Why do my viewers say my Twitch stream is buffering when it looks fine to me?

Your own preview never travels over the internet, so it cannot show you what viewers receive. The three most common real causes are that Twitch is not transcoding your channel, so viewers have no lower quality to fall back to; that your bitrate is higher than your upload can hold steadily; or that the problem is on one particular viewer's connection. A playback test run from a different network will tell you which.

Why does my Twitch channel only have Source quality and no 720p or 480p option?

Twitch's server-side transcoding is not guaranteed for every channel. Without it, viewers get only the quality you broadcast, so anyone whose connection cannot carry it buffers instead of dropping to a lower rung. Enhanced Broadcasting, which is now available to all streamers, lets your own computer send several qualities at once and removes the dependency on Twitch transcoding you.

What bitrate should I stream to Twitch at?

For standard H.264 streaming, 6,000 kbps is the widely used ceiling and 1080p60 at 6,000 kbps with CBR and a 2-second keyframe interval is the common baseline. Fast-moving games often look better at 720p60 and 4,500 kbps than at 1080p60 on the same bitrate. Set the number your upload can hold continuously, not the number it peaks at.

What is the difference between dropped, skipped and lagged frames in OBS?

They point at three different parts of your machine. Dropped frames are a network problem: OBS encoded the frames but could not send them. Skipped frames mean encoding lag, so the encoder could not keep up. Lagged frames mean rendering lag, usually a GPU that is busy running the game. Fixing the wrong one wastes an evening.

How much upload speed do I need to stream on Twitch?

Plan for your total stream bitrate to use no more than about 70 to 75 percent of the upload speed you can hold continuously. Speed tests report a peak measured over a few seconds, while a stream needs that rate for hours, and consumer upload commonly sags during evening peak hours.

Why is my Twitch stream blurry or pixelated during fast movement?

Compression has a fixed budget per second. Fast motion changes most of the picture every frame, so the same bitrate has to describe far more change and detail is what gets sacrificed. Dropping from 1080p to 720p at the same bitrate gives every remaining pixel more data and usually looks sharper in motion, not worse.

Why is there no video of my past Twitch stream?

Twitch does not save past broadcasts unless you turn on Store Past Broadcasts in your stream settings, and it only applies to streams after you switch it on. Saved broadcasts are also deleted after a retention window that depends on your account type, so an older stream may simply have expired.

Twitch stream troubleshooting

A plain-language guide to the things that actually go wrong with a Twitch broadcast, why they happen, and how to work out which one you are looking at. Written for people who have been told their stream is buffering and have no idea where to start.

Everything here is free to read and there is nothing to sign up for. If you want to see what your stream looks like arriving at a viewer right now, the 30-second playback test measures it and tells you what to look at next.

Start here: work out whose problem it is

Almost every wasted evening in stream troubleshooting comes from fixing the wrong end of the chain. Between you and a viewer there are four separate places a problem can start, and they need completely different fixes:

Your computer — the encoder, the GPU, the game competing for resources.
Your connection — upload speed, and more importantly upload stability.
Twitch — ingest, transcoding, and whether lower qualities exist at all.
The viewer — their network, their device, their browser, their player settings.

A viewer complaining cannot tell you which of the four it is, and neither can your own preview window. Your preview never crosses the internet. It is showing you the frames before the part that breaks.

The one test that narrows it down fastest

Run the same playback test from two different networks — your computer and your phone on mobile data, for example, with Wi-Fi turned off. Then:

Bad on both — the problem is upstream of the viewer. Look at your encoder, your upload, or your Twitch settings.
Bad on one only — the problem is local to that network or device. Your broadcast is probably fine.
Fine on both, but a viewer still complains — get that specific viewer to run the test and send you the result.

One clean test is one data point. Three results from three places is evidence, and it is the difference between knowing and guessing.

“My viewers say it’s buffering but it looks fine to me”

This is the single most common Twitch complaint, and the reason it is confusing is that both people are telling the truth. There are three usual causes.

