15 to 20 seconds between selecting a scene in OBS and it showing in the Facebook stream?

[photoman]

I've installed a new computer this week for my church's Facebook streaming. New box, Windows 11 Pro, I7-13700 CPU, 32 GB memory, NVIDIA 4060, Intel Killer network hardware. All drivers and the OS are up to date. Wired network connection, WiFi is off. We use a big three's cellular internet service because we're rural and this is the only game in town that isn't just plain slow and over priced. An Internet speed test typically comes in 450 - 500 Mbps.

When I select a scene in OBS it can take 20 seconds before that newly selected scene shows in Facebook. I've compared the new computer's OBS settings against the old computer's settings and have seen nothing that raises a red flag. I've run the OBS Analyzer tool and all I get from that is informational comments. I've run Full HD video @ 60 FPS, the CPU barely sweats, one GPU is idle while another maxes out under 50% use, and the Facebook dashboard shows bit rates that I set in OBS. I have run test streams, watched the resulting test video, and it just looks good.

I've used OBS for a year but I am not a streaming guru and haven't had much cause to troubleshoot issues. Is a 20 second delay normal? I know there should be some delay between what I see in OBS and in Facebook but 20 seconds? Is there a problem here or is what I see "normal"? If this seems long, what should I be looking into?

Thanks. John

 

[AaronD]

Yep, that's about right for a round-trip server delay. It's not just echoing what it gets. It's processing it too, to make it work for as many viewers as possible on varying connection qualities, and buffering all of those different versions in case of a network hiccup, and all of that takes time.

Professional network broadcasts are often several minutes behind live, once they get through the Rube Goldberg machine of one studio after another, each of which does their little bit to it per the contracts, and finally get to your local TV station. So half a minute is really not bad at all for just the one middleman.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

We use a big three's cellular internet service because we're rural and this is the only game in town that isn't just plain slow and over priced. An Internet speed test typically comes in 450 - 500 Mbps.

1. Beware typical SpeedTest type reports on Download speed, which you don't really care about for streaming
2. Upload speed for streaming, and cellular ISP means a much greater variability in bandwidth, jitter, and latency. All of which have implications (not show stoppers, necessarily) for Streaming.. just be aware and take that connection into account

20 seconds, fairly typical. FaceBook has a detailed blog article of exactly what goes into receiving a H.264 stream, re-encoding (possibly into multiple resolutions/encoding formats), then distributing internally then distributing to end-users... and speed of light isn't that fast. So watching preview window over cellular ISP... will often be slower than alternatives (which sounds like you don't really have). When we went from DSL to fiber optic, latency went down. And listenign network and device will impact that lag/delay. Ex. watching our video stream on cell phone vs OBS Studio PC FB /Live/Producer window has a significant latency difference...
ALL to be expected

a delay of up to 1 minute would not be that far out of ordinary/normal (nothing to get upset about). During our last Sun AM service, latency from live to /Live/Producer preview on a fiber connection, was around 10 seconds. and I consider that very good.
That delay can and will vary week-to-week... not by a lot typically, but the variance will be there if you check carefully/attentively. On cellular, the variance will be typically larger

When I select a scene in OBS it can take 20 seconds before that newly selected scene shows in Facebook. I've compared the new computer's OBS settings against the old computer's settings and have seen nothing that raises a red flag. I've run the OBS Analyzer tool and all I get from that is informational comments. I've run Full HD video @ 60 FPS, the CPU barely sweats, one GPU is idle while another maxes out under 50% use, and the Facebook dashboard shows bit rates that I set in OBS. I have run test streams, watched the resulting test video, and it just looks good.

My PTZ camera feeds OBS Studio at 60fps... but we only stream at 30FPS... So... are you sending a 60FPS stream for a House of Worship livestream?
is anyone watching, and then adjusting FPS for slo-motion? presuming no, then you are wasting video quality by sending extra frames. For a given bitrate, better quality/1/2 the frames will look nicer for normal north american 30FPS viewing. I suppose in part it would depend on worship/liturgical style, but in general the vast majority of HoW streams don't benefit (opposite, actually) with 60fps streams