Posts from Online Tech Tips for 08/04/2019

In this issue: How To Choose a Bitrate For Twitch & YouTube Streaming - [View in browser]( Saturday, August 03, 2019 How To Choose a Bitrate For Twitch & YouTube Streaming by Ollie Green | [Online Tech Tips]( Do you want to know the best bitrate for streaming to Twitch or YouTube? Read through this detailed guide and you’ll have the answers you need. Before we get started, please understand that Twitch and YouTube will deal with the data you send them differently, so we will split this guide into two sections. We will have suggestions for Twitch first and then a guide for YouTube. If you use a re-streaming service to stream to two platforms at once, it’s best that you use the suggestions provided in the Twitch section. Alternatively, some services will allow you to choose separate settings for different platforms. Remember that all of these settings we will talk about will be within your streaming software, not on Twitch or YouTube. How To Choose The Best Bitrate For Twitch Twitch limits all uploads to 6000kbps, which means you cannot go any higher than that. However, in many cases it’s better to go lower. Twitch will always reserve its bandwidth for its partners, so unless you stream during non-peak hours, your viewers won’t get access to quality options. This means that when you stream on Twitch, your viewers may be forced to view your stream in the quality that you upload to Twitch’s servers. If you stream at a certain bitrate, your viewers need to have the download speed to be able to match your upload. For most viewers, a bitrate for 6000kbps will be too high. Unless you are guaranteed to get quality options on your stream, you should opt for lower settings instead. A good starting point would be to stream at 720P at 60FPS. If you are playing a shooter game or any game with high paced action, 60FPS is highly recommended. For this, Twitch recommends the following settings. - Bitrate: 4500kbps - Keyframe interval: 2 seconds - Preset: Max Quality - B-frames: 2 If you are playing a game that doesn’t have much action, you could choose to go for 30fps and 720P resolution. For this, keep the same settings as above, but limit your bitrate to 3000kbps. In the future, your channel may grow to the point where you get partnered. At that point, you will be given quality options. This means viewers will get to choose what quality to stream in, so it’s best to go for the highest quality possible. In this case, you will have two options on Twitch – 1080p or 900p. Once again, the settings above are suggested, but for both 1080p and 900p, 6,000kbps is recommended. What If My Upload Speed Is Too Slow? Twitch recommends 3,000kbps (around 0.4MB/s) for 720p at 30 frames per second. If your upload speed is lower than this, you should try to find an alternative internet solution. You could opt for a lower resolution, but the quality would not be satisfactory. If your upload speed is higher than 3,000kbps but lower than 6,000kbps, you can use the following information as a guide. The Best Bitrate Based On Your Upload Speed For Twitch: - 4,000kbps or less – 720p 30fps - 5,000 kbps or less – 720p 60fps - 6,000 kbps – 900p 60fps - 6,000kbps with partner – 1080p 60fps How To Choose The Best Bitrate For YouTube YouTube automatically transcodes your stream, no matter how many viewers you have. That means viewers will have all quality options from 360p to the highest quality you are streaming. That means you should stream at the highest bitrate possible. Your viewers can then choose which quality option they want and they won’t have any issues with buffering. However, if you want to stream at a certain resolution, YouTube does recommend the following ranges. It’s highly recommended to choose the higher range in this list for the most optimal experience for your viewers. YouTube Recommended Bitrate (kbps) - 4K 60fps – 20,000-51,000 - 4K – 13,000-34,000 - 1440p 60fps – 9,000-18,000 - 1440p – 6,000-13,000 - 1080p 60fps – 4,500-9,000 - 1080p – 3,000-6,000 - 720p 60fps 2,250-6,000 - 720p – 1,500-4,000 - 480p – 500-2,000 You may also like these other posts from OTT: [How To Disable The Bixby Button On Samsung Galaxy Phones]( [The 10 Best Console Ports on iOS & Android]( [What To Do If Webpages Are Loading Slowly On Windows 10]( [How To Install Apps On Your Android Device From Your Computer]( [How To Write & Publish An eBook On a Budget]( How To Build a Basic Web Presence If You Have No Coding Skills - [View in browser]( Saturday, August 03, 2019 How To Build a Basic Web Presence If You Have No Coding Skills by Ryan Dube | [Online Tech Tips]( Many people would like to have their own website, but not everyone has the skills required to launch a new domain and build a website from scratch. As there are so many people who want a website but lack