Easiest Way To Set Up Your Stream With OBS

Starting to stream there are a lot of things you need to know but no longer will you struggle with setting up OBS with this easy step by step Guide.

I am going to be doing the setup using OBS 23.1.0 and the hardware I am using as an Intel i5-9400F with a Nvidia GTX1080. The reason I am specifying this is because my GPU is a little more powerful and thus I will be doing all my encoding using the GPU instead of using the CPU.

If you have a much stronger CPU you should consider encoding using your CPU instead of your GPU and If you have a new Nvidia RTX card you should definitely encode using your GPU and the new NVENC Encoder.

First you want to click on "File" in the top right corner of the screen and then "Settings", once inside settings you should see a tab open up showing different tabs from "General" to "Advanced".

You shouldn't worry to much about the "Advanced" tab and move on to the "Stream" tab. In the stream tab you select the type of service you stream to, I stream to Twitch and thus I chose Twitch as the service. I leave the Server on Auto and then just pasted my stream key into the "Stream Key (Link)" box.

If you don't know how to get your stream key, go to Twitch, click on your Profile picture in the top right corner and select "Creator Dashboard", once the page has completed loading go down to "Settings" in the bottom left side tab and click on "Channel", the first item on the page is your stream key.

Next is the Output tab in OBS. Once open select "Advanced" from the drop-down list of "Output Mode". Once selected a few more options are available, under the "Stream" tab select "NVIDIA NVENC H.264(new)" if you have a strong GTX or RTX Graphics card in your computer and "x264" if you have a strong CPU in your computer.

Moving on at "Rate Control" select "CBR" (Constant Bit Rate) and depending on your internet speed and what quality you want to stream at select a "Bitrate". As a rule of thumb if you take your internet upload speed and multiply it with a thousand (eg. 20Mbps x 1000 = 20 000 CBR) you get a theoretical maximum upload speed, but for the best results take 45% of that total and that should be your maximum CBR (eg 45% x 20 000 = 9000 CBR).

Things to keep in mind for CBR, if you are not partnered on Twitch you can have a maximum of 3500 CBR and if you stream at 1080p you should aim for a CBR higher than 4000 otherwise it won't look good. Also don't bump the CBR too high as that will cause your stream to lag for people with slow internet. A good number to have is between 4000 and 5000 for CBR.

At "Keyframe Interval" type "2", at "Preset" select "Quality" and at "Profile" select "High". Have "Look-ahead" unmarked and "Psycho Visual Tuning" marked. With GPU select your GPU of choice, If you only have one GPU make it 0 (numbering starts at 0 for first GPU and 1 for Second, etc.) and lastly select "2" for "Max B-frames".

In the Audio tab you can leave everything as it is and change only "Desktop Audio Device", "Mic/Auxiliary Audio Device" if they are not the right items eg not your headset and not your mic.

In the "Video" tab you want to select your screen Resolution you game on and that is being captured from the drop-down list for "Base (Canvas) Resolution", you select the resolution you want to stream at from "Output (Scaled) Resolution" and you can select your downscale filter as "Lanczos" if you have a strong CPU or GPU, "Bicubic" if you have a lower end CPU or GPU or your stream quality doesn't look too great and you select the FPS you want to stream at from the "Common FPS Values" list.

Once you have done all that you can make your hotkeys for your scenes and change a few settings in Advanced if you feel you need or want to. The only thing you should check under advanced is that under "General" that your "Process Priority" is set to "High".

And that is how you set up your stream in OBS Studio, if you have any questions please feel free to ask me in the comments or join me in my stream to ask me a question live, I stream on Monday's, Wednesday's and Sunday's at 8pm SAST.

This weeks question:

What did you struggle most with when setting up your stream?

#Twitch #Stream #Streaming #OBS