Best OBS Settings for Twitch - A Beginners Guide
Live streaming your content online is one of the best ways to establish an online presence and create a huge base of viewers that love your content. You can live stream games, conduct virtual music concerts, create your own cooking streams or art tutorials. There is so much you can do online!
Now, with platforms like Twitch, offering users a medium to live stream and establish their own brand, streaming is totally becoming a viable career option.
Especially for gamers, as they have literally taken over the streaming medium somehow proving that there is a surprisingly huge viewership base for gaming-related content.
Now, you don’t have to be a tech-savvy genius to create your own streaming channel on Twitch. But there is definitely a learning curve involved to become a pro at live streaming.
The content that you choose to post is extremely important, but the quality of your streams can make or break your streaming career.
Here comes in OBS, short for Open Broadcaster Software - a popular streaming software that can potentially alter your streaming quality. All you have to do is make some specific tweaks to optimize the OBS settings.
Unfortunately, it is not as straightforward as we had hoped it would be. Depending on your system configuration, hardware, and internet bandwidth you will have to alter the OBS settings to get the best results.
We realize that many beginners with little to no knowledge about terms like encoding and bitrate might want to venture into streaming. So in this article, we have written a detailed, beginner-friendly guide about the best OBS settings for Twitch.
We cover all the basic terms and then move on to talk about the best obs settings for twitch.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is OBS Studio?
OBS Studio is a free and open-source software used for video recording and live streaming purposes. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Using this piece of software you can stream your content on platforms like Twitch and YouTube.
It is an RTMP-enabled encoder software that allows it to capture and stream real-time high-quality video and audio.
In this article, we are mostly concerned with the OBS Streamlined Settings panel that gives you access to a wide array of streaming configuration options that can be optimized to gain maximum quality control and high-quality streams.
What do you mean by Encoding?
The operation of encoding is performed by an encoder that converts your video/audio file into a digital format ready for transmission from your computer to the live streaming platform (Twitch in this case).
Encoders are essential in any type of broadcasting and can come in form of both software or hardware. Naturally, software encoders are cheaper than hardware encoders.
In this article, we will be focusing mainly on the NVIDIA NVENC and the x264 encoders. We speak further about them in the upcoming sections.
What is Bitrate?
When you are live streaming a high-quality video, a huge amount of data is being transferred through your network. For the streaming video to be of top-notch quality, this data transfer has to happen quickly.
Bitrate describes the rate at which bits are transferred from one location to another. So it is basically the amount of data transferred in a certain time. Without high bitrate, a high frame rate and high-resolution video will not look as good to your viewers.
But a high bitrate will take up a huge chunk of your Internet bandwidth, so setting it appropriately is essential in order to optimize your stream quality that reaches your viewer.
Best Bitrate for OBS
Now that you have a general idea about what bitrate is, you can easily understand that your Internet speed will determine what quality you can stream at and hence will determine the bitrate you choose.
It is advisable to use ethernet cables instead of WiFi to get consistent internet speed. Your resolution and FPS (Frames per second) targets, will decide how fast your internet has to be.
| RESOLUTION | FPS | INTERNET SPEED |
|---|---|---|
| 720 | 30 | 1500 to 4000 |
| 720 | 60 | 2500 to 5000 |
| 1080 | 30 | 3000 to 6000 |
| 1080 | 60 | 4500 to 9000 |
Note: For non-partnered Twitch Streamers it is recommended that you don’t set your bitrate higher than 6500 kbps value. Twitch might downgrade your bitrate if you go any further than that.
Video OBS Bitrate
In your OBS settings, the video bitrate is set to 2500 kbps by default, but you can choose to change it according to your video resolution. In the table below you’ll find the recommended video bitrate for a set video resolution.
| Video Resolution | Video Bitrate (kbps) |
|---|---|
| 270 | 400 |
| 360 | 800 |
| 480 | 1200 |
| 720 (High Definition) | 1500 |
| 1080 (High Definition) | 4000 |
| 4k (High Definition) | 8000 |
Audio OBS Bitrate
Similar to the video bitrate, you can also tweak your audio bitrate to optimize the overall quality of your stream. If you are streaming instrumental performance on Twitch, it’s essential you choose a high audio bitrate and compensate for the bandwidth loss by setting a comparatively lower video bitrate.
