The most important factor for streaming stability is making sure your settings aren’t too stressful for your network or computer. OBS displays diagnostic information in several places.
In OBS, there are three things to check to ensure your stream is as smooth as possible on Piczel.tv
Dropped frames, listed in the bottom right of OBS, should be 0%.
There should not be any “encoding overloaded” message in the bottom left of OBS.
Your FPS setting in OBS should be at least 20
If you have no dropped frames, no “encoding overloaded” message, and at least 20fps, you should have a smooth, stable stream. After any changes you make to your streaming settings, be sure to check that they all still hold.
To optimize your stream, you want to lower your bitrate, CPU usage, and latency, while increasing quality and smoothness as much as possible.
You should first set your bitrate to a level that leads to no dropped frames, 1000 is usually safe but you can find a more accurate maximum value by running a speed test (piczel.tv recommends testmy.net - they are fully html5) and set your max bitrate to 70% of the upload speed you measure. Since most speed tests report in Mbps (Megabits per second) be sure to multiply your result by 1000. For example, if your speed test returns .5 Mbps, set your Max Bitrate to .5*1000*.7 = 350 kbps.
Then, increase your output resolution to match your monitor’s native resolution. This will increase quality by making your stream sharper for viewers. After changing this, ensure you don’t get an “encoding overloaded’ warning. If you do, decrease your stream resolution until it disappears consistently.
Be sure to use Variable Bitrate, or VBR, instead of Constant Bitrate, or CBR. CBR will always upload approximately your max bitrate, even when it only needs a fraction of that. This causes your stream to be more stressful for your computer, our servers, and your viewers.
FPS, or your framerate, is directly related to how smooth your stream will look, and has a large effect on how much CPU power you need to stream. For example, streaming at 30fps uses half the CPU power as streaming at 60fps. The minimum safe value for your framerate on Piczel.tv is 20fps, but it may work lower than that, we just can’t guarantee it. 60fps is a reasonable maximum because most people can’t even view a higher framerate than that, as a typical monitor can only show content at 60fps. 30fps is the default in many streaming programs, and a good middle ground for CPU usage vs smoothness of the stream. You can adjust your fps up or down to use more or less CPU power. For example, if you want the sharpest stream but don’t care about it being slightly less smooth, you could lower your fps to 20 to offset the CPU usage of the higher resolution.
To minimize latency on both HTML5 players we offer, you want as low a keyframe interval as possible. Most streaming software defaults to automatically inserting them where it can, but you can also manually specify an interval. For the lowest possible latency, you must set your keyframe interval to 2. This ensures that every 2 seconds, a full image of the stream is sent, not just the changes since the last keyframe. Our HTML5 stream parser makes a new “chunk” every 2 seconds, or every keyframe, whichever is slower. This can be a stressful setting for your streaming software, so be sure that you don’t have an “encoding overloaded” error in your settings.
Finally, streamers may check their settings with our Stream Analyzer. The Stream Analyzer is accessed by right clicking the player on your own stream and selecting "Stream Analyzer", or by directly accessing https://piczel.tv/optimizations. The Stream Analyzer shows whether your stream is configured properlty for several different parameters, to help ensure your stream is high quality and smooth.