Tips for using OpenBroadcaster with PA

Hey, just started using OpenBroadcaster to capture PA to video. Might well use it for streaming later as well. Any tips please? Particularly, if you're /just/ recording video, what bitrate do you use for 1080p video? Did a quick forum search but no results, oddly.

Since probably relevant, system is i7-2600k, 32GB RAM, GeForce GTX760, primary drive is a 256GB Samsung SSD (about a year old).

Youtube recommends 8Mbps for 1080p video, not sure if that is doable. Did a test at 4000kbps and it seems fine, noticeable better than 1000 and 2000. Gotta go to work now though. Figured I'd post

Paging doctors @wpmarshall and @ZaphodX to the thread, cos you guys must know all this and more by now! Hope you don't mind

@zihuatanejo I found the stuff on here to be rather helpful in getting settings sorted:

http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1262922-open-broadcaster-software

I've been broadcasting on a much less powerful system than yours (been on a bit of a hiatus for a while since I lost access to any reasonable internet speed) but hopefully I'll be upgrading my system and apparently high-speed internet is due here in December, which will be nice.

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EDIT: I didn't read your post correctly at all. Sorry! The above is probably completely unhelpful to you, but I'll leave it in case someone else stumbles across it.

Isn't there an in-built Twitch thing?

I think they prefer the face-cam in the corner, which would be a perk.

Yes there is, but apparently it is very basic/rudimentary. Great for casual use, but a lot of people use OpenBroadcaster for extra features.

Specifically though, I'm talking about using it to record the game (like FRAPS) direct to a video file. OBS, rather nicely, will encode in the background, whereas FRAPS prioritises speed by just dumping uncompressed/barely compressed footage striaght to disk, meaning you need to encode it/compress it later on y ourself. That actually offers advantages, since OBS doesn't seem to encode 'nicely' according to Youtube's preferences. So youtube compresses it again for you.

Back when I made some Minecraft videos, I used Handbrake to encode the FRAPs raw footage myself, which was nice cos you can look at the youtube guidelines for codecs etc etc, use those settings, and whack it up. But my version of FRAPS wasn't capturing the mouse cursor in game (and yes I unticked the option to hide it!). Not tried latest version of FRAPS yet though, I suspect that was the issue.

There is an inbuilt twitch functionality which is quite nice however you can't control your bitrate and bunch of other things like you can with obs. Also if you are recording videos then you will get superior quality by recording to your PC using OBS rather than exporting the twitch archived broadcast. I do like the twitch functionality in PA for integrating the chat room into the game itself, that is excellent.

I also have this issue with Fraps but am too cheap to get the latest version

I swear I saw a bitrate selector. Or maybe a quality selector...

Yep, I know what clopse and foerest look like cos of this feature, heh!

The twitch guide suggests a bitrate between 3000 and 3500 for 1080p

Yeah but the fact that it is an article on Twitch indicates that the bit rate is ideal/optimal for streaming. Whereas if I record to file only I'd rather it was as high quality as possible.

3500 when streaming, if you're just recording then put it to max (5k). Use Handbrake to convert to mp4 if you want to do some editing with it.

Youtube will always re-render your video no matter what size or format.

Thanks Zaphod, appreciate the response. Didn't realise OBS had a max bit-rate? Will look into that.