Hi, like many others, I'm a newbie to the world of streaming, thanks to the new world we live in now, so please bear with my greenness.
First, little background - I'm trying to stream my wife's dance classes from her home studio via Facebook Live, and initially we were simply trying to use the Go Live portal on FB, but while the picture was great using her Surface Book's camera, the audio (wireless mic and ipod going into a USB mixer) started great but got increasingly choppy every time at about 7 minutes into a 45min class. The audio is clean if we use a cell phone, but its quality through the phone microphone is not great.
I have a working theory that maybe we were feeding too high a bitrate of audio to FB, and after 7min FB couldn't catch up with the incoming audio data anymore, resulting in increasing drops. Not finding any way to adjust the bitrate down with the FB Live portal, I figured I'd give a third-party application a shot, and this is where OBS comes in. I ran some test streams last night from OBS (trying to match the FB recommended settings) to FB, but the preview in the FB Live was horrible, low resolution, freezing, and running many seconds behind what we saw on the OBS screen. Furthermore, I couldn't get the stream to pop up on her FB page during the recording at all! That seemed like a deal breaker, so I gave up. However, she pointed out some 30 minutes later that my test now shows up on her page, and in fact the quality seemed quite good!
Is it normal for the FB preview to be so bad and so much delayed? That makes it impossible for her to monitor herself using the preview window, and with it she loses the ability to monitor the incoming comments, as they appear in the right hand panel of the window (unless you can get the comments to display in OBS?). And shouldn't I expect to see the stream appear on her FB page very shortly after it starts? Surely not several minutes later? When we used the FB Go Live function the stream pops up on her page some seconds afterwards (I monitor it on a phone upstairs), and the preview quality she sees is very good and minimally delayed. If the audio didn't go to smithereens after 7min, we'd be happy using FB Go Live.
I guess my question is does this sound like normal behavior that you just have to come to terms with when streaming to FB from OBS, or is there something wrong with my settings somewhere? Again, ultimately the quality of the OBS test clip was very good, once it appeared minutes later, so the stream settings seemed pretty good, but during the live test everything seemed to be going wrong. And you can't exactly do a live class at noon, if the clip will only become visible at 12:20.
Sorry for the long post, but any suggestions would be helpful.
Kind regards and stay safe,
Janne
First, little background - I'm trying to stream my wife's dance classes from her home studio via Facebook Live, and initially we were simply trying to use the Go Live portal on FB, but while the picture was great using her Surface Book's camera, the audio (wireless mic and ipod going into a USB mixer) started great but got increasingly choppy every time at about 7 minutes into a 45min class. The audio is clean if we use a cell phone, but its quality through the phone microphone is not great.
I have a working theory that maybe we were feeding too high a bitrate of audio to FB, and after 7min FB couldn't catch up with the incoming audio data anymore, resulting in increasing drops. Not finding any way to adjust the bitrate down with the FB Live portal, I figured I'd give a third-party application a shot, and this is where OBS comes in. I ran some test streams last night from OBS (trying to match the FB recommended settings) to FB, but the preview in the FB Live was horrible, low resolution, freezing, and running many seconds behind what we saw on the OBS screen. Furthermore, I couldn't get the stream to pop up on her FB page during the recording at all! That seemed like a deal breaker, so I gave up. However, she pointed out some 30 minutes later that my test now shows up on her page, and in fact the quality seemed quite good!
Is it normal for the FB preview to be so bad and so much delayed? That makes it impossible for her to monitor herself using the preview window, and with it she loses the ability to monitor the incoming comments, as they appear in the right hand panel of the window (unless you can get the comments to display in OBS?). And shouldn't I expect to see the stream appear on her FB page very shortly after it starts? Surely not several minutes later? When we used the FB Go Live function the stream pops up on her page some seconds afterwards (I monitor it on a phone upstairs), and the preview quality she sees is very good and minimally delayed. If the audio didn't go to smithereens after 7min, we'd be happy using FB Go Live.
I guess my question is does this sound like normal behavior that you just have to come to terms with when streaming to FB from OBS, or is there something wrong with my settings somewhere? Again, ultimately the quality of the OBS test clip was very good, once it appeared minutes later, so the stream settings seemed pretty good, but during the live test everything seemed to be going wrong. And you can't exactly do a live class at noon, if the clip will only become visible at 12:20.
Sorry for the long post, but any suggestions would be helpful.
Kind regards and stay safe,
Janne