1. Twitch is not transcoding your channel

When Twitch transcodes a stream, it makes several lower-quality copies so viewers can drop to 720p or 480p when their connection struggles. When it does not, the quality menu shows only Source, and a viewer whose connection cannot carry your full bitrate has nothing to fall back to. They do not get a slightly worse picture. They get buffering.

Server-side transcoding has never been guaranteed for every channel, and smaller channels are the ones most likely to go without it. This is the invisible cause behind an enormous number of “my stream lags for some people” posts, because the broadcaster's own quality menu looks perfectly normal to them.

You can check this in seconds. Open your channel on twitch.tv while live and look at the quality menu in the player settings, or run the playback test — it lists every quality Twitch is offering for a channel and says outright when there is only one.

2. Enhanced Broadcasting — the fix most streamers have not heard of

This is worth knowing about because it directly solves the problem above. Enhanced Broadcasting lets your own computer encode and send several qualities at once, instead of sending one and hoping Twitch makes the others. Your viewers get a real quality ladder whether or not Twitch decides to transcode you.

It started as an invite-only beta with NVIDIA, but Twitch has since made it available to everyone. It is supported in recent versions of OBS Studio, Streamlabs Desktop and XSplit, and it can configure the encoder settings for you rather than making you pick them.

The trade-off is honest and worth stating: encoding several qualities at once is more work for your machine than encoding one. If your CPU or GPU is already near its limit, turning this on can cause the encoding lag described further down. It is still the single most effective answer to “some of my viewers buffer” if your hardware has room.

In June 2026 Twitch extended this further, adding 1440p streaming for Partners and Affiliates using the HEVC codec with higher bitrate allowances, and adding server-side transcode support to reduce the load that multi-encoding puts on a streamer's machine.

3. Your bitrate is higher than your upload can hold

Covered in full below, but the short version: if your connection cannot sustain the bitrate you set, your stream does not gently degrade. It stutters, and it does so for viewers long before you notice anything.

Dropped frames: three different problems with similar names

OBS reports three separate counters and they point at three different parts of your machine. Fixing the wrong one is how people lose a whole evening.

Dropped frames (network)

OBS encoded the frames but could not get them to Twitch. This is a connection problem: not enough upload, an unstable line, or a poor route to the ingest server. Lower your bitrate first, then look at Wi-Fi and ingest server.

Shown in the OBS status bar as dropped frames

Skipped frames (encoding lag)

The encoder could not keep up with real time. This is a CPU or encoder problem. Switch from x264 to a hardware encoder, use a faster x264 preset, or lower the resolution or frame rate you are encoding.

OBS Stats window, encoding lag

Lagged frames (rendering lag)

OBS could not compose the frame in time, almost always because the GPU is busy running your game. Cap your in-game frame rate, turn off in-game vsync, or drop a graphics setting. More bitrate will not help this one at all.

OBS Stats window, rendering lag

Dropped frames on the viewer's side

A fourth kind, and the one our test measures: frames that arrived at a viewer's browser but their device could not paint. This is usually their machine being busy, not your broadcast being faulty, and it is worth ruling out before changing anything.

Reported by the Twitch player, measured by ViewerVitals

A handful of frames over half an hour is normal and not worth chasing. A steady stream of them, or a burst that lines up with something specific happening, is the signal.

Bitrate, resolution and frame rate: what to actually set

Bitrate is how much data your stream sends every second. More data means a sharper picture — but only up to the point where the resolution stops benefiting, and only if your connection can carry it every second for hours.

At the time of writing, 6,000 kbps is the ceiling most of the Twitch ecosystem is built around for standard H.264 broadcasting. Twitch's servers will often accept more, but going above it means fewer viewers can be served comfortably and transcoding becomes less certain — which is the opposite of what you want. Higher allowances exist through Enhanced Broadcasting for Partners and Affiliates using HEVC.

