Hello, my YouTube friends. If your OBS stream looks blurry,
lags randomly, overloads your encoder,
or your audio keeps acting weird, there's a good chance you do not have five different OBS problems. You probably have one. If you're new to OBS, maybe you copied somebody else's OBS settings
and your stream still looks bad.
This video is for you. Because the biggest OBS mistake in 2026
is still people chasing
the best settings
instead of the right settings. And we're gonna fix all that today. So you know what?
Let's get to it. Videos with titles like best settings for your OBS
get a lot of views on YouTube, and I totally get why people want a simple path to getting started. The thing is,
this only leads to so many of the most common issues that new streamers have. Blurry streams and coder lag, bad audio, performance drops,
and total confusion when tutorials
don't match what OBS is doing now. The reality is there isn't a one size fits all universal
setting for OBS to just work awesome. Everyone's machine is different. Different motherboards,
CPU,
RAM amount and speed,
different storage sizes and speeds,
and most of all, different graphics cards. And every single one of those differences
can have unexpected effects on the way your computer processes
your livestream. I wanna tackle the five main issues and show you how to adjust the settings to figure out what's right for your machine. It's really not that hard either, so don't worry.
I got you. Let's start with the first one, blurry streams. If your stream looks blurry or pixelated,
the first thing that most people do is just bump up that bit rate, and sometimes that helps. But the reality is blur usually shows up when your settings are out of balance. That can mean your resolution is too high for your bit rate, your frame rate is too high for your bit rate, your encoder is under way too much load, your system does not have enough headroom
left while you're streaming. So the real fix is not just raise the bit rate. Let's look at the settings that we need to adjust here. Let's just show you how to find out which
settings are right for your system. We're gonna go into settings and we're gonna go to our output. And here we wanna change this from simple to advanced.
And streaming is obviously what we're after here. So you've got your audio encoder and I don't recommend you really mess around with this at all. Um, you've got your video encoder. So here is where you're going to select something depending upon the hardware that you have in your system. So if you don't have a graphics card that has an internal encoder,
you're gonna be running x two six four. This includes anyone who's on a Mac or on probably most laptops,
that sort of stuff. And I can tell you right now, x two six four is very, very hard on your computer because it uses your CPU
instead of graphics encoder. Now if you have an NVIDIA card, you can select NVIDIA NVIC,
and MSI has their own. I'm not exactly sure what it is. I've never had an an MSI card or anything like that. For me, I'm gonna select the NVIC.
We do not wanna rescale our output. You want this disabled and you want this to be the same output that you're going to be streaming at. So there are a couple of different things that you need to know between
somebody who has a dedicated encoder like NVIC and someone who's using x two six four. If you have a dedicated encoder, you can pretty much set your bit rate and all that sort of stuff to almost whatever you want because
it is not encoded directly by the CPU or even the GPU. It has a separate chip on the card that encodes it. So it's almost totally separate from the entire process, whereas x two six four, you have to take into account everything that you're doing on your computer because this is just extra overhead. So let's start with x two six four and your rate control. I generally select CBR.
It gives you the most consistent results and I start at a bit rate of 6,000.
Now your key frame interval, if you set it to zero, it will automatically
find the right keyframe interval for you, which should be fine. Here is the other place where you have the most control, your CPU usage preset.
