When you stream, you have to remember several key parameters that directly affect your stream's visual quality, such as bitrate, resolution, and frames per second. To ensure a smooth result for your connected platforms, you should make sure to stick within their recommended settings.
However, besides those obvious parameters, there's one more which is easy to overlook. It's how each platform does transcoding. Transcoding at platforms is different from transcoding at Restream. Restream’s transcoding is a tool that allows for adjusting stream quality and settings for specific platforms only, without affecting the main feed.
No transcoding
Many platforms, such as Picarto, don't do transcoding and have strict stream quality limitations to let most of the viewers view the stream. Exceeding quality limitations will cause troubles with stream stability.
Partial transcoding
Other platforms such as Twitch do a hybrid approach, having strict recommended stream parameters but also transcoding the stream to lower specifications. This allows every streamer to do a high-quality compression of the original feed and also enables lower stream quality for their viewers who have a bad connection to the platform.
Note: Some streamers on such platforms will not have a quality selection option - this is a feature provided to partners or popular streamers. Other streamers are treated like the platform doesn't have transcoding for them.
The advantage these two approaches?
The original quality feed will be as good as a streamer can get.
The downside for these two approaches?
The original quality feed will be different from streamer to streamer and there are no certain ways of knowing how much data will be consumed for viewing before a viewer starts watching the stream.
Full transcoding
The third approach is full stream transcoding without preserving the source stream, which is done by YouTube and most Facebook streams. Such platforms allow only a limited set of resolutions with 16:9 aspect ratio, such as 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1440p, 2160p. The incoming stream will be converted to a certain standard, making it fully predictable in terms of quality and bitrate for viewers. The original feed will be converted and replaced.
Note: All streams will have multiple quality selection options for platforms with full transcoding.
The advantage of full transcoding?
It allows streamers with weaker hardware to compensate for it by sending higher bitrates to target platforms, getting a higher quality image, which is then brought to an appropriate standard that any viewer can watch. This sometimes allows for higher quality than a streamer can get at platforms without full transcoding.
The downsides of full transcoding?
The transcoding of the original stream will always decrease its quality for a viewer in comparison to what the streamer sends. It also doesn't allow for parameter variety, since every stream will be brought to the highest quality below what the streamer sends, so for instance, a 900p stream will be converted to a 720p stream and so on.
All in all, on some platforms, the stream may always look worse than on others, or worse than your Restream recording is, but this is an important element that will let viewers see the stream in quality optimized for such platforms.
If you want to learn more about streaming quality, check out our blog post SD vs HD for live streaming.