An encoder error occurred while streaming. Cannot identify the cause.

[KawaXIV]

I recently acquired a 7900 xt about a week ago and for a time it was working just fine while using the AMD HW H.264 (AVC) encoder option.

I don't think AMD's encoder is particularly flattering to the footage at the lower bitrates that Twitch requests, so I decided I wanted to give quicksync a try, which I believed would be supported by my i7 10700k. I did not see any QSV option in the drop down list of video encoders in OBS Studio settings, so I tried going to the bios and making sure integrated graphics were enabled. At the start of all of this, it was on "auto" so I figured the decision being made by "auto" was to disable it while a discrete GPU was installed, so I flipped it to Enable and expected to see QSV show up. It did not, so I rebooted the PC and set it first to disable, thinking that's how it was, and then my problem emerged. I have since set it back to "auto" and decided to shelf the idea of using QSV and go back to the AMD HW encoder. I did try uninstalling the GPU driver completely with DDU and then reinstalling it, but the original driver installation was only like a week old anyway, and this changed nothing. So at this point everything should be how it was when OBS Studio and my 7900 xt were in working order.

Now, when I try to start streaming or start recording, I get "An encoder error occurred while streaming." almost immediately. In some cases it's the instant I hit the button. In some cases it happens within like 10-30 seconds, but it's always pretty quickly.

Ever since this began happening, the only solution has been to launch OBS, kill the process from the task manager to get OBS to prompt me to use safe mode, and then relaunch OBS in safe mode and start streaming. I will attach 2 log files. The earlier one is OBS failing when I'm clicking Start Streaming, and the second one is OBS seemingly succeeding in Safe Mode.

If anybody can please help identify the cause of my issues that would be greatly appreciated, because I don't understand the log file well enough to determine what is wrong here.

 

[KawaXIV]

Since posting the thread, I discovered the Analyzer tool at https://obsproject.com/tools/analyzer?log_url=https://obsproject.com/logs/A3ONUABXudDBj0Lu#entry_2 and went ahead and uploaded my logs.

I can't do anything about Wi-Fi streaming as I've been troubleshooting and failing to resolve an ethernet related problem for over a year, so that's on the backburner, and the Windows 10 1809 issue is pretty much down to Reddit convincing me years ago in their (and to be fair, my) outrage over their handling of updates and settings reversions and advertising etc in Win 10 that I should be using an LTSC version, so I have no automatic update path and would require a fresh install to change my OS in any way, which is burdened under the weight of years of installations and configurations and media that the challenge of determining where hundreds of games store their saves and backing up as much as I can to avoid excessive downloading has kept me kicking this particular can down the road endlessly. I'm also somewhat undecided on what my future OS will be.

In case you're worried about me in the meantime while I make my decision, LTSC 1809 still has security updates. For example, according to my Windows Update history, an update was installed recently on 11 June 2024.

However, I went through all my scenes and cleaned up the capture interference warnings and most notably, "Third-Party Plugins (1)" "win-capture-audio" which I believe I might have installed at one point thinking I needed it to exclude discord audio from stream if I needed to, and it didn't work and I had long since forgotten I installed it. I did see advice to remove third party plugins while searching my issues prior to the thread, but all the responses framed this advise as uninstalling them from the Windows Control Panel add/remove programs, which I scanned but did not see this plugin because as far as I'm aware, it was not installed as a program but simply by dropping a DLL in the OBS plugins folder.

Since deleting this plugin, and cleaning up the capture interferences I was able to launch OBS outside of safe mode and get it running without an encoding error. I definitely did not need multiple game capture sources so that was easy enough to fix and just the result of the detritus of this OBS profile being many years old, and I guess if I want to show something on the desktop quickly I shouldn't be toggling a display capture source within my scene but rather switching scenes altogether out of the one that has my game capture and into one that has only a display capture, so I'll just do that going forward.

So since some combination of the above actions *seems* to have resolved the issue, I think I'm OK without support, but if it's okay to leave the thread up I'd like to hear any comments about any problems or potential problems I may have anyway. This OBS profile has very likely existed since around 2017 or something and a lot of my settings choices are long since separated from whatever rationale or advice sourced them, so I don't even know what a lot of the options mean any more.

 

[KawaXIV]

Not solved. Still getting the error from time to time. Have not changed anything beyond the updates in the prior comment and still hitting encoding error from time to time. Happening in Safe Mode now too.

 

[KawaXIV]

Some time at the end of June I completely reinstalled OBS with fresh settings, stayed in simple mode, and only imported scenes and sources, which resolved the issue for several weeks. I had not seen "An encoder error occurred while streaming." for weeks, until suddenly tonight I did again.