So very fast is gonna give you good quality, but it's not gonna take up too much CPU. If you have the best of the best and massive amounts of RAM and all that sort of stuff, you can set this to a slower rate, and it will definitely make your image quality better. However, we're talking about you need a serious machine to be able to do that sort of stuff. So just keep that in mind. If you're getting blurry outputs,
maybe change this to faster or fast, and see if you get results that are better for you that your machine can handle. For NVIC, like I said before, and you can see it automatically puts my bit rate to 10 k and, you know, two passes, and all of this stuff you can basically keep the same. Generally speaking, 10,000 kilobits per second is pretty overkill
for 30 frames per second at nineteen twenty by ten eighty. I'd probably go with 6,000 right here, but the reality is that if you're streaming at 60 frames per second, maybe you wanna do a 10,000 kilobits per second bit rate. Now you also have to remember that this depends on the
strength of your Internet connection. So if you have a great Internet connection, 10,000 kilobits per second might be fine. If your Internet connection is questionable at best, 6,000 might be overkill. You can still get good picture quality at nineteen twenty by ten eighty at 4,000 kilobits per second. And, this isn't just for NVIC, this is also for x two six four. If you have to, you can drop this to 4,000
and maybe bump up your encoding
piece right here to something higher and that might give you a better image quality. Really, this is just about testing, testing, testing to see what gives you the kind of image quality that you want. Now, the other piece is video. You wanna make sure that your base canvas resolution and your output scaled resolution are the same. As you can see right here, they are not. We're gonna set these exactly the same and then your frames per second. You gotta know what it is. 30 frames per second, pretty easy for most modern computers to be able to do. Once you bump up into the 60 frames per second range, well, you're gonna want a higher bit rate and all that stuff to handle the extra frames. Once you bump up to the 60 frames per second, you're literally doubling the number of frames your machine has to process in the same amount of time. So this could be a problem if you have your bit rate set too high or if your encoder is set too high. So if you wanna do a 60 frames per second, you might end up having to lower it to seven twenty or something like that to get the kind of picture quality that you want. Now, wanna preface by saying right now, 90% of people who watch live streams are watching them on your phone. So there is no reason to stream in four k or two k or even to be locked in to nineteen twenty by ten eighty. Seven twenty is perfectly fine for somebody watching a stream on their cell phone. In fact, a lot of them are using data plans and that sort of stuff, so you're doing them a favor. The point is to give them decent
video quality.
This is not a television broadcast. This is a live stream done by somebody, and your goal should be delivering something that works, something that looks good. And you can do that seven twenty p and no one will ever know. So those are the settings that you're gonna look at for any kind of blur or anything like that in your livestream. Now let's look at the next of the big five issues,
laggy or choppy streams. Here's the thing. The same issues that caused the blur also caused this for the most part. Some machines just manifest that overhead in different ways.
So let's look at fixing this one in the settings. So let's just define what lag and chop are. Lag would be if your voice is somewhat delayed or maybe ahead of the video that you're seeing on the screen. Lag is not the time that it takes
between the broadcast that you see on your computer
and the broadcast that you see on the actual live stream.
That would be latency and that is something that's built into the network and the processing that's done by the actual company that's doing the live streaming, I. E. YouTube or Twitch or any of those things. It takes them time to receive each packet and then process those packets to be broadcast on the live stream. And latency is not really something that you can control particularly well. There are settings on those platforms to kind of mess around with it, but the reality is when it's set, it is what it is and there isn't much you can really do about it. What you can do is fix lag and choppiness.
Now the first thing you ought to do when you're fixing lag and choppiness is go in and check out or adjust the exact settings that we already talked about. What I mean by that is to make sure that your encoder is the proper one for you,
make sure that you've tested your bit rate and it works, and make sure your CPU usage preset
and or your presets down here are set properly in your bit rate, and then make sure that your video is the same and your frame rates are reasonable. If you're getting lag, you can automatically go in here and switch video from nineteen twenty by ten eighty to seven twenty and then test and see if you're still getting lag. Generally speaking, what's happening with lag is there is a delay or a issue where the processing of your audio isn't going as fast or your machine is overworked, so the processing of either your video or your audio are not getting done at the same time. Now you can generally avoid this by making sure that you're using actual audio input directly from your camera. That's how I resolved almost all of my lag issues. But sometimes this isn't possible. Sometimes you're using a webcam and you have a separate USB microphone and this is where lag can exist and maybe it's not even any of these settings in here. So there is a way to actually fix this. So this is where we could go into our audio settings and we can click this little thing right here and we can adjust
the offset. So if our video is one millisecond ahead of our voice, well, we can add a millisecond here or we can remove a millisecond to delay our audio. Whichever one is appropriate, we can now adjust this to line up our audio. Now if you are experiencing audio lag that gets worse and worse and worse as the stream goes on, that's something that's likely going to have to be handled right here because that basically just says that your machine is not encoding the stuff fast enough and so this sync is going out. However, if the delay stays the same throughout your entire stream, then it's definitely something that you can fix just by going in here and syncing your off offset. So that's how you're gonna fix lag. Choppiness is almost 100% gonna be fixed in your settings. That just means that it's dropping frames and the reason why it's dropping frames is because your machine isn't processing something as well as it should. And we're gonna get into other ways to verify or streamline your process, but the first thing you gotta do is just make sure that your camera works and you're not getting choppy camera. And to do that, the settings in here are the ones you're gonna be looking at. So that's how you're gonna fix choppiness and lag. Bad audio or weird audio behavior. A lot of streamers spend all their time fixing video
and almost none fixing audio. That's totally backwards.
