When you are a Twitch streamer, understanding bitrate is essential in helping you guarantee a high-quality stream that your viewers will enjoy.
Unfortunately, many streamers don’t understand what bitrate means on Twitch or which bitrate is ideal. By the end of this post, you will learn what a good bitrate for Twitch is.
Your bitrate determines what resolution and framerate you will stream with. The bitrate you select depends on your internet’s upload speed and the capacity of your computer. Nonetheless, a bitrate of 3,000 Kbps is ideal for someone streaming in 720p at 30 fps. However, if you are streaming at 60 fps in a 1080p environment, your bitrate should be about 4,000 Kbps.
First, we will define bitrate and discuss how it differs with bandwidth. Afterward, we will discuss why bitrate matters and explain what is a good bitrate for Twitch.
What Is Bitrate?
When you want to share something with the world, such as your gaming sessions, tutorial, skills, etc., you can join a streaming platform like Twitch and create your channel.
When streaming, a vital aspect you must consider is the quality of the streams. How is your graphics? A quality stream is desirable; viewers will enjoy watching your live stream.
The quality of your streams relies on the bitrate. Well, bitrate refers to the total bits encoded in a second. It refers to the data that gets transmitted to Twitch when you are streaming.
Thus, when you select a high bitrate, it will utilize most of your bandwidth. However, a higher bitrate means better graphics and improved quality of your live stream.
To enjoy high bitrate, your internet must be stable and fast, ensuring its upload speed manages to handle the bitrate. You should note that bitrate differs from bandwidth.
We’ve defined the bitrate as the maximum data transferred per second. The bandwidth refers to your internet’s capacity to transmit data in bitrate.
High bandwidth allows you to enjoy high bitrate and decent streaming quality. For a Twitch streamer, the bitrate matters a lot. With a high bitrate, your viewers will enjoy better video and audio streaming as more data gets transmitted every second.
However, you will face buffering if you have a high bitrate exceeding your internet’s capacity. Hence, knowing the best or ideal bitrate for your streaming is worthwhile.
What Is a Good Bitrate for Twitch?
As a streamer, you may get confused about the best bitrate to guarantee quality streaming. You must ensure you get the best ways to retain the viewers; having clear live streams is one way. So, what is a good bitrate for Twitch?
Here’s the kicker, the bitrate ideal for your case depends on your internet’s speed and what resolution you are streaming in. For instance, if you plan to live stream in 720p at 30fps, the best streaming bitrate for you is around 3,000 Kbps.
However, if using a higher resolution of 1080p at 60 fps, your bitrate should be about 4,000 Kbps and can go higher to even around 6,000 Kbps. If you select a bitrate that doesn’t align with the streaming resolution, you will face buffering and low-quality streaming.
Using the bandwidth, you can quickly calculate the bitrate you need for your streaming. For instance, if your bandwidth is 10 Mbps, multiply it by 1,000 Kbps, then half that number. So, 10 Mbps should have a bitrate of about 5,000 Kbps.
You can adjust this bitrate on your streaming software to get the best streaming quality. Every streaming software has a section for bitrate speed in its settings.
Once you access this section, you can specify the bitrate you’ve gotten after the simple calculation and use it for streaming on Twitch.
Conclusion
A good bitrate will depend on the streaming resolution and your internet quality. We’ve defined what a bitrate means and how it affects your streaming quality on Twitch. With that, we hope you’ve fully understood what is a good bitrate for Twitch.
