
NVENC is made by NVIDIA and will be available if you have a NVIDIA graphics card installed in your computer.

"Quicksync" is made by Intel and comes with many of its CPUs that have an integrated graphics card (on Macs it’s called "Apple H.264"). You won’t see these options unless you have these chips in your computer. "Apple H.264," "Quicksync" or "NVENC" use chips on your graphics card, also known as your GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to encode and compress the video. This is sometimes called "software encoding." This generally allows the computer to make “smarter” decisions when choosing what information to include and what information to get rid of when encoding your video stream and allows it to maintain the best quality:size (bitrate) ratio.

"x264" uses the computer’s Central Processing Unit (CPU) to do all the encoding. In the screenshot here, you can see that I chose between "x264" and "Apple H.264." On Windows, you might see "Quicksync" or "NVENC" in addition to "x264." Depending on the hardware in your computer you will see between 2 and 6 different encoding options based on these settings. They only allow (or recommend) 720 HD video in either 30 frames or 60 frames per second.īy default, Wirecast will limit you to Facebook’s preferred settings. On another note, if you don’t know what "encoding" means in relation to video and audio or live streaming, you probably will want to read this article.Īlthough you don’t necessarily need to change anything, we'll discuss it now, so you have an idea of what the settings do and how they work.įacebook is quite strict on the size and quality settings of any live video you stream to the site via the Live API. We cover Frequently Asked Questions, including what computer to use with Wirecast.

If you don’t know what "quad core" means in relation to computers or why that matters with Wirecast, you should probably watch this video.
