Technical
H.264 / AVC
The universal video codec every platform and device accepts. When in doubt, you're streaming H.264.
Related terms
- HEVC / H.265
A more efficient successor to H.264 — better quality per bit. Supported for YouTube streaming and some Twitch Enhanced Broadcasting setups.
- AV1
The newest open codec: dramatically better compression, no licensing fees. RTX 40-series+ GPUs encode it; platform support is growing fast.
- Encoder
The software or hardware that compresses your video to send it online. 'x264' uses your CPU; 'NVENC' uses an NVIDIA GPU.