How to screen share in 1080p
Maintaining a smooth 1080p60 can be tricky, but there are variety of options to achieve the desired results
Last updated
Maintaining a smooth 1080p60 can be tricky, but there are variety of options to achieve the desired results
Last updated
To maintain a high quality 1080p60 stream, especially if screen sharing game content, you'll want at least 12-mbps to 20-mbps of upload bandwidth.
You'll also need a pristine Internet connection to maintain a low-latency and smooth result; you can test your connect at https://vdo.ninja/speedtest. High packet loss will limit the possibility of maintaining both low-latency and high quality video; in such a case, you'll need to prioritize one over the other.
https://vdo.ninja/?push=SOMESTREAMID&screenshare&quality=0
Alias: https://vdo.ninja/?push=SOMESTREAMID&ss&q=0
Copy one of the two links above and change SOMESTREAMID into a different name. The name picked just needs to be a unique alphanumeric value is not already in active use.
You can also add &fps=60 to the link, to attempt to force 60-fps, but the default with &quality=0 is already 60-fps.
https://vdo.ninja/?view=SOMESTREAMID&videobitrate=10000&scale=100
Alias: https://vdo.ninja/?v=SOMESTREAMID&vb=10000&scale=100
Copy one of the two links above and change SOMESTREAMID in the same name as you did for the Push Link. You can change &videobitrate=10000 to another value if you want to change the bitrate.
| Parameter | Explanation |
|---|---|
If you have problems maintaining good video quality, you can add &codec=av1 to the viewer's side to see if it makes the screen share any better. AV1 is a newer codec with better compression efficiency. H264, VP8, and VP9 are other options to try.
Screen sharing at 60-fps is the default, but sometimes this does not always work.
You can try forcing 60-fps by adding &fps=60 to the source (sender-side link). If you get an error, you can try using &maxframerate=60 instead.
Try disabling variable refresh rates, such as those offered by Freesync or G-Sync.
You may not achieve 60 FPS depending on your hardware, the browser or the type of screen share you use or the viewer uses. Sharing a chrome window or tab is the best way to get 60 FPS consistently. If you share your screen or any other window you might only get 30 FPS. Screen sharing a "Window" with Chrome (chromium) tends max out at ~42 FPS, while screen sharing via "Entire Screen" tends to make out close to 59 FPS.
You can use the &contenthint parameter in some browsers to suggestion whether to prioritize frame rate or resolution. Sometimes getting both high isn't possible.
&contenthint &screensharecontenthint
These parameters take detail or motion as a value, based on whether you value resolution or frame rate.
For an e-sports optimized version of VDO.Ninja, with many of the settings pre-configured for 1080p60 streaming, check out Versus.cam.
It's free and uses VDO.Ninja, while adding a nifty management dashboard for monitoring inbound game streams. The management page makes it easy for you to remotely change resolution and bitrate without modifying the URL while live.
Using Entire Screen or Chrome Tab capture, instead of Window capture, can increase the frame rate when screen sharing via the Chrome browser:
For some reason, when screen sharing a Window with Chrome, the frame rate is limited to around 42-fps.
If you're needing exactly 60-fps, or are still having issues, continue on for more options:
For the best screen-share results, you can use OBS Studio to capture the gameplay, and bring that into VDO.Ninja via the OBS Virtual Camera. This is an annoying added step, but OBS does a better job at capturing gameplay than the browser does.
Frame rates should be close to 60-fps in this mode, but may vary still vary a bit.
An alternative to using the Virtual Camera and browser though is to use a feature in OBS to publish directly to VDO.Ninja.
This is an experimental feature currently and may require a special version of OBS at the moment to work, but it might be included in OBS by default with the release of OBS v30 or v31.
Check out a demo YouTube video of how to accomplish this: Publishing from OBS directly to VDO.Ninja
This mode should give OBS Studio control over frame rate and bitrate, so with a good connection it should be possible to lock in a solid 60-fps.
A fairly experimental, yet very exciting option to streaming over VDO.Ninja is the use of &chunked mode.
Chunked mode sends the video and audio over the data-channels, as if streaming via RTMP, rather than via the browser's default method of transmitting video. This provides VDO.Ninja more low-level control over the video, frame rate, and buffering.
This mode is more resistant to packet loss and will not vary the frame rate / resolution during the stream. It does however mean that if you are connection hiccups or is having problems, it will not be able to react and dynamically reduce quality to continuing streaming.
Chunked mode also uses more CPU than the normal mode and so may not respond well to computers that are maxing out their CPU.
To ensure reliability as a result, a buffer is needed; upwards of 1-second buffer delay may be needed to ensure reliable performance.
To screen share using chunked mode, the following is a sample sender-side link:
A unique part of chunked mode is that the sender sets the bitrate via &chunked=N, where N is the kilobits per second of the video.
Viewing the stream is the same as normal:
&buffer can be used to specify the default buffer delay, which accepts a value in milliseconds. The default may change depending on version of VDO.Ninja, but it's roughly between 500ms and 1s in most cases. Going below 200ms is not advised unless using it over a LAN.
Please provide request/feedback if you use &chunked mode, as it's experimental and still being improved upon.
You can explore using &meshcast and &relay as options as well. While it is a server-based method of sending video, it can sometimes allow for 1080p video where network conditions are poor.
Meshcast in particular can help stream 1080p video to multiple viewers at once, if the sender does not have a computer and network capable of doing so on their own.
Meshcast may not always be able to achieve 20-mbps speeds, sometimes only 2 to 3-mbps is possible, so it may not always be the best option for those streaming e-sports.
Push Link
sets a unique stream ID
selects screen sharing instead of webcam
sets the resolution to 1920x1080p
View Link
selects the stream ID
sets the video bitrate to 10,000-kbps, you can change the value if you want
tells the system to not scale down the screen share