Can OBS detect when a stream to YouTube has dropped?

C

coordinatezero

New Member
I use Starlink and every few days around 3-4am UTC the connection gets reset by Starlink (I have no control over this). This causes my stream to drop, but OBS sits there as if nothing were amiss. Is there any way to get OBS to notice this and either stop, or retry? Thanks!
 
Go into settings, then advanced, scroll down to "automatically reconnect" and make sure it is ticked (enabled). You can increase the retries but the default should work fine if Starlink reset doesn't take too long otherwise just double it to cover few minutes till Starlink is back online.
 
Adding to Babs' answer: auto-reconnect only kicks in if OBS actually sees the RTMP connection fail. With a Starlink reset the TCP connection can be left half-open, so OBS keeps writing into a dead socket and thinks it's fine, which sounds like what you're seeing. Two things that help:
  • In YouTube Studio, use a persistent stream key and turn auto-stop off for the broadcast. That way, when OBS does reconnect, it lands on the same broadcast and URL rather than YouTube having ended it.
  • Detect it from outside OBS: a small script that checks the broadcast's status via the YouTube Live Streaming API (or OBS's websocket output stats: if bytes sent stop increasing, stop and restart the stream). That catches the "OBS says live, viewers see nothing" case.
Full disclosure: I'm a developer who works on live video ingest and I'm researching exactly this kind of silent failure for people on flaky links, with an eye to building an external monitor/auto-recovery service. Not selling anything. Is this a 24/7 stream? If you'd be up for a quick chat about how often it bites you and what it costs, I'd really appreciate it. Feel free to DM me.
Liam
 
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