People will tolerate video that's a little soft, but they will not tolerate bad audio for very long.
And the reason this gets messy in OBS is because people keep changing things without understanding the chain. You got the source,
the filters,
the routing,
and the final sound going to the stream. If one part of that chain is wrong, the whole thing is gonna sound wrong. And that's when people start getting doubled audio, harsh mic audio, muddy audio, weird levels, sync issues,
or random behavior that they blame on OES.
So do not just throw filters on your mic because a tutorial told you to. Know what each filter is actually doing, and make sure your audio path actually makes sense from start to finish.
Let me show you what I'm talking about and one big mistake that almost all new live streamers made. Let's dive into our audio. And you can already see this is a fresh OBS setup. So this is what any new person who downloads OBS is going to see. Get your scenes, your sources, and and then your audio mixer right here. And you can automatically see that we have two global
microphone things or whatever you want to call them right here. So theoretically, your desktop audio should handle any kind of sounds that are played by your computer and your mic auxiliary. It just chooses one on your computer and sets it up. You can see it chose something that's actually microphoning because we are getting some levels here. And personally,
I hate this because this is going to cause you so much confusion later on. If I were to add a camera, it's going to add a microphone for that camera, which is going to double up my global microphone.
If you're getting double audio or anything, it's mostly because you've never seen anyone tell you this, but every person who does live streaming for a living or for any period of time, they essentially remove this. And let me show you how to do that. We're gonna go into settings. We're gonna go into audio, and you see where it says default and all these others are disabled? We're we're just disabling this. We want to add our own audio,
and we want to know that the audio that we add is in the scenes that we need it. And we don't want some magical
global desktop or global microphone
or global listening device to mess our audio up. This just adds confusion into the mix. If we apply it, boom, you can see now we have nothing, which means that anything that we add here in scenes is going to either have a microphone or audio signal. It's going to show up in our audio mixer, and we know what we're controlling in our audio mixer. There's not these global things
that could double up and all that sort of stuff. Believe me when I tell you if you've got the global stuff in here, just go into your settings and disable that, and you're going to probably fix 90%
of your doubling audios and all that sort of stuff. So now we could just go into sources and add a camera or something like that with video capture device.
And let's see here. We're gonna add who knows? It doesn't really even matter. So for now, we'll just pretend and we'll add our snap camera. And none of this stuff you have to do. You could just leave this on device default and you'll be just fine. But the custom audio device is what we're talking about. And we can choose our HDMI
cam link and click okay and boom. And there you go. That way you always know you have the correct microphone and you can see it's picking it up. It says active. We can also go in here and just rename this and call it whatever we want. And boom. There we go. Down here, this right here is your mute button. So you just click it to mute and that means the live stream won't hear it. This right here is the button you're going to press to enable monitoring. Now you don't want to do this until you know what your monitoring device is. So to find your monitoring device, we're going go back into settings. We're going to go into audio, and we're going to go to our monitoring
device right here and default does us no good because we have no idea what it's going to select. More than likely, it's gonna be your speakers, which means you're gonna get feedback because your voice is gonna come out through your speakers and you're gonna hear that. So we're gonna go up here and we're gonna select our zone wireless headphones,
which is what we would use for our livestream. We can apply that and boom. And now when we do this, that means we're gonna hear our main microphone into our headphones. I wanna caution you, there will be a slight delay.
It's really hard to listen to. So it's good to do this to check and make sure that your microphone is functional, working properly, not peaking, all that sort of stuff. And if it is, you're gonna turn it off and you're gonna assume it all goes to plan. Filters.