coding skills, a lot of services have cropped up over the years for non-technical people to design and launch their own websites. The following are nine of the best online services for creating your own basic web presence even if you have no coding skills at all. [About.me]( When you sign up for an [About.me account]( you get your own URL on the About.me website. With a free account, you can include an email signature on the page, as well as a spotlight button that can link to any external page you like. About.me is perfect for creating a single web page that features your personal profile and links to all of your social media accounts. It’s a sort of online “business card” – a link you can share with people so they can visit it and learn more about you. [Emyspot]( Emyspot is a simple website builder that lets you quickly create a website that’s perfect for your situation. It’s a UK-based site that provides a wide range of prices depending on what you need from your online presence. With a [free Emyspot subscription]( you get: - Unlimited pages. - Unlimited traffic. - 150 MB of storage. - A store with a maximum of 10 products. The free site does include ads on the page, but you receive a subdomain of the emyspot.com domain. So keep this in mind when deciding whether one of the ad-free premium packages is better for you. Emyspot provides you with a page builder tool that lets you easily add text and images. It also includes widgets that let you embed other content like videos and music. [Imcreator]( Imcreator is a popular website builder platform among creators. The website building platform is intuitive and easy. A site you build with this platform will be responsive, meaning it’ll work well even on mobile devices. There are also templates available so you don’t have to start building your site from scratch. Sites you can build with Imcreator are professional and clean. A free subscription offers you: - Unlimited hosting. - Use your own domain if you’ve registered one elsewhere. - Access to all Imcreator themes for your own site. - Tools to build your own store. - No ads. This is one of the few free website building platforms that let you have a site without any ads. Of all platforms, this one offers the most features for free. [Jimdo]( If you register to build your own online presence with Jimdo, you have a number of options to choose from price-wise. However, the free option has plenty of choices if you’re looking to build something fast and at no-cost. A free site with Jimdo provides you with a subdomain on the jimdosite.com domain. The website builder on Jimdo is so easy that you can build a professional looking website in just minutes. You also have the option to create a store if you’re looking to build a commercial online presence. The free account will include a small ad for Jimdo at the bottom of your pages. Still, at no cost, it’s a great option for quickly establishing yourself online with minimal effort. [Squarespace]( Squarespace isn’t a free platform for establishing your online web presence, but it is a very popular one. It does offer a 14 day free trial so you can try the platform before making the decision to upgrade to a paid plan. Once you create your account, you’ll see demo content that you can use to create your own website design. This way you won’t need to start from scratch. When you select the Home menu in your Squarespace account, you’ll see a list of useful tools that’ll let you customize your site with dynamic content for your visitors. Squarespace also offers lots of videos and documents that’ll help you come up to speed quickly when creating your online presence with this platform. Squarespace creates a subdomain for your new website. However, you can also purchase your own custom domain through Squarespace as well, if you prefer. [Webstarts]( Webstarts is an aptly named website builder platform that provides a lot of extra features you won’t find at most other services. That includes the free plan as well. A personal site that you build with Webstarts is hosted at a subdomain of the webstarts.com domain. A few of the features you’ll find at Webstarts include: - Responsive designs that work on mobile devices. - Your own subdomain that works upon signup. - Create your own online store if you want to. - Host your own videos on your site. - Live chat feature to IM with your visitors. - Customize your site with HTML. - Embedded CDN service to speed up your site. If you’re looking to build a web presence with a wide assortment of features, Webstarts is a great place to start. If you find that you need a larger site or that you’ve developed a large visitor following, there are affordable plans with more cloud storage and bandwidth. [Doodlekit]( Doodlekit is one of the easiest website design platforms of all. The service comes with