are 2 places it could be. One is in the Video settings in OBS, there should be a box to scale resolution, make sure that is still set to 1920*1080p. Next under the stream settings where I think it's labeled "Output" there is another box for scaling resolution. Make sure this one is NOT checked so that it uses your Video settings. Hopefully that helps some!

I absolutely loved this video and it explained so much. I'm replying to this specific post because it's kind of close to the specs of my pc I built. I have a (5600xt be radeon graphics card) with a ryzen 5 3600x cpu so it's hard to get advice sometimes for my specific build. I stream and record ( I will be changing up possibly, now that I saw this video ) I usually have artifacting while streaming in games with high motion on stream so I run on 720p 60 instead of 1080p as I used to before with h264 at 5450 bitrate now, but i know my graphics card can handle it. I guess my main question is should I switch to x264 to get better quality at lower bitrate/use more of my cpu and record on graphics. I've tried so many things and my last option really is to try that since I am not affiliated or partnered on twitch. Also my dpi for my mouse is 1500 so it uses a bit of cpu during movement. If possible I would like to go back to 1080p quality just off my own preference, not that it matters but internet speed is not an issue at all. (A reference to a video example can be found here (you can ignore if you would like to just helping is greatly appreciated), www.twitch.tv/videos/1279467602 I start gaming around 2 hours and 6 mins)

Do you have a dedicated video card as well? If not you may be limited to just x264.

Hey! What graphics card do you have? And do you have your drivers up to date for it?

@@ShinigamiNGChannel I have a amd 6500 xt

Unfortunately it looks like the 6500 XT doesn't actually have a hardware encoder. So there isn't an H264 option for that card. You'll be limited to x264 of your CPU instead. Sorry!

Hmm, with your setup, the 250x may be your limiting factor. Both it and your FX-6300 are a little dated, but I think your CPU at least has several cores and a decent clock speed. You may need to lower your bitrate even more, maybe around 4500? You could also try a faster preset, though I can't remember off the top of my head what the fastest settings are. Lastly, if you are trying to stream in 1080p and/or 60 fps, I would recommend dropping to 720p and 30 fps. I know it doesn't look as good, but should help improve your performance! I hope that helps!

@@ShinigamiNGChannel I was streaming already on 720p, but I'm gonna try select a faster option on the settings and test if it can improve

But anyways, thanks for the help and the amazing vid m8

You're welcome! Unfortunately with the age of your gear, you will probably need to make some quality compromises, but hopefully not too many!

Honestly with your hardware you probably wouldn't have any problems with x264 at all. IF and that's a big If, you run into any frame drops, then I would suggest using the NVENC encoder on your 3060, since it likely won't affect your frame rate in either of those games at all.

@@ShinigamiNGChannel it performed way better wuth x264 i had no delay but does it overheat my cpu?

Sadly the encoder is part of your graphics card, and would require you to get a new graphics card to get a new encoder. The other alternative is using a processor software encoder such as x.264 instead.

Hmm, I'm not super familiar with Apple's encoders, but it is at least an Intel chipset. I would imagine that the software encoder will be plenty for what you are doing, and since you aren't gaming or using a lot of other resources, you'll probably be able to get pretty good quality out of it as well! OBS I think defaults to the Faster preset, and basically the slower you go, the higher quality you in theory SHOULD get. You may be able to drop the preset down to Fast and get an even clearer image. Going to Medium or Low will need a pretty powerful PC though. It's also possible that at that bitrate you may also need to increase the preset to fastest instead. In that case, I personally would drop the bitrate until your PC can comfortably stream at Faster or Fast preset. You may have to play with those settings a bit until you get it right where you want it!

@@ShinigamiNGChannel this was very helpful. I did not think of lowering the bitrate and then ALSO decreasing the speed preset. I'll give it a try. Thanks again!! :D

You're welcome!

That depends, are you streaming to Twitch or RU-vid? And what is your internet upload speed? If Twitch, I'd recommend keeping it fairly low at say 4500 kb/s since they only guarantee transcoding for Partners, which means if you are only an Affiliate and you use high bitrates, your viewers might buffer. RU-vid offers transcoding for all last I knew, so you can stream as high of quality as you want and use higher bitrates. BUT if you don't have a very large upload speed then you will be limited by that. I'd recommend using a speed test site and finding out what your normal speed is before setting your bitrate. Also, keep in mind if you have say 10,000 kb/s you don't want to try to use the whole thing. Internet speeds tend to fluctuate a little bit, and you need to save some of it for other services. So I tend to recommend shooting for 75% or less if possible. Hope that helps!

@@ShinigamiNGChannel I haven't messed around with settings that much but ik I have a decent enough pc but I have so much delay when I play games andy upload speed is like 27mbps whatever its called

As long as your upload speed is 27mbps and not your download then you should be fine. A lot of providers will give you an upload speed of only 10% or less of what your listed download speed. With my provider, they don't even list the upload speed with the plan and I had to read through the fine print and find out what it actually was. As for a delay, are you playing on WiFi at all? How old is your modem and/or router? If they are very old they may not support a lot of the networking features that newer games use.

@@ShinigamiNGChannel ye I play on WiFi but nah its new like its average WiFi like 20 ping in fortnite and all so ye do u think with the right settings w my pc I can get absolutely 0 input delay r lag

You're welcome!

You are correct! I mispoke! I should have said x264 here instead of h264, good catch!

Hammyboi, I'm not sure, what CPU and GPU do you have?

@@ShinigamiNGChannel I have a i9-10850k with a rx580 this same thing happend to me

There is a lot of different settings that all work together here. Your bitrate that you have set is basically how much work you're telling it to do, so the higher that is, the more work your encoder is doing. Then if you are using one of the presets that I think default at Faster, the slower you go is like multiplying all of your work. So if you set it on Slow with a really high bitrate, you'll practically need a supercomputer! Right now I regularly stream at 4500 kbps on the Fast preset using h264 and OBS only uses about 3% of my CPU. I have a Ryzen 2700X and an RX 5700 XT.

I have i5-8400 and it seems that no apps can take advantage of my 2gb gpu. so i guess it just uses software encoding?

Your GPU might also be part of the processor and not a dedicated graphics card. That is very common especially in laptops. In that case, even if you choose hardware encoding, it will technically still be using your processor. However some processors have dedicated encoders so it doesn't slow down your processor too much. In your case I would switch to x264 and see if that performs any better. You may also need to lower your bitrate and increase your speed preset.

I had to look that up because I've never even heard of it lol, but I have to agree! At least in pictures where he has a beard. His clean shaven face looks NOTHING like mine! Our chin and jawline are very different.

@@ShinigamiNGChannel colt pulls bad bitches bro! Lol

I have no idea if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I've already got ShiniWifey lol

@@ShinigamiNGChannel that’s dope bro! Congratulations!!!

Thanks haha!

That's fair! I probably should have turned the music volume down a little more!

Thank you for your feedback! I definitely didn't have all of my settings as fine tuned as I should, and was working on a pretty limited setup for my green screen and lighting. I've changed things up a bit lately and I'm not actually using the green screen now, though I could definitely still work to improve on quality!