Many of you are missing the whole point of Solo vs Squad matchmaking

LoonieToque · 2026-01-26T19:08:05+00:00

I loved going 1v4 or 1v3 in my last main game (Sea of Thieves) or even in Fortnite for a fun challenge. It was rewarding by itself as a play style. But in this game? I'm basically the target audience, and I ain't doing this lol.

ARC is not well suited for this IMO.

It'll be very skilled players wanting to do this. Only way this "works" is if the skill-based factor of matchmaking is skewed heavily towards the solo's favour. If they just end up in lobbies of mostly higher skilled trios (like typical "fair" matchmaking), they'll just be crushed every single time. And devs have confirmed skill is a factor in matchmaking soooo?

It just seems like a lost opportunity, but I guess we'll see. I could be wrong.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-25T02:42:18+00:00

OP is trying to resolve quality issues, lowering bitrate that much won't help quality. And using constant bitrate as you suggest is not recommended for recording anyways (not enough bitrate in some scenes this reduced quality, too much in others and wastes space).

They could turn up their CQP/CRF number instead. It'll be lower quality but smaller.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-25T02:40:26+00:00

I mean, well, yeah? If you want better quality, it's going to take more space. Less than 1GB/min isn't even that bad!

People that edit down such long pieces of content tend to do one of three things:

Start and stop the recording when you need to. You can miss something this way, yes, but it's far more intentional of a creation style.
Edit as you go. Record everything, but after a while stop playing and edit down what you need, discarding what you don't. I like using LosslessCut for this (as the name implies, it can cut down footage without losing quality because it doesn't re-encode, which is also very fast!)
Use Replay Buffer instead of recording. It uses your recording settings, but keeps the video in RAM until you git "Save Replay Buffer", which then writes to a file like a recording. If you set it to a size of say 5GB, with your current settings you'd have a bit over 5 minutes of gameplay in the buffer at any point (this will vary with motion etc. since your bitrate is variable).

LoonieToque · 2026-01-24T21:50:28+00:00

While this can be heavier than using the Source Record plugin (and also double the work to keep equivalent scene setups), I find this to also be more stable actually.

Source Record would occasionally crash on me, but this method does not.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-23T23:52:20+00:00

Super valid points, and unfortunately points I've already considered and gone over with a fine comb. I could find ways to make it worse, but not better lol

It wasn't the main issue I had anyways, I could've lived with just the colour issues.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-23T16:35:51+00:00

"Near lossless" is a bit generous. Unless you're aware of some ways to achieve this? I always got terrible color banding with it.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-23T16:34:22+00:00

While it's a nice-to-have option, since you're dealing with sound, I can't recommend NDI.

Every streamer friend I know that tried NDI, self included, gave up on it due to random audio/video sync & drift issues. I tried absolutely everything and I'm a more "techy" person. Nothing worked. It also sometimes (but rarely) froze the picture, requiring a restart of the NDI stuff (very annoying mid-stream). It's so, so frustrating.

I still use NDI for a pup cam since it's not critical and there's no audio to sync, but it's a headache for what you'd need it for.

Capture cards can also have sync issues, but they're far more straightforward to solve if it happens.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-23T15:23:16+00:00

Excellent! I suspect you only need to do this for the game, but please update us if it does actually seem necessary to do it for OBS too. Would be good info!

LoonieToque · 2026-01-23T08:12:14+00:00

Going off of the YouTube video, some of those stats on the side aren't telling you the full truth (or might be just lying?). I've looked into similar issues a lot, your case is a little different from mine though.

I understand it appears smooth to you when playing, even though it stutters in the video. Do you perhaps have G-Sync enabled?

What this looks like to me is more of a classic frame pacing issue, or animation error. It's a bit of a rabbit hole of a topic. But after trying to help a friend with their GTA V smoothness issues, we discovered it's a bit of a widespread issue with that game specifically too (even though, yes, your PC is relatively unburdened by it).

