OBS Profile & Level
Good Day/Night
I currently use OBS
Profile: High & Level: Auto for streaming at 720p 30 fps, as well as Profile: Main & Level: Auto for recording at 1080p 30 fps.
I multi-stream, & use a AMD ASROCK RX550 2G GDDR5.
But I have no idea what these two settings mean, what they do, & how they affect quality & performance.
My intent is to record at a higher quality, while streaming with the best performance I can; & i'm currently looking to improve my streaming performance.
What do these settings mean & how should I change them?3 Replies
buy a better graphics card thats not an rx550.
Profiles for a given codec (those being h264 / avc, h265 / hevc, vp9, av1, etc) are essentially a set of capabilities that you are saying you support.
Basically, a device or app reports that it supports profiles XYZ for a specific encoder. When that device/app views a video, it needs to support that profile to be able to display the video correctly. Some basic video player apps or things like TV's might not support higher profiles
For 99% of use cases, the
High profile for h264 works for all modern devices. HEVC and AV1 really only use the main profile for content creation
Levels are similar in the sense that they specify some settings, but they are specifically about how the video decoder needs to perform. Higher levels are essentially "you need to support this level of performance" by specifying the decoding speed, maximum frame block size, and max video bitrate that the decoder should expect to work with (IE: Level 6.2 for h264 supports 800Mbps)
tl;dr higher level is betterhigher is better, until it does not work on devices 😛 Old smart TVs and old chromecast's might reject a stream due to the level being to high. I would suggest leaving it on auto, and it will generally pick a sane value for what you've chosen. L4.2 is very common for 1080p60. Level 5+ would exclude a fair number of devices (assuming they chose to listen), assuming it can't just pick a lower resolution/transcode.
another thing is that increasing the level does not inherently make the stream higher quality. Its more that it could potentially permit it to be higher. Your AMD card wont use 5 ref frames, even if the profiles allows it. So essentially, you're only excluding potential devices from watching, for no reason.
Auto is friend imo, unless you are doing something very specific, then it will pick the right value for you 🙂