Coding with JoeG - Streaming Software Configuration - December 2020 Update

In a previous post, I covered the hardware I use for the stream. In this post, I’ll cover the software and settings to ‘produce’ the stream and artifacts. Please keep in mind, this is a guide based on some of my searchings, my playing around, and my hardware, your needs may be different. Another thing to keep in mind, is these are my settings for streaming live coding not live gaming.

Streamlabs OBS Configuration

Streamlabs OBS is a free reliable streaming app with the fastest setup process on the market. We have developed an all-in-one application making streaming easy for everyone. Whether you’re a novice or experienced streamer, Streamlabs OBS will provide you the best streaming experience, with tools built to engage, grow, and monetize your channel.

Download

Settings

The first thing, from what I remember, is that Streamlabs OBS runs an ‘Auto Optimize’ function, which you can find on the general tab of settings. From everything I have seen and read, you really never want to, except for maybe the first time. Most of the time, you will want to ‘tweak’ the settings to fit your needs. I’ve been on streams where the host says “What a minute. I have to tweak something”. It’s gonna happen for a while.

First, we are going to talk about the setting for Streamlabs OBS. You can get to these by clicking on gear () icon. Again, some settings might not be applicable depending on your hardware.

General Tab

Everything in this tab is according to your preference. For me, everything is unchecked except for:

• Confirm stream title and game before going live
• In the ‘Output’ section, Automatically record when streaming
• In the ‘Source Alignment Snapping’, all 3 checked.

Stream Tab

Enable multistream, if you are. For me, as the writing of this post, I’m only live streaming to Twitch

Output Tab

For this tab, I have a few things tweaked based on my hardware and conditions. Please select the Advanced option for ‘Output mode’.

Output - Streaming

Setting	Value	Description
Audio Track	1	Only have one track. This is helpful if you want to separate music from your voice
Encoder	Hardware (NVENC)	This is set to software, by default, I changed it to hardware because I wanted to offload some of the video encoding to my video chip/card since my PC not fast enough
Enforce stream service encoder settings	Checked
Rate Control	CBR	Constant Bitrate Stream: This is the standard bitrate to use for streamers. Let’s say you’ve set your video bitrate to 3000 Kbps for your next stream, using CBR means your stream will always be at 3000 Kbps, even when less could be used, such as a dark game that lacks detail.
Bit Rate	6000	The higher the better
Keyframe Interval	0	0 Indicates that Streamlabs will figure it out before it starts. The “Keyframe Interval” could be set at 2, meaning that the video frame will be rendered every 2 seconds.
Preset	Performance
Profile	high
Look-ahead	Unchecked
Psycho Visual Tuning	Checked
GPU	0
Max B-frames	2

For a more in-depth look at bitrates, and keyframes, check out What is Video Bitrate.

Output - Recording

Setting	Value	Description
Type	Standard
Recording Path	local storage	If you can, this should be a SSD on a different partition/device than your operating system. Avoid recording to a network drive
Generate File Name without Space	Checked
Recording Format	mp4
Audio Track	1	Only have one track. This is helpful if you want to separate music from your voice
Encoder	Hardware (NVENC)	This is set to software, by default, I changed it to hardware because I wanted to offload some of the video encoding to my video chip/card since my PC has a detected video card now.
Enforce stream service encoder settings	Checked
Rate Control	CBR	Constant Bitrate Stream: This is the standard bitrate to use for streamers. Let’s say you’ve set your video bitrate to 3000 Kbps for your next stream, using CBR means your stream will always be at 3000 Kbps, even when less could be used, such as a dark game that lacks detail.
Bit Rate	6000	The higher the better
Keyframe Interval	0	0 Indicates that Streamlabs will figure it out before it starts. The “Keyframe Interval” could be set at 2, meaning that the video frame will be rendered every 2 seconds.
Preset	Performance
Profile	high
Look-ahead	Unchecked
Psycho Visual Tuning	Checked
GPU	0
Max B-frames	2

