Question / Help AverMedia H727 PCIe micro stutters

[AccountingNightmare]

Hello all! I have an AverMedia H727 PCIe capture card I want to use for streaming, but I'm having trouble getting it to play nice with OBS. The capture card appears to be dropping frames when I use it in OBS. OBS itself does not report any dropped frames, nor does the recording FPS drop below 60. And yet the picture has micro stutters every now and then.

I'm using "Video Capture Device" as my source, and I've tried different "Use Buffering" settings to no avail. The capture card works fine when I use it with AverMedia's software. It also doesn't matter if I'm recording or streaming or not; just using "Preview Stream" will result in capture card frame drops.

My processor usage doesn't go above 30% during any of this.

I did a test stream so I could generate a log file:
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/6f686d3909ef07d84b76f755acdb22e7

I uploaded the resulting video file from the above capture to Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVNLfnq1WGQ

The footage stutters/drops frames a number of times in that video and it can be very hard to see, but the most noticeable are probably at 1:28 and 1:44. It probably looks pretty minor in this video but it can get a lot worse, with extremely noticeable stutters lasting multiple seconds.

Any idea what's causing this? I couldn't find anyone else having this problem with this card. I'm also using the latest drivers from their web site.

 

[AccountingNightmare]

An update: Some people reported that putting the card in a PCIe x16 slot can fix a lot of issues so I tried that to no avail. I turned off power management settings for PCIexpress and that also made no difference. Finally, I turned the recording bitrate way down to 1000 (I doubted this was the issue seeing as the stutters happened in preview mode as well but I tried it just in case) and still had the stutters.

However, I discovered I can use [DWM] Monitor Capture under Game Capture to capture the footage from the AverMedia program. Doing so results in a much smoother capture. A lot of people say Monitor Capture is just a bad idea overall so it's really odd that I have to do it to get better performance, but at least it's a functioning workaround.

 

[ZeroWalker]

Have the same card and same issues, however it doesn't matter the application, whether it be OBS or Avermedia.
It's extremely frustrating, have been troubleshooting for ages, i thought it was CPU usage, and then i thought perhaps the console was bad or the game dropped frames?
But if i connect to my TV it all looks fine when i test around.

Basically it can all be fine, then randomly it will drop a frame or two.
But then all of a sudden it can drop tons of frames for awhile and then go smooth again.

So it seems to fit your description, got a friend as well who also experienced this issue if i recall correctly.

 

[Zone Dymo]

I would like to also complain about this.
But its a weird issue, to me the footage looks great and smooth in Avermedia's Mediacenter.
But as soon as its captured via OBS or Xsplit, it just seems to take a dip in smoothness, no clue why and I cannot do anything about it, fiddled around with all the settings.

 

[sam686]

Try OBS-Studio (a separate free download) using buffer option in video capture?
Try OBS-Studio to capture at 59.94 fps? OBS classic don't support 59.94 stream/recording, and many video game consoles run at 59.94 / 29.97 fps.