responsive templates you can use to get your website up and running in just minutes. Your site can include a photo gallery and a blog. The service provides you with free website hosting including 100MB of storage, and up to 100GB of bandwidth. It’s more than enough to build a professional website presence. A free Doodlekit site is ideal for a simple, personal website. If you need more bandwidth or storage, you can upgrade to one of the affordable plans that are available. Upgraded plans include SSL security, web usage statistics, a custom domain, and more. [Google Sites]( Google Sites is one of the easiest services available to create a quick personal web presence. There are no premium options available because the service is provided by Google and is entirely free. Building pages includes a long list of widgets for you to add test boxes, images, embedded content, and even links to Google Drive files like Docs, Sheets, Slides and more. Creating a Google Site website is a little different than building a regular site. The development platform has limited themes and design itself is constrained by the limits of the platform itself. However creating an entire multi-page site using the service is the fastest and easiest of any other. The site becomes a sub-folder within the sites.google.com domain. However, you can point a custom domain you’ve registered to the Google site that you created. Creating Your Own Web Presence As you can see, it doesn’t take a whole lot of coding knowledge or web design experience to launch your own web presence right now. In fact, all it requires is choosing the right tool that suits your needs, and you could have a professional website online in less than a day. You may also like these other posts from OTT: [How To Disable The Bixby Button On Samsung Galaxy Phones]( [The 10 Best Console Ports on iOS & Android]( [What To Do If Webpages Are Loading Slowly On Windows 10]( [How To Install Apps On Your Android Device From Your Computer]( [How To Write & Publish An eBook On a Budget]( Check out more posts from our publishing family: Help Desk Geek Posts [The Best Virtual Private Networks Compared Side-By-Side]( Aug 3, 2019 by Patrick Hearn Virtual private networks, or VPNs, are more popular than ever before – and easier to find, too. VPNs let you access the Internet through a secure connection and greatly increase safety when browsing online and accessing personal information. But the benefits don’t just stop there. Through the use of a VPN, you can: Bypass region-specific […] [READ MORE]( [The Most Common Windows 10 Error Messages & How To Fix Them]( Aug 3, 2019 by Joseph Boone On-screen errors are always a source of frustration. It never fails to drain the life from one’s face anytime your Windows OS succumbs to an internal hiccup. Even more so when you have no idea how it happened in the first place. In a time when our lives are being made easier through the use […] [READ MORE]( The Backroom Tech Posts [How To Encrypt Data In Amazon S3]( Jul 20, 2019 by Aseem Kishore Most data uploaded to the cloud is protected by the standard username and password authentication, and is usually stored in plaintext for easy access and retrieval. 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Before we get started on the article let’s see what the use case might be for this type […] [READ MORE]( Switching To Mac Posts [The Best iOS Scanner Apps To Scan Documents & Images]( Aug 1, 2019 by Elsie Otachi The first commercial model of the Xerox machine was almost the size of two washing machines, weighing about 650 pounds, and prone to overheating.  Nonetheless, it was a godsend for secretaries as they no longer needed to use lousy carbon paper or visit third-party external print shops to produce quality copies. Its core technology later […] [READ MORE]( [The Best Extensions For The Safari Browser]( Jul 31, 2019 by Stephanie Faris If you have an Apple device, you’re likely familiar with Safari. Although it’s not nearly as popular as Google Chrome, the fact that it’s built into every MacBook, iPhone, and iPad means that it’s still being used on plenty of devices. Although Safari is packed with its fair share of features, including incognito mode and […] [READ MORE]( ABOUT ONLINE TECH TIPS Welcome to Online Tech Tips – A blog that provide readers with daily computer tutorials, technology news, software reviews, and personal computing tips. My name is Aseem Kishore and I am a full-time professional blogger. I graduated from Emory University with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. Copyright © 2019 Online-Tech-Tips.com, LLC, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you joined our newsletter on our website, www.Online-Tech-Tips.com. You'll get an email whenever we post a new article! [Update Preferences]( | [Unsubscribe](