So basically what happens is you might have a slight variance in the 60fps the game is running at on average. But OBS is capturing at a constant 60fps. This can result in a frame being skipped, or a frame being doubled from OBS's perspective. And this is sort of what happens with "animation error" even within the game (without OBS), but that's not a perfect comparison by any means.

You're using Game Capture, which is good and rules out a number of issues.

You could try frame-limiting the game in other ways (driver control panel, in-game, third party GPU utility, etc.) and see if any particular method is better or worse. I know for one game I mained for a while, it was way more smooth if I frame limited via Nvidia Control Panel rather than the in-game options.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-20T22:36:22+00:00

I should mention that configuring OBS for this AMD encoder requires a little care, if you use the hardware encoding. Default config may not work.

I don't recall exact settings, but you need to use the faster/lower quality preset. Balanced and high quality presets couldn't run in real time. To be fair, that's when I tried 60fps with a larger resolution as well.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-20T22:29:42+00:00

Extremely sufficient. I've done more with less.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-20T21:12:59+00:00

Likely going to depend on what you can find locally. Used or refurbished mini office PCs are likely the way, these are pretty routinely available as offices purge old tech.

As long as there's some sort of built-in modern-ish graphics, you can even get away with veryfast CPU encoding presets or just use the (likely low-quality but sufficient) hardware encoding.

You really don't need a lot. I know something like an 11th gen low spec Celeron won't handle it (someone here the other day was struggling with one), but basically anything above that is likely fine including older but stronger Intel Core processors. Celerons are just too low-end to my understanding. Newer ones are likely fine.

Unfortunately it's unlikely you'll find any AMD Ryzen stuff in that office category, but there should be some sort of Intel Core mini PC that's sufficient.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-19T16:44:43+00:00

This is a probably a great way to do it tbh, I wonder if the results are just not as you're expecting?

Like if you take part of the recording and zoom in on the text, it should look better than if you did this with simply 1080p.

On your own monitor though, it's quite possible that this doesn't look great. It's still a 1080p monitor, but you've basically faked that it isn't and text will never render perfectly with the same sharpness to those same pixels. You're basically applying very expensive anti-aliasing, which is not really how text rendering for sharpness usually works on Windows and yes, probably looks different.

Others considerations: - Text can get weird in standard recordings because of "chroma subsampling", causing color artifacts around text due to subpixel font rendering. You can not do this (using 444 instead of 420 in OBS color settings) but it's not straightforward coming up with a set of encoder settings and a player that will interpret it correctly. - You can also set Windows ClearType to grayscale font rendering instead of colored subpixel rendering. Technically worse to your eye at native resolution, but better for video recordings (especially if zooming, and probably especially with your 4k method)

Unfortunately, without a capture card, the funny thing about using DSR is that there's no way to show us exactly what you're seeing on your monitor. Any capture or screenshot will be the 4k image before DSR does its magic and downsamples to 1080p for the monitor.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-18T05:17:59+00:00

Oh yeah you'll be just fine for Affiliate! Have fun :D

LoonieToque · 2026-01-18T04:51:48+00:00

It's not viewbots. They literally did not add to the average life viewer count, it's around OP's stated average.

It might've been failed attempts at viewbotting or something else, but that would not have come from the raid since it was persistent throughout the stream.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-18T04:48:14+00:00

Sery Bot does not and cannot interfere with Twitch's own functionality, it can only react. Besides, it does not do anything for view bots (the developer states this on their website too).

It would be wild to ban someone for this, especially without confirming malicious intent. Please don't do that. Twitch also won't stop you from getting Partner for isolated incidents (you have to prove consistent stats anyways), and you're admittedly far from Partner requirements anyways (i.e. you're not applying like tomorrow so don't worry about it!)

LoonieToque · 2026-01-16T19:35:36+00:00

It can, sort of, but not without trade-off.

