What Are The Best Settings For OBS Recording? - Linus Tech Tips

• Buc221

• Member
• 38

Hello.

My specs are as follows

Ryzen 1700x 

16gb hyperx fury 3200mhz

XFX RX 590 8gb

If anyone can help me determine the best settings for recording through OBS, that would be nice.

I tried alot of different settings and encoders, but i seem to get the ''encoder overloaded'' error and i get quite alot of stuttering in the footage.

I have a 1680x1050 monitor. 

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• Uptivuptiz

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• Rainbow
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I don't use OBS that much, but I can tell you this: DO NOT USE THE NVENC ENCODER! It uses Nvidia GPU for encoding instead of the CPU.

Please mention or quote me if you want a response.  

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Buc221
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• Buc221

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1 minute ago, Uptivuptiz said:

I don't use OBS that much, but I can tell you this: DO NOT USE THE NVENC ENCODER! It uses Nvidia GPU for encoding instead of the CPU.

I have only three available: x264, h264 and h265

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• Snipergod87

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h265 has best quality but more cpu cycles h and x 264 imo are interchangeable

• Buc221
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• mariushm

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H264, H265 (HEVC) are encoding standards.

x264 is a software encoder which compresses a video using the H264 standard (MPEG4-AVC).

x265 is a software encoder which compresses a video using the H265 standard (also known as HEVC).

and for completeness, XViD is a software encoder which compresses a video using the H263 standard (MPEG4-ASP)

In OBS, x264 refers to the option of using the software encoder x264 to create a H264 encoded stream, instead of using the hardware encoder present in your video card.

The hardware encoder is decent, uses practically no processor time to encode the video and the performance loss on your video card is minimal. It does not produce as much quality as the software encoder, but in most situations, it's a good tradeoff.

Software encoder x264 will give more quality but it also uses the processor by a significant amount, so there's a chance too much of the cpu time is spent on the encoding, leaving the game without processor time, so the game's fps may lower too much.

It depends on how you configure the encoder, and what games you play.

You should have option to use the hardware encoders offered by AMD Advanced Media Framework (aka AMF) which are H264 and HEVC but Twitch and Youtube as far as I know only accept H264.

If for some reason you don't want to use the hardware encoders (for example to get slightly better quality but for a lot of cpu usage), you can use the software x264 option.

advanced section : set the color format to NV12, yuv color space to 709 , full range...  if you use the hardware encoder, set the bitrate to the maximum you can afford to upload and that Twitch allows (probably 6mbps, so you enter there 6000 at bitrate) 

HEVC is a better standard than H264, but as I said, platforms like Twitch or Youtube won't accept it and really, the quality improvements of HEVC are mostly visible when you're going above 1080p - with a software encoder like x265.exe, at 1080p you basically get probably 10-20% extra quality in the same amount of bits, but it takes you 5-10 times as much time to encode a video.

The hardware encoder on the video card is configured for speed, to be able to do 60fps real time encoding, so in most cases you won't get even 10% more quality when switching between H264 and HEVC, at the same bitrate. If you want to benefit from what HEVC offers, you really have to configure and give it time to analyze frames and determine how to best compress stuff - that doesn't happen when you want real time encoding.

• Donzter99 and Buc221
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• Buc221

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21 hours ago, mariushm said:

H264, H265 (HEVC) are encoding standards.

x264 is a software encoder which compresses a video using the H264 standard (MPEG4-AVC).

x265 is a software encoder which compresses a video using the H265 standard (also known as HEVC).

and for completeness, XViD is a software encoder which compresses a video using the H263 standard (MPEG4-ASP)

 

In OBS, x264 refers to the option of using the software encoder x264 to create a H264 encoded stream, instead of using the hardware encoder present in your video card.

The hardware encoder is decent, uses practically no processor time to encode the video and the performance loss on your video card is minimal. It does not produce as much quality as the software encoder, but in most situations, it's a good tradeoff.

Software encoder x264 will give more quality but it also uses the processor by a significant amount, so there's a chance too much of the cpu time is spent on the encoding, leaving the game without processor time, so the game's fps may lower too much.

It depends on how you configure the encoder, and what games you play.

 

You should have option to use the hardware encoders offered by AMD Advanced Media Framework (aka AMF) which are H264 and HEVC but Twitch and Youtube as far as I know only accept H264.

If for some reason you don't want to use the hardware encoders (for example to get slightly better quality but for a lot of cpu usage), you can use the software x264 option.

 

advanced section : set the color format to NV12, yuv color space to 709 , full range...  if you use the hardware encoder, set the bitrate to the maximum you can afford to upload and that Twitch allows (probably 6mbps, so you enter there 6000 at bitrate) 

 

HEVC is a better standard than H264, but as I said, platforms like Twitch or Youtube won't accept it and really, the quality improvements of HEVC are mostly visible when you're going above 1080p - with a software encoder like x265.exe, at 1080p you basically get probably 10-20% extra quality in the same amount of bits, but it takes you 5-10 times as much time to encode a video.

The hardware encoder on the video card is configured for speed, to be able to do 60fps real time encoding, so in most cases you won't get even 10% more quality when switching between H264 and HEVC, at the same bitrate. If you want to benefit from what HEVC offers, you really have to configure and give it time to analyze frames and determine how to best compress stuff - that doesn't happen when you want real time encoding.

Alright, thank you very much for the help, I put the settings in and I will try recording soon.

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• Guest

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H265

10,000

or 20,000 Bitrate for 1080p. (16:9)

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