The Three Pillars of Streaming
Your bitrate is the amount of data you send to Twitch when you stream. A higher bitrate takes up more of your available internet bandwidth. Increasing your bitrate can improve your video quality, but only up to a certain point-- our recommended bitrate settings have been tested to optimize video quality without wasting bandwidth.
Choosing the right encoder can make the biggest difference for your broadcast, from software to hardware encoders.
Part of a successful stream is finding the right ingest server for your ISP. You can find an ingest finder below to help you choose the right one.
Encoding can be taxing on your system. x264 will utilize a lot of your CPU, resulting in lower FPS. Alternatively, GPU encoding (e.g. NVIDIA NVENC) utilizes a dedicated encoder in the GPU, allowing you to play and stream without compromising game performance. If you want to use x264, start with veryfast preset, and experiment with them until you find your sweet spot.
x264 offers a wide range of presets that change quality significantly, and presets above Faster require CPUs with 6+ cores. NVIDIA NVENC offers consistent quality based on the generation of the encoder. The updated NVIDIA Encoder (NVENC) on Turing-based NVIDIA GeForce GPUs (RTX 20-Series and GTX 1660/Ti) will typically produce superior quality than x264 Fast and on par with x264 medium. While the older generation (Pascal, Kepler) are similar with veryfast/faster quality.
For audio quality we support stereo only, while the recommended bitrate is 160 kbps.
H.264 is the most widely used codec on the planet, with significant penetration in optical disc, broadcast, and streaming video markets.
This codec uses CPU power in order to encode the video, but this might not be the best cost effective way, its certenly the way forward of getting the most quality out of your video.
Nvidia NVENC is a feature in Nvidia graphics cards that performs video encoding, offloading this compute-intensive task from the CPU to the GPU.
Streaming is now easier than ever - NVIDIA and OBS teamed up to release a new version of OBS Studio with enhanced support for NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. Together with NVIDIA RTX, you can get the best performance and superior image quality.
These ingests endpoints are selected for you based on the optimal network paths detected from Twitch to your device.
We designed this tool to give more information to you our broadcaster, it provides information about your current session if its meeting our recommendations or if you need to troubleshoot it. Twitch Inspector to the rescue!
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More questions ? Answers are here...
We understand there are constant rumours about the limit of the bitrate, as you can see our recommendations point at 6000 Kbps, going beyond that could have potentail risks for both your broadcast and your viewers.
Variable bitrate is bad for video over the internet due to how TCP (the internet protocol most streaming video uses) works, and you should use CBR whenever possible. More information can be found here.
At this time Twitch only accepts RTMP/RTMPS. Any changes made to our supported ingest protocols will be reflected on this page.
If the bitrate exceeds our recommended specification for a period of time, the source rendition is removed from the player.
We have a list the most common tools to use during a broadcast and they can be found on your dashboard.
We are activley working on alternative solutions in order to increase the video quality of our broadcasters, including supporting other codecs that will make possible 4k braodcasting.