Audio dropouts

Peter Dordal

New Member
I've been using OSB Studio for a month to stream our church service via Facebook. Everything has gone well until 10/18, when we had, much of the time, more that one audio dropout per second (there were brief periods that sounded normal). Here's a picture of one second's worth of auido, showing three dropouts:
obs_dropouts.png

I usually record as well as stream; this was taken from the recording. The stream seemed to be more or less the same.

There is one webcam, at 720p, and one audio stream. We've been keeping the 720p resolution for streaming, 30 fps. The streaming bitrate is set at 1000 kbps; the actual bandwidth available is 2000 kbps. Streaming and recording is on a dedicated laptop.

My wild guess is that I'm looking at CPU overload, possibly due to the need for excessive compression due to the limited bandwidth. The following Sunday I decreased the recording/streaming resolution to around 600x800, and we had no noticeable dropouts. But then we had no noticeable dropouts before 10/18, either. The only explicit change I can think of is that I muted the local laptop mic, instead of simply turning down its sensitivity; it's hard to see how that could make a difference.

Any suggestions? The lower resolution is fine for us, but I'd like to know if we can expect more problems, or if this is a sound driver issue, or if I should set the resolution even lower.
 

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Peter Dordal

New Member
I think I finally figure it out: Patch Tuesday. The date we first had the problem, 10/17/2020, was the Sunday after Patch Tuesday on 10/13. Last Sunday, 1/17/2021, we also had a problem, again following Patch Tuesday on 1/12. This time we did not get the severe clipping; we just had blurry video, especially text (indicating video-encoding stress). I could see from taskmgr that Windows Module Installer worker was causing the CPU to be pinned at 100%. But at about six minutes into the service, WMI worker finished its work, and suddenly the text was much sharper.

The laptop is normally used only on Sundays, so on both occasions it was doing its best to install the latest Patch Tuesday updates. I guess what I have to do is boot up the laptop sometime between Patch Tuesday and the following Sunday, and let it get the updates out of -- no, in to -- its System.
 
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