Reasonable starting points

720p 30fps — 2,500 to 3,500 kbps. Safe on a modest connection. Genuinely fine for most content.
720p 60fps — 3,500 to 4,500 kbps. The sweet spot for fast-paced games on a normal home connection.
1080p 30fps — 4,000 to 6,000 kbps. Good for slower content: art, chatting, strategy games, cards.
1080p 60fps — 6,000 kbps. The common baseline, but only if your upload genuinely holds it.

Alongside those, two settings that are not really optional: rate control set to CBR, and a keyframe interval of 2 seconds. Twitch's infrastructure expects both, and getting the keyframe interval wrong causes strange, hard-to-diagnose playback problems.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Streaming 1080p60 because it sounds better than 720p60. For fast-moving games this often makes the picture worse. At a fixed bitrate, more pixels means less data per pixel, and fast motion is exactly when that shortage shows up as smearing and blockiness.

If you play shooters, racing games or anything with quick camera movement, try 720p60 at 4,500 kbps for one stream and compare. A lot of people never go back. It also makes life much easier for viewers on weaker connections, which matters more when you are small.

Ad slot — in article

Upload speed: the number that actually matters

A speed test gives you a peak, measured over a few seconds under ideal conditions. A stream needs that rate continuously, for hours. Those are very different numbers, and consumer upload — cable especially — often sags during the evening when everyone in the neighbourhood is online. Which is exactly when you are streaming.

A workable rule: your total stream bitrate should be no more than about 70 to 75 percent of the upload you can hold reliably. Total means video plus audio. At 6,000 kbps video and 160 kbps audio, you want somewhere north of 8 Mbps of dependable upload, not 6.5.

Things that quietly ruin upload stability

Wi-Fi. The most common single cause. Wi-Fi is fine on average and terrible in the moments that matter. Use an ethernet cable if there is any way to run one.
Powerline adapters and mesh hops. Better than Wi-Fi, still far less consistent than a direct cable.
Other devices. A cloud backup, a game update or someone else's video call will take upload from your stream without asking.
VPNs. They add a hop, cost throughput, and can route you badly. Turn one off before you spend hours on anything else.
The wrong ingest server. Usually automatic and usually right, but if you are far from a major city it is worth testing a couple manually.

Encoder settings: which one and why

Your encoder turns raw frames into compressed video. The choice is mostly about which piece of hardware does the work.

NVENC (NVIDIA) — a dedicated chip on the graphics card, separate from the part running your game. Almost always the right choice on an NVIDIA GPU.
AMF / VCE (AMD) and QuickSync (Intel) — the same idea, quality varies more by generation.
Apple hardware encoder — the sensible default on Apple Silicon.
x264 (CPU) — excellent quality per bit at slower presets, but it competes with your game for the processor. Best on a second machine or a CPU with cores to spare.

If you are getting encoding lag on x264, move to a hardware encoder before you touch anything else. It is the single biggest improvement available on most setups, and modern hardware encoders are close enough in quality that the argument for x264 has mostly gone.

Latency, chat delay, and why your stream is 12 seconds behind

Twitch offers two latency modes, and Low Latency is the default — it has been opt-out rather than opt-in since 2019. If your delay is long, it is worth checking that yours was not switched off at some point.

Low latency puts viewers a few seconds behind you. Chat feels like a conversation. Slightly less cushion when a connection wobbles.
Normal latency is more like ten to fifteen seconds. Worse for interaction, but more forgiving of an unstable connection at either end.

The setting is in your Creator Dashboard under stream preferences. If your chat feels permanently out of sync, that is the first place to look. If you are on Low Latency and still seeing a long delay, the delay is being added somewhere else — and the playback test will tell you how far behind a viewer actually is rather than how far behind you assume they are.

