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need help with Bitrates for 720p, 360p, 240p, 160p in smil file creation

hi. i recently bought wowza streaming engine plan to transcode my video steam coming from OBS studio. The resolution of video files is 480x320.

  1. Can u please tell me which output video bitrate i should use in OBS studio to send it to wowza streaming engine for transcoding?

  2. what video bit rates should i use while creating SMIL files for 720p, 360p, 240p and 160p

Many thanks

Hello @hassan raza,

  1. I found this article on the Internet: https://teradek.com/blogs/articles/what-is-the-optimal-bitrate-for-your-resolution, and there’s lots of information available if you e.g. Google for “recommended video bitrate”. It’s difficult to give an exact number, because it also depends on what type of content you have. Sports, and fast moving pictures, as well as dark pictures (i.e. outdoor concerts in the night) will require a higher bitrate than “quiet” content like a conference with a single speaker.

  2. Transcoding to a higher resolution is not recommended; it will cause bad quality output because the transcoder is forced to scale-up the picture. It’s better to either only use 240p and 160p, or else to send 720p (that is 1280 x 720) from OBS, and transcode to 360p, 240p, 160p. Again the recommended bitrates may vary, and you can use the information from answer #1 to decide which bitrate you want to use.

PS: Remember that transcoding does require lots more CPU resources than just streaming. Make sure you have a powerful machine, or consider using GPU. Here are some transcoder benchmarks: https://www.wowza.com/docs/wowza-transcoder-performance-benchmark