Question / Help Audio Stuttering whilst Streaming

[ObiWanKenOBS]

Hi,

I'm a bit new to this and am having problems with stuttering audio whilst streaming from OBS.

My source is a gaming stream going into OBS that's being streamed to me from a friend in Germany, then I'm adding commentary and streaming out to Twitch.

Often whilst streaming, the audio I get from him is fine for the first few hours but then starts breaking up and gets progressively more stuttery and jumpy until it's completely garbled. After it has begun, this deterioration happens over only a few minutes.

The start of the audio breaking up is often (but not always) accompanied by "adding X milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now Y milliseconds" etc messages.

The issue seems to be resolved by reconnecting the source but this doesn't explain why the problem is happening in the first place.


I'm running OBS v0.16.2 on Linux (system info below).

OS : Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon 64-bit
Cinnamon Version : 3.2.7
Linux Kernel 4.4.0-53-generic
Processor : Intel© Xeon© CPU E5-2630 v3 © 2.40GHz × 8
Memory : 31.3 GiB
Hard Drive : 82.3 GiB
Graphics Card : NVIDIA Corporation GM204 [GeForce GTX 970]
Graphics Card : ASPEED Technology, Inc. ASPEED Graphics Family


Any ideas about what might be causing the problem and is anyone else experiencing the same?

Thanks.

 

[Therealbeef]

@ObiWanKenOBS
What is the resolution of the feed coming in? Also, are you receiving multiple feeds?
Please see this clip, does your audio stutter like this? https://clips.twitch.tv/KathishGoldenHummingbirdMau5

What I found to be the problem was I was getting too many high resolution feeds into OBS at one time. It was processing 3 separate 1080p feeds which were being shrunk down. The solution was to have the originating feeds lower their resolution a bit (I think to 720 worked). Here it is working later in the stream - https://clips.twitch.tv/SeductiveScrumptiousSpaghettiPeanutButterJellyTime

 

[ObiWanKenOBS]

@Therealbeef Thanks for your reply. Yes, that does sound similar (possibly not identical, but similar) to the problem we were having. Doesn't sound like you were having audio problems with the background music though from what I can just hear when there's no talking. Was the music on the stream added at the same location (on the same machine) as your mic?

I'm receiving a single 1080p 25 stream being sent at 4mbps. I wouldn't have thought that my computer would struggle with that but I guess I could try knocking it down to 720 and see what happens.

Anyone else have any experience with this audio issue?

 

[Therealbeef]

@ObiWanKenOBS
All of the audio is being sent through a single feed with the bottom left video stream, so the entire thing has the same audio issue. Nothing is being added local.
Each piece of the video on that screen is coming from different feeds which are then synced up. When I knocked the resolution down, the audio fixed itself.

Good luck! Please let me know what you find out. If you need another system to test things with just let me know and I can try things over here too.

 

[forget_it]

Hi all so depending on what you are using this can be so frustrating... I have a solution for those of you using avermedia capture cards and obs together and perhaps this applies to other capture cards..if your audio just seems to stutter and no matter what you try you cannot sort it....[THE SOLUTION] in OBS your capture card source should be a video capture device. Click the settings cog in the mixer next to your video capture device and change [capture audio only] to [output to desktop audio] and then enable desktop audio. Make sure all your settings in obs match your capture card settings.

Things to note video bitrate in obs is kbps, avermedia stream engine video bitrate is mbps. So 3.0 mbps in avermedia = 3000 kbps in obs so on so forth.

Keep sample rate 44.1khz.

Audio Bitrate can be 128 or 256 just make sure everything in obs matches up with your capture card stream engine settings