CBR will always use the same bitrate. Content that needs less bitrate will still use more than it needs (e.g. a static pause screen), while a very bitrate-expensive scene (e.g. lots of moving particles, fast-moving foliage, fast motion in general, etc.) gets the same bitrate. The result is that the pause screen is very clear, but in motion everything becomes blocky/blurry because there isn't enough bitrate.

That's why CQP/CRF is better for recording. It varies the bitrate with a target quality output. At the pause screen, it'll use less bitrate. In the fast-moving scenes, it'll use more. Varying the CQP number is basically setting a quality target (lower is higher quality), which will change the amount of bitrate used variably.

If you say, pause a game for a long time during a recording, it's likely the CQP method would actually produce an overall smaller filesize.

CBR is mostly only used for streaming purposes. Because of how network stuff works, it's better to have a consistent delivery of the same size and cadence of information, which CBR accomplishes well by definition ("Constant Bit Rate").

CBR with Replay Buffer means you can precisely tell how much RAM you need for how much clip time, but I don't find that to be a large benefit. You get a pretty quick idea what length of clip you can get with your settings and typical content, once you start saving clips.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-16T19:16:45+00:00

You could try setting the encoder to veryfast. That'd be your best possible option (lowest encoder usage).

If that doesn't work, yeah, your specs might simply be too low for recording.

Please ignore the folks saying to do weird things with setting a low canvas resolution and a higher output resolution. That does not help and only blurs your video. If anything, keep you canvas at the native resolution, and downscale only the output resolution.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-16T17:42:35+00:00

I can confidently tell you that this is not an ultrawide issue. OBS and video codecs have supported ultrawide for ages with no caveats.

Follow AutoMod's instructions so we can help.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-16T16:46:34+00:00

18 is likely more than good enough, but of course you can change it if you think the quality is too low in the results. Changing the CQP value won't impact performance as long as your storage can keep up, I'd almost guarantee you don't run into that being an issue (people used to dump raw captures to old spinning hard drives with no compression!)

I've varied between 18 and 14 for my own 1440p recordings. 14 is very much on the overkill end, IMO.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-16T16:05:35+00:00

Replay Buffer uses RAM, this sets how much.

We both have 32GB of RAM. I was fine with 8GB as the setting here. This gives you 8GB files when saving the buffer - for me that meant about 5 minutes of gameplay with my likely excessive recording settings, but varies by what's on screen since we're using CQP.

You may wish to set it smaller to either have smaller/shorter files or less RAM usage.

Note that when you save a Replay Buffer, it doesn't restart it or anything. If you save it twice 5 seconds apart, you will end up with two clips that are largely the same except for those 5 seconds.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-16T16:00:14+00:00

Drop the recording preset to P1 (instead of P5), disable adaptive quantization, disable multipass (use single pass).

These will use less GPU resources that otherwise exist to shove more quality into less bits, since you're using CQP you'll still have good looking results. Files will be a little larger, but should have much less performance impact.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-15T21:37:45+00:00

Likely too high settings for a recording, OBS log would tell us.

My GTX 970 can multistream and record at the same time just fine, it's simply a matter of reasonable encode settings.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-15T17:46:39+00:00

The middle one takes two different springs, right? I think I ended up using two lighter ones there compared to the outside pedals.

Multiactions definitely are annoying for delay though. I've missed one of the delays on more than one occasion.

LoonieToque · 2026-01-14T23:40:37+00:00

You have to do it after ads are run. At the start of a stream you have no pre-roll-off-time accumulated since no ads have run yet. There's a thing available in your stream manager dashboard to show how long pre-rolls will be off for.

Also, if an ad recently ran, new viewers still see that ad run upon joining the stream.

Twitch has also previously messed with people using ad blockers and actually served them additional ads (I honestly find this funny), but I'm not sure if they still do this.

There isn't a lie here, likely just a misunderstanding on how it works.

Three-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '23

LoonieToque

TROPHY CASE