What Bitrate Should I Stream At?

In general, 3000kbps with a resolution of 1280×720 should be used. You must, however, consider the gear you’re using, the sort of material you’re producing, and the alternatives available to your viewers.

There’s also the question of which bitrate to employ vs which bitrate is optimum for your stream. For example, if you’re playing FPS games on a powerful machine but with a bad internet connection, you’ll have trouble seeing your motions clearly when gaming.

Let’s determine the ideal bitrate for your stream while keeping reasonable expectations in mind. We’ll utilize OBS Studio and the Twitch Inspector tool to find this out.

What bitrate settings should I use to stream with my computer?

Let’s fire up OBS Studio and see what your hardware constraints are. To obtain a basic notion of what your system specs (and internet connection) can manage, we’ll perform the Auto-Configuration process first. Keep in mind that this is only a hypothesis, so we’ll have to make some adjustments later.

How to utilize the Auto-Configuration Wizard in OBS Studio

Select Auto-Configuration Wizard from the Tools menu.
Choose the greatest choice for your demands; in this case, let’s go with Optimize for Streaming; recording comes second.
Choose your preferred base canvas resolution and frame rate.
Enter the details for your stream; we’ll utilize Twitch to make use of the Twitch Inspector feature. https://dashboard.twitch.tv/u/yourname/settings/stream You may link your account or receive your stream key here: https://dashboard.twitch.tv/u/yourname/settings/stream
Allow the bandwidth test to complete.
Apply the settings by clicking the Apply button.

You should have a reasonable sense of where to stream at now that the program has evaluated your settings. This may be sufficient to get you up and running on Twitch in many circumstances.

Using the Twitch Inspector

We’d want to utilize a program like the Twitch Inspector to assist us to figure out what’s going on with our connection. While the Auto-Configuration tool is tremendously useful when getting started, there are a few issues that might arise.

Your average speed can be lower than what’s necessary for your current settings. Furthermore, even if you weren’t running a demanding game or streaming setup, you can receive a few missed frames as the wizard guesses your optimum settings. This tool will reduce the guesswork, allowing us to determine what, if anything, needs to be changed.

Go to the Twitch Inspector page and log in using your Twitch account. To proceed to the following step, you must first authorize your primary channels account. If you’re a new streamer, you won’t see anything when you first log in. If you’ve already streamed, you may notice some of your previous broadcasts in the main section.

Let’s start at the beginning and have a look at the UI. We may add more accounts to test in the upper right corner if necessary. A button to conduct a stream test may be found below. A see tips option is also available, which is quite useful for resolving typical queries concerning bitrate and encoding issues. The primary page will ultimately show us how our tests were broken down.

Let’s have a look at running a stream test. Basically, the popup instructs us to perform the following:

From the Twitch Dashboard, get our stream key
Open your encoding program (OBS Studio, XSplit, etc.) and add ?bandwidthtest=true to the end of your stream key. It will look something like live_0000000_xxxxxxxxxxxx?bandwidthtest=true
Begin streaming

Make sure your video bitrate is set to 6,000 kbps in the output tab, which is the highest Twitch recommends.
When you’re done, press start streaming and then return to the inspector tool. A number of things on this website will change after a short period. We’ll notice the dark box in the top right corner convert into a live chart that displays average bitrate after your connection is established. You’ll also get information about how steady your connection is right now.

If you have the time, I recommend doing this test for at least 5 to 10 minutes. The more time you have, the better. Some internet speed tests have the drawback of just measuring a brief period of time. We may use this tool to take a closer look at what’s going on with our bitrate.

Conclusion

I’d advise any broadcaster to use the test tool to find the optimal servers for their stream. Then, to gain a better knowledge of what’s going on with your bit rate, I think it’d be a good idea to use the Twitch inspector. This will assist you in determining the bitrate at which you should stream.