10 tips for optimizing your live streaming computer and making it run faster from Paul Richards

The first thing you wanna think about what optimizing your live streaming computer is your video production workflow.  Following the best practices, we have outlined this blog post will help you optimize the outcomes of your video production live streaming.  What’s you’re of optimized your workflow it’s that time start tuning your hardware and software.

 When it comes to optimizing your video production workflow one of the most important things to consider is video resolution.  You should make sure that all video sources coming into your computer or at the same resolution. If you are using video sources at different resolutions that you were streaming and recording it will require your computer to do upscaling or downscaling.  For example, if you have one camera coming in at 720p but you were live streaming in 1080p your computer will have to upscale 720p video signal into 1080p.  You can avoid this excess computer processing by simply keeping all video resolution is the same throughout your video production chain.

When it comes to optimizing your video production live streaming hardware it’s important to understand an update your hardware’s firmware.  Manufactures often issue an updated firmware to increase functionality and performance of live streaming gear. What is the most important pieces of hardware inside your computer is the graphics card. Graphics cards are crucial to optimizing your computer’s performance for video gaming and live streaming. You should first check to make sure that your graphics card is enabled in the software that you were using. It’s considered best practice to run your life streaming or video production software in administrator mode using windows.   This can be done by right-clicking the application and selecting run in administrator mode.  Often times graphics card manufactures include a software package that you can use to optimize performance. In our live streaming computer, we have an NVIDIA graphics card which allows you to select the applications that you would like to use the graphics card with in windows.

When you were setting up your video production software for live streaming it’s important to keep all your applications and video assets on a solid-state hard drive. Just like your graphics card solid-state hard drive’s can be optimized tune for optimal performance. Solid-state hard drive manufactures usually include a software package for optimizing performance that you can download.

And an important aspect of the windows operating system to understand is that windows was made to run but all types of different hardware.  Therefore when you were building a live streaming computer it is your job to customize the windows operating system to work for live streaming with the hardware you have selected. One computer performance bottle neck in the windows operating system that you can improve upon is found in the power scenes settings inside your control panel.  By default Windows operating systems are generally set to a power savings mode that can be restricting your computers processing power.  If you’re using your computer for live streaming you should set your powers settings to performance mode and turn off any sleep modes that may be on.  We also suggest turning off any screensavers leaving your desktop picture plain black to avoid screen burning and optimize your computers performance .

 It’s also considered a best practice to start with a clean windows installation and delete any unwanted or unused apps in your programs and apps area .  It’s common knowledge that running into virus software can eat up valuable computer resources.  Consider uninstalling your antivirus software and rely on Windows defender.  Since your computer will be connected to the Internet make sure using a router with an included far wall for protection from the outside world .  Always check for windows updates that come every second Tuesday of the month .  Be prepared for these windows updates as they can cause delays right before your next live streaming event.

Let’s discuss some troubleshooting techniques to help fix a computer that may be having issues with live streaming video production.  An easy way to reduce your computers CPU usage is to offload either the recording or streaming to another hardware device. Generally, you do not want your live streaming computer to have a CPU usage over 50 to 75% . If your computer is having trouble recording and live streaming your video production at the same time you can consider using a hardware in encoder or recorder.  Hey hardware video encoder can except an HDMI video and audio signal from your computer and record in high definition.  This is an easy way to offload the CPU usage from video recording onto an external device.  You can also use an X ternal encoder which will except an HDMI video and audio signal and just live stream that content to your favorite CDN. We highly  suggest the video encoders from Magewell.  These video encoders will except an HDMI video and put in Livestream to both Facebook and YouTube at the same time.

Still looking for ways to maximize your live streaming computers performance and make it run faster?  We have seven new applications that we found on maxim PC magazine to help improve your life streaming computers performance.  If you have applications inside windows that are using too much of your computers resources try using process lasso by bitsum.  This application will quickly stop processes that are making excessive demands on your computer processor.  You can optimize the windows start up process by using an application called bootracer.  Racer will manage the windows start up process to make sure that the windows operating system is optimized no random applications are inserting himself into the Bootup process.  A very interesting new windows optimization application is called jet boost .  Jetboost will quickly shut down unnecesary applications and services only on a temporary basis with a single button.  You might be surprised how many backgrounds services are running on your Windows based computer .  By shutting down all of the services in applications running on your windows computer you can optimize performance for your video production software alone .  If you’re having Internet bandwidth issues consider using the Internet Excelerator to which optimizes your Internet land settings inside windows .  You can make your entire computer processing unit run faster than it was designed by overclocking your PC .  We generally do not suggest that you overclock your PC because it can harm your system but you can find tools from AMD and Intel for doing so at your own risk .  finally as we mentioned earlier you can tune your solid-state hard drive with application such as the Samsung magician .   Similar tools are available from SanDisk and crucial which will tweak the performance of your solid-state hard drive to improve speed and reliability .

 You can download are a complete live streaming checklist and computer optimization guide at PTZoptics.com/checklist .  We hope that this blog post and video is helpful for live streamers and video production experts around the world . Don’t forget to reach out to us on Facebook at PTZoptics .