Choose a Streaming Quality in Livestream Studio

Livestream Studio has more flexibility and streaming bitrate options than ever before. These include the ability to stream in 1080p, 4k, and custom bitrates.

In order to see the highest quality options, you must have hardware encoding enabled on your Studio system by going to your Settings > Streaming.

This means your computer must have either an Intel Processor or NVIDIA card installed that supports this feature. Computers that do not have these will not see the hardware encoding option and have a more limited selection of streaming bitrates available to them.

After saving your settings, navigate to the Stream tab in the lower portion of Studio.

After configuring your streaming providers, open the Stream Quality dropdown menu in the upper right corner of the Stream module; the lower qualities will be listed first with higher, multi-bitrate qualities populating below. Each quality lists the resolution(s) being pushed out with the average total bitrate in parenthesis.

Selecting Custom allows you to configure your own bitrate in case none of the presets suit your needs. Click the corresponding gearwheel to open up the bitrate settings. 

*The ability to use custom bitrates is available regardless if you have hardware encoding or not.

Choose a name for this particular quality (e.g. High), set the width, height, video bitrate, audio bitrate, audio sample rate, and encoding profile. Once you have configured the settings, click Done.

You can add up to four custom bitrates by clicking Add Quality. Each quality can be edited individually by clicking the corresponding gearwheels.

You can remove a quality by going into its Edit Quality menu and selecting Delete Quality.

What's the Best Quality for Me?

There are two factors to consider when choosing a streaming quality: Network Upload Speed and CPU.

Upload speed is easier to determine, especially if you are connected to a dedicated network via Ethernet. Go to www.speedtest.net and start a speed test. Pay attention to your upload speed results.

If you perform a speed test on a shared network, the results will display the upload and download speeds available for the total network, not just your device, so the numbers will be less accurate. It's best to remove other computers and devices from your network.

Our rule of thumb is to choose a quality whose total bitrate is half of your upload speed. This allows room for network fluctuation. For example, if your upload speed is about 10Mbps, which equals about 10,000Kbps, then you can safely assume your network can push out 720p + 480p + 360 + 240p (4862Kbps) and lower.

When choosing your hardware, be sure to review our recommended hardware specifications, which includes expected performance benchmarks for different types of processors.