AV1 Live streaming on youtube not working. Please Help.

NeverdieAudio

New Member
Hello, another user with the same issue here. RTX3070Ti, 16000kbps AV1 to YT live. Tried several settings, changes,different bitrates, but it just seemingly happens at random. Some streams will run 8 hours fine with AV1, but then (usually on weekends from my experience) I get drops to ~200 kbps that just get stuck and I need to stop/start stream again. That is usually enough to fix, but still makes AV1 streaming unbearable.
Ive been trying it since OBS 29 through all the patches, but no changes. Nvenc h264 is absolutely fine and it never happens to me. Everytime I get an upload hiccup, it just recovers and runs fine.
Maybe it seems to me like AV1 cannot recover from a small upload drop and needs to be restarted manually? I dont know. But it sucks that I cannot properly utilize the biggest advantage of YT streaming...
Just to clarify, I have a 4070Ti, made a mistake in the original post.
 

rAIVOkone

New Member
This is driving me nuts. HEVC streaming also drops a significant amount of frames due to a network issue but recovers from the drop. NVENC doesn´t have any issues at all.
 

Khuntza

New Member
Just wanted to add my +1 to this issue. Streaming to YouTube with a 4070ti, AV1 at 12000kbps-18000kbps. Sometimes a 5hr stream works fine. Tonight I had it drop to <200kbps about a dozen times and I had to stop/restart the stream in OBS.
I'm going to switch back to NVEC x.264 for now.
 

KnutH

New Member
Same issue here. Just recently got a RTX 4070 gpu in order to be able to stream AV1. I have a stable internet connection with low latency, 30 mbps upload speed. Been streaming for years with H.264 with no similar issues.

Bitrate set to CBR, 2 keyframes, max 2 b-frames, p6, high quality, two pass(quarter res),look ahead off, psycho on.
OBS ver 30. Windows 10.

I stream sports to YouTube. Broadcast last for aprox 2 hours. First game I streamed it was 1080p50fps with 12mbps bitrate. Bitrate dropped to 160kbps after 20 mins or so. No obvious issues with the internet connection. Nothing in OBS logs. Tried a speed test from different devices/pc. Tried different things, but nothing I could do to fix the issue. According to YouTube studio the bitrate sent to YT is too low, indicating that the problem is not on YT’s end. I stopped and started the stream and it’s all good.

This Sunday I streamed a new match. Tried 1440p50fps with 18mbps bitrate. Worked like a charm for almost 100 minutes. Same issue as previous broadcast. Had to stop and start stream to get it going again.

Have a friend streaming same sports, but in a different town. He has not had any issues. More or less same settings as I. He uses an other ISP.

I will consider streaming via my 5G mobile router next game to see if this is more stable. I think I will get even higher upload speed and low latency. If this works I will switch back to the cabled ISP next game to see if issue is back.
 

Arktix

New Member
Just chiming in here in March 2024 to say that I'm experiencing the same issue trying to stream AV1 to YouTube with OBS. Randomly drops to very low bitrate and requires restart of stream in OBS. I will be reverting back to HEVC or H.264 until this apparent AV1 issue gets resolved. From what I'm seeing, I think it's either an issue with NVIDIA hardware/firmware (more likely firmware), OBS implementation of AV1, or YouTube's ingest of AV1. Difficult to pin down which one, but it's clear steaming AV1 to YouTube with OBS has issues.
 

NeverdieAudio

New Member
Hello, I have also switched to HEVC (h265) for the time being and it works absolutely fine. With every hiccup it just reconnects on its own without any issues. So if you are still struggling with AV1, just switch to HEVC if you can.
But yeah, maybe it really is just an Nvidia issue...
 

Arktix

New Member
Hello, I have also switched to HEVC (h265) for the time being and it works absolutely fine. With every hiccup it just reconnects on its own without any issues. So if you are still struggling with AV1, just switch to HEVC if you can.
But yeah, maybe it really is just an Nvidia issue...
Thanks. Good to know you've seen the same issue and have resolved it by switching to HEVC. I switched back to HEVC as well and everything has been fine. Hopefully AV1 encoding gets fixed at some point. I do see a bit better quality from the AV1 encode.
 
Top