The bitrate keeps bouncing or the picture stutters

Your feed reaches the dashboard, but the bitrate won’t sit still: the picture judders and automatic scene switching drops in and out of the low-bitrate scene every few seconds.

Check this first

1. Watch the bitrate while you’re moving, not standing still. Nine times out of ten the problem isn’t the platform: it’s the coverage wherever you happen to be walking.
2. Compare the bitrate you set in the encoder with your key’s cap. If you broadcast right at the cap, any pothole drops you under it. See Plan limits.
3. Look at the RTT as well. With high latency, automatic scene switching drops you down a scene even when the bitrate looks fine. On the dashboard, next to your Current bitrate, you get the RTT and packet loss with their traffic light: on red (loss at 5% or more, or RTT at 400 ms or more), lower the bitrate before touching anything else. See Your home dashboard.
4. If your feed goes into a Cloud OBS, remember that the output towards your platform has its own cap depending on the plan. Raising the incoming bitrate doesn’t raise the outgoing one.

Pick a bitrate that holds

• Don’t set your plan’s maximum as a fixed value. The bitrate that survives the worst stretch of your route is the one that gives you a stable stream.
• If your app lets you set a bitrate range instead of a fixed value, use it: it will come down on its own in the bad stretches instead of cutting out.
• SRT and SRTLA take coverage potholes better than RTMP, and SRTLA also spreads the feed across several connections. See Choosing a protocol.
• Change one thing at a time and run a short test. Dropping bitrate and resolution together doesn’t tell you which of the two was the problem.

Tune automatic scene switching

These are the values a server is born with. Adjust them according to what you see:

Setting	Default	Raise it if…	Lower it if…
Retries before switching	5	It jumps scene over one-second dips	It takes too long to go to BRB
Low bitrate (kbps)	900	It never notices you’re struggling	It goes to the low-bitrate scene while you’re fine
High RTT (ms)	1500	It fires on latency spikes that are normal on the move	It doesn’t react when latency goes through the roof
No signal (kbps)	450	It’s slow to put up the offline scene when you drop	It puts up the offline scene while the feed is still alive

Note

In No signal (kbps), the value 0 means “only when the bitrate hits zero”. That’s the most conservative setting: it won’t switch to the offline scene until nothing at all is coming in.

The scenes have to exist

Automatic scene switching can only go to scenes that exist with that exact name. If you renamed a scene in OBS and didn’t change it in the dashboard, it has nowhere to go and it will look like it’s broken.

If you’re about to touch thresholds, start with Recommended thresholds and with How it works.

Still not working

Open a ticket from Support in the dashboard or write to support@enhancedirl.com. Tell us the plan, the encoder, the protocol, the bitrate you configured and roughly what time it happened to you: with that we can look at what arrived.

If there are also stretches where nothing at all arrives, follow My feed isn’t arriving.