You can hit filters for this microphone down here or you can go here and go to filters. Now, when you're first starting out as a basic live streamer, I don't really recommend that you use any filters. If your microphone quality is not what you would hope it is, if it's too low even on full volume, problems like that, those are the kind of things where you're going to enter into
maybe looking into some audio filters. So if your audio is too low on your standard mic, you might add some gain. If you're getting clipping or something like that, you might add a compressor and limit that sort of stuff. If you've got a constantly noisy room, something like noise suppression or a noise gate that just puts a limit on the noise in the background's
volume level, those can work for you. But barring any of those existing issues actually showing up, I don't recommend adding any of these audio filters because they just complicate things when they don't necessarily need to. Now there is another tool to sync up audio if you weren't able to go
into here and sync up your audio for some reason and that is located up here. It's the video delay. So maybe your audio was, uh, way behind
and you just couldn't get it adjusted. Well, you can go in here and add video delay
and delay the video so it lines up with your audio. So that's another option on that front. But removing
your global sources right here is going to solve 95%
of your problems, and then understanding how to mute and how to enable your monitoring will do the rest. Number four, performance drops from bad capture choices. Now what I'm talking about when I'm talking about capture is video or a desktop or a game
or pretty much anything that's not native in OBS that you're bringing in from the outside. Not all capture methods behave the same. Display capture, game capture, and window capture can affect performance
differently
depending upon what you're trying to do. Because your OBS setup is not just the output, your scenes, sources, and game capture can all negatively affect performance.
If your GPU is already maxed out by the game,
OBS still has to render a scene on top of that. So if performance tanks every time you go live,
you can't just adjust the bit rate. You gotta look at what capture method you're using. So the three different capture methods that you're going to use mostly are going to be your display capture, which will capture another display on your computer. All you do is select whatever display you want and bada bing, you just have to make it whatever size your screen is and you're all set. And then next, you have your game capture right here, and that's gonna capture any games that are running on your system. Um, you could capture any full screen application, which games are almost always full screen applications.
So you can select a bunch of different settings here, whether you wanna capture the cursor. You kinda have to use the anti cheat compatibility hook. Otherwise, most of them won't show up. You can also drop this down and select capture a specific window, and then drop this down and select which window your game window will be up when you're running a game, and you should be good to go. And the last one that I wanna show you would be your window capture, and that's right here. And a window capture is going to capture any specific application window that you have on your computer. So we can drop this down and select any of the windows that are open. So that would mean that if you're running a browser or something to that extent, you could put your browser window in there. So for example, we could just capture a workspace
for our file explorer
or something like that, and boom. There we go. It brings it up. How heavy your scenes are. Now if you have like 50 things going on in your scene, there is a chance that that's going to cause issues, lag and that sort of stuff. There's only so much that your computer can process
at one time depending upon your hardware. So it's really important for you to optimize the elements that you do use. So let's say that you are running a nineteen twenty by ten eighty stream, and you're using a bunch of different elements in that like videos or browser sources or something like that. Anything that you put in your livestream
should be optimized so it runs at the same frame rate and the same resolution
as your broadcast.
So if you're going to go and add a video,
you want to know that the video that you're running is the same frame rate and everything. So you can right click on those videos, go to properties, go to details,
and I can see that this is nineteen twenty by ten eighty, and the bit rate is down here, but we're really concerned about the frame rate right here. It's 30 frames per second. Great. That's the same as my live stream. I can open that up, and I know it's not going to have to process this differently
than the rest of my stream because it's running the same frame rate and everything.
If we wanted to add browser sources, you want to be cognizant
of the same kind of thing. Bring it in at nineteen twenty by ten eighty, and you can use a custom frame rate if you like and set it to the frame rate. Now, I don't worry quite as much about browser sources, but if you do run into problems where you're seeing choppiness or something in your browser source, using a custom frame rate and locking it to the same as the stream can be a pretty big advantage. It doesn't mean you can't shrink it and move it where you want, but when OBS is processing it, it's gonna be all in the same native resolution. It's just making life easier.
