Live encoding causes a lot of debate in the streaming and broadcast communities, and the decisions we make about how it’s done not only affect the quality of the stream, but the budget of the production. The price difference between encoder tiers is thousands of dollars, which adds up quickly when you’re doing multiple channels. We developed a test focusing on the end-viewer experience for a common video stream rather than transport streams. Our Encoder Shootout series is designed to allow producers to make their own judgments before hearing our opinion. The goal is not to crown a winner, but give you one more piece of information when choosing an encoder.
For our lates Encoder Shootout, we compared two of the most popular software programs for streaming, vMix and OBS.
About the test content
Our test content has one minute of test patterns, one minute of New Years Eve confetti content, and one minute of slow motion water content. We’re simulating an intentionally tough but realistic environment for these encoders. So, the video is streamed at 5 megabits per second. At 1080p30 (set as 1080p29.97), 5 mbps is right at a breaking point where you can see some blocking and stuttering if the encoder is lower quality. We’ll just test H.264 or AVC encoding since that’s what’s most common right now. Finally, the keyframe interval will always be 2 seconds, which should show more obvious differences between different encoders’ GOP structures.
The test content originates in ProRes and is played back from a vMix machine. It looks incredible in its raw format.
You can download the assets below:
