Telestream's Guide to Building Your Own Streaming Computer
Live streaming is a process with a lot of variables. While anybody can stream on devices from a smart phone to a super computer, the more sophisticated your stream the more processing power and strain you'll put on your computer.
Luckily Telestream is here to help, with a great guide on how to build a reliable computer for live streaming. We'll be taking a look at some of the finer points from that article, below.
The Four Main Hardware Components:
When building an editing or streaming station, there are four main hardware components to consider, in order to have the most desired outcome. These factors are:
1) CPU & RAM
2) Motherboard
3) GPU
4) Storage
CPU & RAM:
An underpowered CPU can drastically affect your production capabilities. However, how powerful your CPU needs to be depends entirely on what you are hoping to achieve. For most cases, users will want to aim for middle of the road CPU in terms of core Vs clock frequency.
Theoretically, having a higher clock speed is always going to result in a better encode. When playing back video files, things can vary drastically based on the codec and the format of the source. For example, you can play out a 720p ProRes file and it’s going to impact the CPU far less than a more compressed version of the same material. ProRes is “data heavy”, but not as “computationally expensive” because it’s an I-frame codec meaning there are no predictive frames that need to be reconstituted on the fly.
-Telestream
Motherboard:
A strong Motherboard is a must, as everything flows in and out of it. An incorrectly configured Motherboard can deliver data and speed below par with the desired stream. The same is true of previous generation Motherboards.
GPU:
One popular technique used by live streamers is utilizing GPU instead of CPU to encode video streams. This is because CPU resources are precious and are vital to operations of your machine on the whole.
Storage:
Picking the best storage comes down to a choice between spinning Hard Disk Drives, Solid State Drives or NvME storage solutions. Spinning drives will provide a lot of storage for a low price, but an SSD will give you much higher read and write speeds.
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