Output - Audio

All of these settings are untouched

Output - Replay Buffer

Setting	Value	Description
Enabled Replay Buffer	Checked	This was on by default, I have not changed it
Maximum Replay Time (Seconds)	20

Audio

Setting	Value	Description
Sample Rate	48khz	Set this to the highest value your audio will support! The higher the hertz, the better the audio quality
Channels	Stereo	Especially if you have music playing
Desktop Audio Device 1	Disabled
Desktop Audio Device 2	Disabled
Mic/Auxiliary Device 1	Disabled
Mic/Auxiliary Device 2	Disabled
Mic/Auxiliary Device 3	Disabled

You can select your microphone for either of the mic/auxiliary slots if you chose to. Doing so will make your microphone available to all scenes without adding it.

Video

Setting	Value	Description
Base (Canvas) Resolution	1920x1080	1080p. Most providers support 1080p and 4k. If you stream in 4k the resolution on the viewer’s screen will be different if they don’t have a 4k monitor due to scaling.
Output (Scaled) Resolution	19020x1080	HD
Downscale Filter	Bicubic (Sharpened scaling, 16 samples)	Bilateral, best for CPU. Lanczos, is better quality but CPU intensive. Bicubic, is the in-between.
FPS Type	Common FPS Values	This will defaults to Frames per Second based on the resolution
Common FPS Values	60	You can lower this to 30 if you are seeing an issue with your CPU. For streaming code, 30 is an acceptable value.

Advanced

Advanced - General

Setting	Value	Description
Process Priority	High	I have this set to high because I am using a separate machine for streaming otherwise you should probably chose normal

Advanced - Video

Setting	Value	Description
Color Format	NV12
YUV Color Space	601
YUV Color Range	Partial
Force CPU as render device	checked	I wanted to offload the encoding of video to the video chip

Some of your default settings for video might be different depending on your locale.

Advanced - Audio

I do not have a separate device to ‘monitor’ the stream audio

Setting	Value	Description
Audio Monitoring Device	Default
Disable Windows audio ducking	unchecked

Advanced - Recording

Setting	Value	Description
Filename Formatting	%CCYY-%MM-%DD %hh-%mm-%ss	This is the default value. I kept it because I keep all of the recordings… so far.
Overwrite if file exists	unchecked

Advanced - Replay Buffer

These are the default values. I imagine that if you are streaming your gaming, you might want to provide some replay functionality for a ‘sweet kill’. No one said ever, ‘That was a great use of a lambda, let me replay that’

Setting	Value	Description
Replay Buffer Filename Prefix	Replay
Replay Buffer Filename Suffix	empty

Advanced - Stream Delay

These are the default values.

Setting	Value	Description
Enable	Unchecked
Duration	20
Preserve cutoff point (increase delay) when reconnection	checked

Advanced - Automatically Reconnect

Setting	Value	Description
Enable	checked
Retry Delay (seconds)	10
Maximum Retries	20

Advanced - Network

If you have more than one Network Interface Card (nic), exampled wired and wireless. You can set Streamlabs OBS to only use one. If you have a wired connection, you should use that. Wireless can drop packets.

Setting	Value	Description
Bind to IP	Default
Dynamically change bitrate when dropping frames while streaming	unchecked	If you notice your CPU or internet connection can not handle the load you may want this checked. Doing so, will drop the frame rate , the number of ‘snapshots’ that the view sees, which could degrade quality. If you are later posting the recording, I would keep this unchecked.
Enable new networking code	unchecked	Explanation
Low latency mode	Unchecked	This should be checked if you are seeing a lot of dropped frames or low/show upload bandwidth from your ISP.

Advanced - Sources

Setting	Value	Description
Enable Browser Source Hardware Acceleration	checked

Advanced - Media Files

Setting	Value	Description
Enable media file caching	checked

Other settings

All of the other settings, Hotkeys, Game Overlay, Scene Collections, Notifications, Appearance, and Face Masks, I have left the default values.

