This is a good thing! Previously if you wanted to stream on a Mac, your options were basically: puzzle out how to use OBS through forum dungeon crawling, or pay for something like Wirecast, which might be more software than you need for your personal Twitch channel. (It also has a paid tier, which is geared toward professional creators and comes with a ton more features.) The free-to-use software is basically a portal to streaming on any service that allows it it has beautiful overlays and themes that you can use to beautify and customize your online space and it is slightly easier to use than regular OBS. Streamlabs OBS is the beautifully-designed brother of OBS - which stands for Open Broadcaster Software - that was acquired by Logitech for a cool $89 million last September. If you’re a Mac user and you happen to be interested in livestreaming, I have some good news for you: Streamlabs OBS is launching today (in beta) on macOS. Don’t forget to apply your changes.Streaming is bigger than ever now that staying inside is a requirement you’ve probably noticed friends start posting links to their newly created Twitch and YouTube channels, and maybe thought to yourself hm, looks fun. Below, set the keyframe interval to 2 seconds, preset to quality, profile to main and max B-frames to 2. This setting will not depend on your network connection, but rather on how much available storage you have left. I am using 20’000, which will inflate the file size to 20 mb per recorded second, to get even more detail in my videos. Set your rate control to CBR, and your bitrate to around 10’000. Again here, set the encoder to NVIDIA NVENC if you have a powerful enough NVIDIA graphics card, otherwise set it to x264.
I like to use mp4 as the recording format, which keeps the file size low, and allows you to import it to any video editing software. Otherwise choose a folder in your HDD storage. In the Recording section, I suggest setting the recording path to an SSD if you have enough storage left.
These settings are, if you haven’t already noticed, optimized for low to mid end PC’s. Below, set the keyframe interval to 2 seconds, preset to Performance, profile to Main, disable the Look-ahead options, enable psycho visual tuning. If you feel like your network connection is not good enough to stream with your preferred settings, then make sure to follow the network connection tweaks later in this guide.
In my case, I am always streaming in 720p and 60FPS, and I’m a bit paranoid about dropped frames, that’s why I am using a bitrate of 3500, which is more than enough if your network connection can support it. To stream in 1080p, a bitrate of 6’000 should be more than enough, and for streams in 720p, you should lower the bitrate to 3’000.
In my example, I could use a bitrate of 19’000, which would be more than enough to stream in 1080p & 60 FPS, but using this much is not necessary! On this website, you should take a close look at your upload speed, which will determine how much bandwidth you can reserve for streaming. I recommend testing your connection here. Below, set the Rate Control to CBR, which stands for constant bit rate, and set your bitrate according to your internet’s upload speed. On this window, you should be able to preview your native display resolution. Right-click your desktop and select Display Settings. This is also very useful for users with an abnormal native screen resolution. If you already know in which resolution you are streaming, then you can rescale your output from here. For NVIDIA GPU’s you should make a test-stream using the NVIDIA NVENC encoder to see how well it works after applying the next tweaks.