And this is how you optimize
so that you're not using all kinds of clock cycles that are totally unnecessary,
making it easier for your computer. So if you have video sources or anything like that that aren't standard set up for your frame rate and your resolution, there's a pretty easy solution. It's a free encoder that you can get. I'll put a link in the description. It's called the shutter encoder, and you just browse to the files. You bring them in here. And once you have your file selected, you're able to select the resolution that you want it and all that sort of stuff. And then you just run it, and you get a new file that's going to be much easier for your OBS process.
How many things are active at any given time? So when you have a livestream that has a bunch of different scene, you kinda wanna make sure that you optimize for all of the things. So we have a bunch of stuff in scene one, but let's say we're working in scene two. Do we really need the stuff in scene one to still be doing whatever it's doing? Well, we can go into our media and we can go to properties and we can select that it restarts on playback and we can select that use hardware coding and all that sort of stuff, but we can close the file when it's inactive which will free up space on our machine
because it's not running
this video in the background when we switch to another scene. Now we don't have to worry. Any elements that are in this scene are only gonna be running in this scene, and we come back here and boom, it starts it back up again. And this is a way that you optimize
for each scene so that you're not carrying over dead weight from one scene to another. So that everything loaded in your livestream
isn't running in every scene. It's only running in the scene when it's active. Gotta optimize your scenes as well as your sources. And whether your system has any headroom left at all. Now I've touched on overloading your computer or all that stuff a couple of different times here, and I haven't actually shown you how
verify what your machine is actually doing. So if you right click down here and you go to task manager, it brings it up, and we can see what percentage of our computer we're using. So we've got 36%
memory and 17%
GPU and 3% CPU, and you can watch these performance numbers as you're testing. I like to go into performance and I can basically select which one I want so that I can get a better look at what I'm looking at. You know, how much of our Internet connection is being used by the stream? Well, you could see that right here. How much of our GPU is being used? We can see that right here. And so if something gets laggy when this video plays right here, why? Is it optimized? Is it not optimized?
This task manager process
stuff is going to tell us, you know, that it's maximized or it's overloaded. All we have to do then is go into OBS and figure out how to not make it overloaded by maybe optimizing the video, changing the video out, putting the video in a lighter format or something like that. Those kind of things can make all the difference between a stream that runs smoothly
without any lag or jaggies or blurriness and a stream that is a complete and total disaster.
But it does take a little bit of work and you have to mess around with your task manager to figure out what's going on. I've had situations where my machine was just flat running short on memory, and so I was getting lag. Why? Well, I had too many scenes that had too much stuff running in the background loading all up into memory. So when it got to processing
the actual stream, we were bumping into the hard limits of memory usage, which meant that it had to wait and it didn't process fast enough. So it wasn't even a matter of my CPU
being bad or my GPU being bad. It was a matter of the fact that I had my memory so maxed out that it just couldn't process it fast enough because it had to continually use swap space and things like that. So all of these things can be a factor and you can see them through task manager and experiment and get your stream running really smooth. Now you can see that sometimes the issue is not your encoder settings.
Sometimes the issue is the way that the scene is built. And that leads me to the last big problem. Number five is outdated OBS tutorials.
Now this one is a bigger deal than you might think right now. A lot of people are learning OBS from older videos that don't fully match how OBS works now. OBS has actually evolved quite a bit over the last six to eight months. So they open their OBS and they try to follow a tutorial, and right away,
things just don't line up. Now they're confused before they even start. And once that happens, people start stacking
random fixes on top of random fixes,
and that's how OBS starts feeling harder than it actually is.
So I definitely recommend finding the most current tutorials that you can on your process,
or if you have to use older ones, just make sure that the actual tutorial still applies.
Because sometimes the problem isn't you,
sometimes the problem is that the tutorial is just out of date. Now I try to keep on top of these things here, so you can count on me to try to keep the tutorials on this channel as up to date as I possibly can. So go ahead and hit that subscribe button down there and make it easy to find me next time you need a tutorial on OBS.
Clicking that button's totally free. What problems are you having in OBS?
Let me know about it down in the comments. If you want a deeper dive into audio that was completely changed in the new OBS,
check this video out. And if you're always looking for tools, tips, and tricks to help make you a better live streamer or YouTuber, subscribe to the channel. My name is Michael Fire junior. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great day,
and I'll see you in the next one.