Scenes

Scenes in OBS provide a different way to provide content to the viewer. Do you just want to show code? Do you just want to show you? Scenes are a way to do that, and a preference. From what I have seen, no two streams are the same. I have eight scenes registered, three of them are just helper scenes that are reused as part of other scenes.

Scene Name	Use
Overlay	Samples, provided by the theme, with some visual UI elements
Starting Scene	I use this when I go live, to let the viewers know “I’ll be there in a minute”
Live Share - Elgato	This is my primary scene. It shares the primary capture from the Elgato card with the video from the webcam
Be Right Back Scene	I have not used this one yet. It’s for the times, I might need to run and get the door, or another drink, or something
Ending Scene	This signals the users that the stream is ending and provides some social media links for them to continue the conversation. My mic is still on at this point. This might be replaced with the Just Chatting scene which I am still building.
Just Chatting	Work in progress. This will just be me with some background images for just the conversation.
Secret Time	I use this when I am working with secrets on screen and I don’t want to share them
Social Media	A shared scene with all of my social media links
Alerts	A shared scene with the OBS/Twitch alerts for new followers, subscribers, etc.

All of my scenes and alerts use the Pure theme by Own3d for a consistent look.

Filters

Filters are like advanced settings that let you tweak your devices (sources) even more. I’m going to cover some of the Webcam and Microphone filters I use to provide a better experience.

One thing to keep in mind is that the order of the filters matter. The output of one filter is feed in as the source of the next filter. So if you have four filters, the input of filter 4 would be the output of the third, not the source data. So, you might want to play around with the ordering a bit.

To get to the filters in OBS, right-click on a source and chose Filters.

Webcam Filters

Webcam Filter - Crop/Pad

This filter will remove or add pixels to your webcam. The webcam I use has a wide range, so I crop out a lot of it just so my face and shoulders are available.

Setting	Value	Description
Left	300
Top	180
Right	300
Bottom	50

Webcam Filter - Sharpen

I don’t use this filter any more.

Webcam Filter - Chroma Key

Chromakeying is used to mask out the background of your camera’s field of view. Think of the weather forecaster on TV standing in front of the weather map. That image is superimposed by a computer by replacing the Chromakeying color with the computer image. I have switched to a blue screen chromakey for my setup since my chair is blue.

You will probably mess around with these settings a lot until you get it just right. The lighting in your room/office/studio is a big contributor to this.

Setting	Value	Description
Key Color Type	Green
Similarity	440	Note: I play around with this number a lot depending on the lighting in my room. I usually don’t go under 400 or higher than 450
Smoothness	80
Key Color Spill Reduction	100
Opacity	100	Your personal preference. How much of yourself do you want on the screen?
Contrast	0
Brightness	0
Gamma	0

Semi-pro tip: Don’t wear the same color shirt as your Chromakey

Microphone Filters

These filters were based on a video I watched Best Microphone Settings for Streamlabs OBS (2020). I recommend you watch this video to learn more about the audio filters.

Microphone Filter - Gain

Setting	Value	Description
Gain	3.7	The more gain, the louder the audio is

Microphone Filter - Noise Suppression

Setting	Value	Description
MEthod	RNNoise

Microphone Filter - Noise Gate

These settings will require a lot of tweaking to get a clear sound for your recording. I find myself tweaking the Close and Open Thresholds mostly. The video above does a great job of explaining each of the settings.

Setting	Value	Description
Close Threshold	-53
Open Threshold	-26
Attack Time	25
Hold Time	200
Release Time	150

Microphone Filter - Compressor

Setting	Value	Description
Ratio	10
Threshold	-18
Attack	6
Release	60
Output Gain	0
Sidechain/Ducking Source	None

Wrap Up

That’s it! Again, your mileage may vary. These are the ‘optimal’ settings for my hardware, software, and environment.

For details on my hardware, check out this post