Blog | Choosing the Right Bitrate for Your OBS Live Stream

Open Broadcast Software (OBS) is an incredibly powerful tool for live streaming video with a bit of a learning curve up front. Once you’ve got your live streaming running, you may discover you want to optimize it. Today I’ll walk you through how to choose the right bitrate for your OBS live stream

Before We Get Started — Set up OBS!

This section is for readers who want to create a high quality live stream with OBS, but haven’t yet set it up. Here is how to set OBS for live streaming with api.video:

Live Stream with OBS and api.video

What is Video Bitrate?

Video bitrate is how much data for your live stream is transferred within a second. If you say bps, you’re saying bits-per-second. Mbps is megabits-per-second. If you say kbps, it’s kilobits-per-second. One bit is the smallest unit of data you can have. Bitrate is how you measure the speed of uploads and downloads of your video. Bitrate is important because it’s tied to video quality. You can capture live video with high resolution and frame rate and your viewer might never receive it in that condition. The reason why would be due to the bitrate and also, the bandwidth.

Bandwidth limits what bitrate you can upload at, and it represents the capacity your viewers have when they download your video. So when you’re wondering how your live stream is sent and delivered, you’ll need to think about video…