Symptoms

Blurry "soapy" picture, appearance of pixels in dynamic scenes, low resolution in viewers. This is usually caused by insufficient bitrate or too high resolution/FPS for the current bitrate.

Possible causes


  • Low bitrate: If the bitrate of the stream is too low, the video will lose quality. For example, when streaming at 1080p60 Twitch recommends ~6000kbps
  • . Too low bitrate will result in a blurred picture.
  • Incorrect OBS/encoder settings: Simple mode with automatic low bitrate may be selected, or OBS may be limiting the bitrate.
  • Weak hardware: Older video cards or processors may not be able to handle encoding and OBS downgrades the quality to support the stream

Solutions


  • Increase the bitrate of the stream. In OBS Studio settings ( Output section) set a sufficient bitrate. For 720p, ~3000-4500 Kbps is enough, for 1080p60 on Twitch - 6000 Kbps (maximum for most streamers). Do not exceed 6000kbps unless you are a Twitch partner - too high a bitrate can lead to crashes or black screen on the viewer side
  • Lower the resolution/frame rate - If you can't increase the bitrate (limited channel), lower the quality load. For example, try 720p60 instead of 1080p. Tip: Many streamers use an intermediate resolution of 1664×936 (936p), which looks better at ~6000 bitrate than full 1080p.
  • Use a suitable scaling filter: in OBS, the scaling methods available are bilinear, bicubic, and lantzos. Lancoche gives the best quality but loads GPU; bicubic balances quality and load
  • . If the stream is jittery because of lanzosh, switch to bicubic filter.
  • Check encoding load: if OBS says "encoding overloaded", it means that hardware can't handle current settings. The solution is to lower resolution or FPS, or switch to hardware codec (NVENC/AMD) instead of x264 (CPU).

Note: If the picture remains blurry even after adjusting the settings, make sure you are using a modern video card with a good codec. New GPUs (Nvidia RTX/GTX16+ series) give a noticeably clearer picture when streaming.With very old hardware, unfortunately, it is difficult to achieve high quality, no matter how many settings you change