Rebuilding my main streaming setup

I’ll admit to considering buying a new Mac Studio earlier this week and just abandoning my regular desktop. I’m probably going to have to do something with my desktop operating system and just install Windows 11 anew. Over the years, I have paid Microsoft so many times for the same operating system across different computers and builds. It’s actually somewhat ridiculous when you think about the investment vs. what you actually got back from the vendor. Earlier this week, I started to get my OBS software running on my main computer with my most powerful graphics card to do a little bit of streaming. For some ineffable reason, things just would not work. Keep in mind this hard drive had moved from one computer build to another, but for the most part, was just the same thing with a little bit different hardware in terms of motherboard, RAM, and CPU. All 3 of those being a generation newer, faster, and supposedly better. Unfortunately, I just kept getting errors from YouTube letting me know they were not receiving enough data. The drop rate in OBS was 60% or higher, and things were just not working.

I’ll admit I thought for a moment this has to be easier than what is happening. Installing OBS on my MacBook Air took just a few minutes. I entered the streaming key and moved along to do a test. That process took a few minutes, and I was up and streaming without any real problems. I set the streaming output bitrate to 51000 kbps, and that worked fine. No frames were dropped at all, and my first test lasted 5 minutes with no problems. The next day, I circled back and streamed for 15 minutes without any problems. On Monday, I may very well do a test and see if we can sustain a stream for 30 minutes on the MacBook Air. It would probably be better to use a regular MacBook or even a new MacBook Studio to manage the streaming. The cheaper solution to running a longer stream would be to just get my desktop computer working properly. I’m probably going to spend some time next week working on that effort.

Overall, my streaming setup is still pretty basic. I have a Logitech webcam and Yeti X microphone that work well enough. My basic canvas is my desktop monitor that I can use to orchestrate a conversation with people. That means that my signal being outputted to YouTube is a 3840x1600 resolution that is supposed to be sent at 60 frames per second. For some reason, even with a 51000 kbps bitrate, YouTube converts that to a 1440p60HD resolution on replay. Better understanding how to configure the stream output to end up a higher resolution replay is something on my list of things to figure out. Managing audio is a little bit easier and that seems to have worked just fine. I did get some type of excepted signal error during the broadcast, but overall everything worked out well enough.