OBS Mythbusters - Why “Best Settings” are a Myth

All around YouTube, searching for anything related to OBS is bound to get you a few “best settings” videos. These videos claim to, as their titles state, have the best settings for OBS. They say that their settings will make your recordings or streams lag free and high quality, and yet one look at the comment section on their videos will prove otherwise.

In fact, I’ve personally noticed in watching these videos that in many “best settings” videos, the creators of the videos are actually telling you to make some of the most common mistakes people make with OBS.

For example, most of these videos tell you to use the advanced output mode instead of simple, and they tell you to record to MP4 in spite of OBS displaying a big warning. You can even see the warning in the videos! I’ve already covered why this particular choice is a bad idea in another video, in fact.

So, “best settings” videos are full of mistakes to begin with, and that’s before we even address why the “best settings” themselves are a myth.

So what’s gone wrong there?

Dispelling the myth

The answer’s pretty straightforward, actually.

The idea “best settings” is that there’s one group of settings that will work for everyone, and that’s simply not true. “Best settings” don’t exist because not only do people have very different computers with different power levels and capabilities, they have very different needs.

For example, let’s say we have two people: someone who wants to record their Let’s Play videos in 4K and upload them to YouTube, and someone who wants to stream to Twitch and keep an archive of those streams. These people have very different things they want to accomplish, and so they’re going to have very different settings that they use in OBS. These people also have very different hardware requirements, because encoding at 4K is going to be much more intensive than the streamer’s 1080p or 720p stream. The “best settings” for both people are going to be radically different.

The truth about the “best settings” is that… there are no settings which will work for everyone! The entire idea of “best settings” is a myth. In the words of fellow support volunteer and OBS expert WizardCM, “If there really were ‘best settings’, don’t you think OBS would come with them?” Matt is of course correct. The matter of the fact is that, if there were “best settings” that worked for everyone, we’d make them the defaults for OBS and everyone’s problems would be solved! Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is a bit more complicated.

Course correcting the myth

So, instead of talking about what the “best settings” are, let’s talk about finding the settings that work for you. We’re still looking for the “best settings” in a sense, but they’re going to be personal to you. It’s going to take some testing, but luckily OBS Studio has a nifty tool to help you get some baseline settings for your hardware: the Auto Configuration Wizard, or if you’re like me and like short names for things, the “AutoConfig”.

To quickly explain what this does, everything you can do in OBS is going to be enabled, and sometimes limited, by your hardware. This is where the autoconfig comes in: it’s going to try and find a good configuration for your hardware, based on a few factors. Namely, the power of your CPU, and if your GPU supports hardware encoding.

OBS Studio opens up the AutoConfig when it’s run for the very first time on your computer, but you can also run it again at any time using the option in the Tools menu at the top of OBS.

As you run through the AutoConfig, you’ll be asked a couple of questions about what you want to do with OBS Studio.

First, you’ll be asked if you’re going to be streaming or recording with OBS. No matter what you choose here, the actual functionality of OBS won’t be changed; you can always set up to stream later, for example.

Next, you’ll be asked what base resolution you want to use, and what framerate you’d like to target. Generally speaking, your base resolution should be the same resolution as the monitor you’ll be streaming from. Nowadays, this is probably 1920x1080.

Next, if you said you want to stream, you’ll be asked what service you want to stream to. As of OBS Studio 23.0, if you use Twitch or Mixer, you can even connect your account to have your stream key put in automatically and get access to chat and stream information right in OBS!

After that, you’ll be given baseline settings based on the options you chose and your hardware. Done!

So, now that you’ve gotten a baseline, where do you go from here? Into testing, of course!

Recordings and streams are very easy to test.

To test out a recording, just make one and watch it back. The OBS team recommends using VLC Media Player for watching your recordings to make sure they’re played back accurately. Link to download VLC in the description.

If you’re planning to stream and want to test what your video looks and sounds like before you stream, you can do it without ever going live. In the Recording section of the Output settings, if you choose to set the Recording Quality to “Same as stream”, you can record a video with the exact same quality as your stream, giving you the chance to make changes, all without ever going live.

If you want to test your bandwidth and stream to Twitch, try using TwitchTest, and set the test’s length to Medium. This will give you a good idea of how your network will perform under close to real streaming conditions. When looking at the results, use servers with the highest quality rating, not the highest speeds, and remember that Twitch only allows normal streams to use 6000kbps at most.

If you’re not streaming to Twitch, the same level of testing doesn’t quite exist, so you can use a normal speedtest and estimate that your “stable” upload speed is about 70-80% of your total speed. Make sure to know the limits of your streaming service though!

If you’re primarily going to be recording and want to get the best possible quality from your recordings, choose the “Indistinguishable Quality, Large File Size” option in most cases. I personally use this setting for recordings, and when reviewing footage, I could not tell you the difference between my game rendered in real time and the footage I recorded from it.

Outro

Thanks for watching this video! I hope I’ve helped you understand why “best settings” are a myth, and gotten you on the way to finding your own best settings. If this helped, please consider giving a like and maybe even subscribing.

You can find me in a bunch of places online besides YouTube, just check the description.

And lastly, if you need help with anything OBS Studio, you can visit obsproject.com/help to find the OBS wiki with a ton of guides and information, as well as the forums, Discord, and more.

Cheers, and see you in the next video!~