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justlarryyy · 1 year ago

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Happy Pride Month.

#lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtqpride #lgbtqpridemonth #drawing #digitaldrawing #art #digitalart #sketch #digitalsketch #artist #illustration #drawingillustration #digitalillustration #digitaldrawingillustration #renderedart #renderedartwork #rendereddigitalart

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stream-academy · 1 year ago

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"My stream looks bad."

This is a pretty common issue that creators face and it all stems from one common misconception: 1080p doesn't mean quality.

The above video is in fact 1080p, but as you can see there's definitely something wrong about it. Here's that exact same freezeframe but at 480p:

So what's happening here? Bitrates.

A Crash Course Through Video Compression

Computer video has historically been a really hard problem to solve. Computers used to be slow (Like, really slow). Computer scientists (read: nerds) figured out that the human eye is bad and have developed techniques that abuse this fact.

Dithering tricks your eye into "seeing" more colors than are actually present. Here's a monotone (two colors!) that appears to also have shades of grey even though there aren't any:

Pretty cool, eh? By using clever placement of the black dots an entire range of grays emerge even though there aren't any.

You can even throw out little bits of detail to save space and the eye will be none the wiser. These are the core principles behind video compression.

Why do we even need to compress video anyways?

The short answer: internet speeds still aren't fast enough. The long answer: distribution costs.

If you are a video site, such as Twitch or YouTube, it is in your best interests to save as much money as possible for every live stream. So, every platform places limits on bitrate.

Okay, get to the point already. What is bitrate and how do I get my stream to look good?

Video compression usually has two modes: constant bitrate (CBR), and variable bitrate (VBR).

For regular video recordings it's usually recommended you use variable bitrate (note that CRF/CQ is a form of variable bitrate). This allows you to save space where you can but increase usage where it's necessary to help maintain visual quality.

But for live-streaming you use constant bitrate (the reason is due to how networks actually operate and how celluar/mobile networks handle streaming. It's complicated). With CBR, you tell the encoder that you want the result to always be at X bits per second regardless of the resulting quality (good or bad). So that means that during moments of low movement (in game, in an IRL setting, or even on your desktop) the encoder doesn't have to work nearly as hard to fit the current frame into the allotted rate. During high movement moments the encoder has to work extra hard to find those visual shortcuts — such as dithering, detail removal, or macroblocks (shudders) — to keep everything within bounds.

Obviously, removing detail will hurt the quality of an image. And doing that repeatedly will result in that reduced image quality you saw in the first 1080p screenshot. For that screenshot, I encoded the video at 500kbps, which is obviously way too low (I did that for for clickbait). For the 480p screenshot I encoded it using a VBR technique called Constant Quality. The size difference between those two files paints a better picture: the 480p version is 12x larger than the 1080p version despite 1080p having 8x as many pixels as 480p.

Alright, so what do you recommend I use?

Well factors like resolution, framerate, your internet, and your computer's hardware all play a role in determining what's best for you.

Here's a table bitrates for resolution and framerate.

Just note that your internet upload speed needs to be large enough for that bitrate AND whatever else you may use the internet for at the same time.

And that's it! Your stream should look loads better! And that's it for this installment of Stream Academy. Feel free to ask us questions about streaming or for help with any problems you've been having along the way. If you're looking for widgets and alerts for your live-stream journey, then you should look into using Casterlabs (that's us! 😁)

Image Sources

Throneful (2021, January 8th). "Apex Legends (2021) - Gameplay (PC UHD) [4K60FPS]" [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPtoIy-oPWQ

Renderedartwork (2012, December 21st). "Michelangelo's David dithered using the Void-and-Cluster technique." [Image]. Wikimedia Foundation. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo%27s_David_-_Void-and-Cluster.png

#livestreaming #twitch #encoding #streamacademy

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justlarryyy · 10 months ago

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