Base resolution to match your art monitor's resolution
Max scaled resolution of 1920x1080
FPS: 30
Base resolution should match your art screen's resolution
Scaled resolution should start at half or less of your base resolution
Downscale filter: Bilinear
FPS: 10
FPS and scaled resolution can be adjusted up or down, the important part is to watch the OBS Stats window - increasing your fps or scaled resolution will increase your CPU usage. For example, 15 FPS is roughly half the CPU usage of 30 FPS
Output mode: Advanced
Encoder: x264
Enforce streaming service encoder settings: UNchecked
Bitrate: 2500 or less - more bandwidth does not mean you get a better quality stream!
Rate Control: VBR
Keyframe Interval: 4
Tune: zerolatency
in no particular order
OBS Studio by default uses the Rec 601 standard for colors. Piczel.tv uses Rec 709, which means that conversion between these two can cause slightly inaccurate colors.
If you would like to have the most accurate colors available to your viewers using our HLS or Streamshots players, in the Advanced section of OBS settings, change your Color Space Setting to 709 and Color Range to Full.
To ensure your stream works smoothly with our WebRTC player, please set the following in your OBS output tab. Note these only appear with the x264 (cpu) encoder:
Tune: zerolatency
If you need to use a GPU encoder for some reason - disable b-frames by setting them to 0
We always recommend OBS Studio as it is always the most up to date, most reliable, and most performant streaming software. We do NOT recommend Streamlabs OBS or other streaming software, though they usually work if you prefer them. Streamlabs OBS is simply OBS Studio that does not perform as well, with many missing features
Piczel.tv recommends the x264 CPU encoder for all users. In almost every case, it is more performant and more efficient than the NVENC encoder for art streams. The reason gaming streaming websites recommend the NVENC (or generally, GPU) encoder is because for high motion, high CPU usage content such as video games, many computers perform better with the GPU based encoder. But for art (and coding, animation, etc) streams, typically you'll have plenty of CPU power to use for the better x264 encoder.
Be sure to keep an eye on your stream stats window - in OBS, click “view”, “stats” to bring up a window that will show you if you have any bottlenecks. Generally speaking, frames missed are caused by your GPU, skipped frames are caused by your CPU, and dropped frames are caused by your network. You can usually fix missed frames by lowering your fps and/or changing your downscale filter to bilinear, skipped frames by lowering your fps, output resolution, or CPU preset, and dropped frames by lowering your bitrate.
If you have any trouble getting a smooth stream on Piczel.tv, please email us at support@piczel.tv and we are happy to help. Please include Speedtest.net results, a current OBS log file, and a screenshot of your OBS stats window while you are live.