For high-quality audio, you can choose a bitrate of 320 kbps. Although we have included some recommendations, trial and error is the best way to determine the exact bitrate for your stream. So performing a few tests and checking which numbers work best is the way to go.
Best OBS Settings for Twitch
Before you begin tweaking your OBS settings, you’ll first have to download OBS on your computer. To do so, you’ll need to visit the official OBS site and download the latest version of the OBS installation file.
The OBS Studio 27.0.1 was recently released in June and is free to download on Windows, macOS, or Linux. Once you have installed the software, we can optimize the OBS streaming settings.
Follow these instructions to get the best OBS settings for Twitch:
- Open OBS Studio on your computer
- Click on the “Settings” button in the bottom right corner under the Controls tab
- A pop-up Settings window will appear.
- Here you can see 4 main tabs - General, Stream, Output, Audio, Video, Hotkeys, and Advanced.
In the further sections, we will go through the General, Stream, Output, Audio, and Video tabs in detail.
General Tab
The General tab doesn’t contain many optimizations options, you can set the default theme to “Dark” if you wish.
Stream Tab
In this section, you can choose the Service platform which is Twitch in our case, and enter your stream key. You can also directly log into your Twitch account by clicking on the “Connect Account” option. This will sync your Twitch account to the OBS settings panel.
Output Tab
Click on the Outputs Tab next and go to the “Advanced” features in the Output Mode. Here you’ll get to adjust all the streaming settings that will directly affect the output stream quality.
Under the Streaming tab,
- Select 1 on the Audio Track
- If you have the NVIDIA drivers installed, it’s advisable you select the NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder. If not you can go with the default x264 encoder. In the below table, you’ll find the recommended settings for the encoder of your choice.
For NVIDIA NVENC H.264 Encoder
| Rate Control | CBR |
| Bitrate | Maximum 6500 kbps (for non partnered Twitch Streamers) |
| Keyframe Intervals | 2 |
| Profile | High |
| Preset |
Max Quality (for 20 series GPU or higher) Quality (10 series GPU) |
| Look- ahead | Checked |
| Psycho Visual Tuning | Checked |
| GPU | 0 |
| Max B-Frames | 2 |
For x264 Encoder
| Rate Control | CBR |
| Bitrate | Maximum 6500 kbps (for non-partnered Twitch Streamers) |
| Keyframe Interval | 2 |
| CPU Usage | You can choose this option according to the game movement speed needed. |
| Profile | High |
| Tune | None |
You can find more details about the encoder configuration in this article.
Audio Tab
Audio settings as mentioned earlier are very important. Good quality audio can still attract viewers even if the video is not up to the mark.
Similar to the previous two sections, click on the Audio tab and start by choosing the Sample Rate. For the best audio you can choose 48kHz, otherwise, you can keep it to 44.1kHz.
Select the 'Stereo' option in the Channel field.
In the Global Audio Devices section, you can choose the different devices that are connected to your computer. If you are using an external microphone, you can choose that as the default option.
Video Tab
- Next, you can go to the Video tab to alter the video settings.
- Here you can first select the resolution under the Base (Canvas) Resolution field and the Output (Scaled) Resolution field.
- For the Base (Canvas) Resolution, select the resolution values at which you’re playing the game.
- The Output (Scaled) Resolution value will determine the resolution of your stream. So select, 1280x720, for a 720p stream and 1920x1080 for a 1080p stream.
- Next, you can select the Downscale Filter. Here you can choose Bicubic or Lanczos if you are downsizing from high base resolution to lower output resolution.
- Depending on your system and internet speed, you can either choose 30-60 frames per second or 60 frames per second FPS.
There you go! After reading this article, beginners can now have a general understanding of all the streaming related jargon along with the details on the best OBS settings for Twitch