Most people will probably say that stream quality is important to them. It should be. The last thing I would want anyone to have is a bad experience watching my stream. I put so much effort into making sure that I'm reading chat, being engaging, and talking about what's going on even if I don't have anyone talking to me in chat. Having an issue with the stream that I don't know about is incredibly frustrating.
I'm much better at taking it in stride than I used to be. I hyper fixate. It's part of who I am. If you tell me not to worry about something. I'm probably going to worry about it more. I think that's something that non-neurodivergent people will never understand. We can't just turn off hyperfixating on something. That being said...it's something I've really been working on. If I can't immediately figure out how to fix something on stream, and it's not a completely stream debilitating issue...then more than likely I'll put off fixing it until after stream.
The most annoying issues are the things that I can't detect myself. Recently I had an issue with my stream where the music was cracking up. I couldn't hear it. The music sounded perfect on my end. There was something wrong with the Application Audio Capture source in OBS though. It was an easy fix. All I had to do was reset the source. It would happen several times during stream though, and I never knew when it was something that I needed to fix until someone would let me know that the audio was bugging.
One of my viewers eventually pointed me to a Windows update that completely fixed it. Big thanks to Bartic for pointing me in the direction of that. He is also a streamer if you ever want to check him out. (https://www.twitch.tv/0xbartic/)
The first thing I ever worked on improving with my stream is just my ability to talk. I know it seems like a given thing that streamers need to have the ability to talk. Unless you have god gamer abilities at whatever game you're playing then no one is going to want to watch you just staring at your screen while you're playing a game. It's boring.
I think I've seen somewhere that from when a new viewer joins a stream that you have about 30 seconds to make a good impression before they decide whether they're going to stay and watch more of the stream or not. I try to keep that in mind when I'm streaming. I was awful at it in the beginning. That's when I decided to make a Let's Play channel on YouTube. It wasn't necessarily because I wanted to become a big YouTuber. I did it to practice talking and commentating about what was going on in the game when I knew that I had 0 people watching and talking to me.
I like to think that I'm somewhat decent at that now. I'm at least tons better at it than I used to be. I try to kind of narrate what I'm doing in the game and if there isn't really anything to talk about regarding what I'm doing in the game then I just talk about whatever random thing I have in my head.
Early last year when I started get back into streaming I noticed when I was trying to make short form clips from my stream VODs that my webcam was often super blurry while I was playing the game. That lead me to do some research on the cause of it and how it could be fixed. That pulled me down a rabbit hole and I eventually ended up finding a content creator named Nutty. (https://www.youtube.com/@nuttylmao)
If you're a creator and you don't know who Nutty is then you should really look him up. He has a lot of super helpful videos about Streamer Bot, OBS, OBS plugins like: Region of Interest Editor, Moves, etc..., and just gives a lot of information that can be helpful when trying to improve your stream. One video in particular that was helpful for the issue I was having was about the Region of Interest Editor.
If you don't know what the Region of Interest Editor is it basically lets you pick a part of your scene, tell the encoder to give that part of the screen a higher priority, and that part will be clearer at the expense of the rest of the screen probably being a little blurrier. I used that.
Using that definitely made my webcam be clearer. What I found out yesterday, when I was playing Elden Ring, was that even though the webcam and the area around my webcam was clearer...that the gameplay was getting somewhat blurry. But Joe: you just said that the one part is clearer at the expense of the rest of the screen. I know I did. Shut up...or something. No, don't really. It's easier to realize that's what happened in hinesight...but you know what they say about hinesight, "Vision is clearest when an apple a day makes the doctor cause your stream to be less blurry." Maybe I don't know sayings.
Anyway. This gave me another issue to fix. I tried to fix it a little on stream last night. I probably hyperfixated on it more than I should. Probably meaning DEFINITELY hyperfixated on it more than I should. I had a general idea at the time what I needed to do to fix it. I just didn't know the specifics of exactly how to do it, and I'm not super good at looking stuff up while I'm streaming.
I am fairly good at researching things when I have nothing else to focus on if I say so myself. Which I did. I just did say so myself. I researched two things this morning. The first thing I researched is adding a Center of Interest to the Region of Interest editor. The way a Center of Interest works is that it draws concentric circles radiating out from the center of your scene. The very middle gets the highest priority while the outter edges will be slightly pixelated. The idea is to make it where the main areas of focus on stream are the ones that are the clearest.
I also took the time to do more research on the encoder I'm using and how I can fine tune it to make my stream look better. This is something I more than likely SHOULD have done a LONG time ago. I'll be honest, when I first set up OBS...I basically just went with the defaults on pretty much everything.
I use the x264 encoder for streaming because pretty much everything I could find when researching suggested to use it over the AMD encoder. Apparently the AMD encoder just isn't very good for streaming. Well...the default for the x264 CPU Usage Preset is superfast. That's helpful in one way because superfast means that it uses less of your CPU. It's BAD in that the quality of the stream post being encoded is MUCH lower.
So I also fiddled around with that. I tried setting it to slow, and it did not SEEM to raise my CPU usage to an incapacitating amount. Another really cool thing about the Region of Interest editor is that it has a Preview that lets you see what your stream looks like AFTER encoding.
I bet you're thinking, "But Joe...I can just see that through the normal stream preview." Nope, not really. The normal stream preview shows you what your stream looks like pre-encoding. It doesn't show you what it looks like post-encoding. So everything you see in the normal stream preview is going to look exactly like it looks when you're just playing the game.
So I ended up tinkering with the encoder settings. I added a Center of Interest. I haven't streamed any since I made these changes, but I THINK everything should look better the next time I stream. Realistically every game I play now should look better. It won't just be Elden Ring. In general every game I play on stream from now on should look better.
Anyway...that was a really long way of saying that I obsess about the quality of my stream. I don't want anyone to have a bad experience on my stream. If you ever watch my stream, and you aren't happy with how something looks or sounds then let me know. If I can't fix it on stream then I'll obsess about it for the rest of the stream and probably cry.
Kidding...for the most part...I am mostly better about that now. If I can't fix it while I'm still live then I will do my best to fix it before the next time I go live.
If you've read this entire post then you're a legend. I write these pretty much every day. If you'd like then you can click JoeBrewing at the top to go back to the main page where there's a list of all my other blog posts.
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