Audio problems

Audio drifts out of sync over a long stream. Usually a sample-rate mismatch. Set everything — Windows, your interface, OBS — to 48 kHz and stop mixing 44.1 and 48.
Audio is quiet or clipping. Aim for peaks around -6 dB with a compressor and limiter on the microphone. Do not fix quiet audio by raising gain until it distorts.
Game audio drowns the microphone. Separate the sources in OBS so you can balance them, rather than capturing everything as one desktop track.
The VOD has no sound in places. That is Twitch's automated music-rights muting, not a fault. Copyrighted music on stream gets sections of the recording silenced.
Audio bitrate. 160 kbps is plenty for speech and game audio. Higher is rarely worth the upload it costs.

Why does my stream look blurry when I move?

Compression works by describing what changed since the last frame. When you spin the camera, almost everything changes at once, and the same number of bits has to describe far more difference. Detail is what gets given up.

That is why a still scene can look crisp and the same stream can turn to mush in a firefight. The answers, in order of how much they help:

Drop the resolution before dropping the bitrate. 720p60 at 4,500 kbps beats 1080p60 at 4,500 kbps in motion, every time.
Check your downscale filter is set to Lanczos if you are scaling down from a higher desktop resolution.
Make sure you are not scaling to an odd resolution. Stick to standard sizes.
Only then consider more bitrate — and only if your upload has genuine headroom.

Past broadcasts and clips

Twitch does not save your streams unless you tell it to. Store Past Broadcasts is a setting in your Creator Dashboard, it is off by default for new channels, and it only applies to streams after you turn it on. A great many people discover this the day after the stream they wanted to keep.

Saved broadcasts are also temporary. The retention window depends on account type — roughly a week for a standard account, longer for Affiliates, longer again for Partners, Turbo and Prime. Twitch can change these, so check the current numbers in your own settings rather than trusting any article, including this one. If a stream matters, download it.

Clips are worth enabling and encouraging. They outlive past broadcasts, they are how most small channels actually get discovered, and they cost you nothing.

A pre-stream checklist

Wired connection, or as close as you can get.
Nothing else uploading — pause cloud backups and game updates.
Bitrate at or under about 70 percent of your reliable upload.
CBR, keyframe interval 2 seconds.
Hardware encoder if you have one.
Store Past Broadcasts switched on.
Latency mode set to what your content actually needs.
Once live, check your quality menu on twitch.tv — if Source is the only entry, look at Enhanced Broadcasting.
OBS Stats window open on a second screen, watching all three frame counters.

Questions people ask

Do more followers get me transcoding?

Not directly, and not reliably. Transcoding has always been allocated by Twitch rather than earned at a threshold, which is precisely why Enhanced Broadcasting matters — it puts the quality ladder in your hands instead of leaving it to chance.

Will streaming at a lower quality cost me viewers?

Far less than buffering will. A viewer who cannot watch smoothly leaves; a viewer watching clean 720p60 mostly does not notice. Reliability is worth more than sharpness at every size of channel, and especially at a small one.

Is my stream broken if the delay is 12 seconds?

No. That is normal latency mode working as designed. It only matters if you want chat to feel conversational, in which case switch to Low Latency.

Should I buy a second PC for streaming?

Almost certainly not, and not before you have tried a hardware encoder. Two-PC setups solve encoding lag, which a hardware encoder usually solves for free. They do nothing at all for network problems, which is what most stream trouble turns out to be.

Why does my stream drop out at the same time every night?

That pattern almost always points at your connection rather than your computer. Shared cable capacity is worst during evening peak hours, and scheduled backups and updates like to run at night too. Note the time it happens for a few streams — a repeating clock time is a strong clue on its own.

Check it rather than guess

Every recommendation on this page is worth less than one real measurement. The ViewerVitals playback test is free, needs no account, takes thirty seconds and tells you what a viewer is actually receiving right now — including whether Twitch is offering your channel any lower qualities at all.

Run it on your own channel, then send the link to a viewer who has complained and ask them to run it too. The difference between those two results is usually the whole answer.

Questions about the test itself — what the percentage means, why two runs disagree, what we store — are answered on the FAQ. This page is about your stream; that one is about the tool.