What bitrate to use

Bitrate choosing guide (Russian version available: Какой битрейт поставить)

Bitrate for streaming

Twitch has a bitrate limit of 6000 kb/s. So it makes no sense to put more.

Youtube has the following bitrate recommendations:

Resolution	Bitrate	Max bitrate
4k 60fps	20,000 kb/s	51,000 kb/s
4k 30fps	13,000 kb/s	18,000 kb/s
2k 60fps	9,000 kb/s	18,000 kb/s
2k 30fps	6,000 kb/s	13,000 kb/s
1080p 60fps	4,500 kb/s	9,000 kb/s
1080p 30fps	3,000 kb/s	6,000 kb/s
720p 60fps	2,250 kb/s	6,000 kb/s
720p 30fps	1,500 kb/s	4,000 kb/s

Birtate for video recording

There is no definite answer here. If you are recording tutorials or just videos from your desktop, it is not necessary to set a high bitrate, 5,000 kb/s will be enough. If you are recording gaming videos, then you need to set the high bitrate. But it also depends on the game. For example, PUBG requires a higher bitrate than Roblox.


Here is the recommended bitrate for gaming videos:

Resolution	Bitrate	File size
4k 60fps	90,000 kb/s	40.5 GB/hour
4k 30fps	50,000 kb/s	22.5 GB/hour
2k 60fps	90,000 kb/s	40.5 GB/hour
2k 30fps	70,000 kb/s	31.5 GB/hour
1080p 60fps	30,000 kb/s	13.5 GB/hour
1080p 30fps	24,000 kb/s	10.8 GB/hour
720p 60fps	17,000 kb/s	7.65 GB/hour
720p 30fps	11,000 kb/s	4.95 GB/hour

If you want to reduce the size of the recorded file, select the VBR bitrate control mode.

[Kolektor]

мб

[[Alien] ꑭ]

Why did you put BDSM logo here?

[(27-way) Rocket]

My rabbit liked this guide

[Stevie Wonder]

@ZulkirVT You are actually wrong, as also confirmed by @arty partners and affiliates get go up to 8000k, if you are relying on just reading old outdated docs and not doing your own research then thats on you, go pull up ANY twitch broadcaster inspecter and inspect and high profile streamer, you will see 100 of the stream at 8000 bit rate. and even if its not offically supported or even stated, it still does not change the fact that you CAN do it and it works and twitch allows it.

If people have an issue with not enough bandwidth to watch at such a high bitrate. which to be honest is f'king low as crap. then thats on them, if you dont have access to Fibre or fast regular copper broadband, then thats on the viewer, i aint going to degrade the quality of my stream becasue someone living in the jungle can hangle my upload

[Spiderman]

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[arty]

a high bitrate makes sense if you play games. If you stream communication, then using a high bitrate is not advisable. You can also change the bitrate during the live broadcast in OBS

[arty]

Twitch gives 8k bitrate, go to any partner's stream and look at the stream statistics, you will see that most of them use 8k. 8k can be used by all partners and some of the companion, I myself am a companion and twitch gives me 8k. But twitch writes "The average broadcast bitrate is too high. This can lead to buffering in low bandwidth viewers. The source quality selection may also be unavailable if the bitrate is too high." If you have a choice of quality, then you can safely set 7700-8000 bitrate.

[ZulkirVT]

@Stevie Wonder - You are actually wrong, Twitch actually documents it at 6,000kbps.

Being able to go higher, doesnt mean that it is officially supported. Get it right yourself first and foremost.

Also, The Author needs to talk about more than bitrate, as there is more than bitrate that goes into a video, to help it along with being encoded and decoded. There's filetypes, there's Audio Bitrate, there's Encoding and decoding technology.

There's just so much. This really is a bandaid on a 2 foot wide, 10 cm deep wound.

[sScorpioNn]

I got the information from the official Twitch article titled "Guide to Broadcast Health and Using Twitch Inspector" [help.twitch.tv] There is a line "Twitch specifies a maximum bitrate (bits transferred per second of video) of 6000 kbps" , so this is official information.

[Stevie Wonder]

Uh wut, i think before you make a guide you should get your info right, yikes.

Twitch's max bit rate is not 6000 its actually around 8200 - 8300