Question / Help Client players experience stream interruptions every 2 mins

[jahenderson777]

Hi Jim and the other wonderful OBS developers,

I recently streamed a big event in our local Cathedral with OBS. I was switching between two manned cameras and a webcam. Everything worked really well apart from one issue which never showed up in any of our test runs or smaller events.

The issue is that the flash players on client machines would get fairly regular interruptions to their streams, about every 2 to 5 minutes.

There were definitely no issues with upload bandwidth (I was broadcasting at 500Kbps on a fibre broadband line which had capacity for 20Mbps upload). There were only green lights in OBS and CPU usage was under 70% with no warnings from OBS.

Even clients that had super-fast broadband speeds (50Mbps) were still experiencing the interruptions.

Since the interruptions seemed to start happening only when we started to have a very high number of watchers, i.e. just before our big event was about to start. This makes me think the issue is that our streaming provider (streamingvideoprovider.com) could not handle the high traffic. Also the interruptions seemed to happen when there was a spike in the bitrate, like when there was a lot of movement on a camera.

I tried changing every setting and mode I could think of in OBS in an attempt to get a consistent stream on the clients but nothing helped.

So my question is: Is there any setting in OBS that may have caused the interruptions on the client flash players? despite ample bandwidth on both the uploading from OBS and the clients downloads?

Thank you in advance for your responses,

Jonathan

 

[Sapiens]

Re: Client players experience stream interruptions every 2 m

Also the interruptions seemed to happen when there was a spike in the bitrate, like when there was a lot of movement on a camera.

You weren't using CBR?

 

[dodgepong]

Re: Client players experience stream interruptions every 2 m

Can you post your log? That would be helpful to identifying things that could cause poor performance on the side of viewers. viewtopic.php?f=6&t=97

 

[FerretBomb]

Re: Client players experience stream interruptions every 2 m

If your replication/streaming service can't handle the load, there's little you can really do about that other than find one that can.

 

[dodgepong]

Re: Client players experience stream interruptions every 2 m

Well, there are some standard things to check: streaming at a reasonable bit rate, using CBR, etc.

 

[FerretBomb]

Re: Client players experience stream interruptions every 2 m

Said he was streaming at 500kbps in the first post, which is... next to nothing. Though yeah, CBR could be a good one if it's the spiking that's causing the overload. Then again, that could just make the whole thing fall over, with the higher constant rate.

@jahenderson777, if that was a typo and you're streaming at 5000kbps, drop your rate a good bit. :)

 

[Boildown]

Re: Client players experience stream interruptions every 2 m

Said he was streaming at 500kbps in the first post, which is... next to nothing. Though yeah, CBR could be a good one if it's the spiking that's causing the overload. Then again, that could just make the whole thing fall over, with the higher constant rate.

@jahenderson777, if that was a typo and you're streaming at 5000kbps, drop your rate a good bit. :)

But he's not streaming a 720p60 game, he's streaming a video camera, and in that world 480i is acceptable, and 480p would be close to HD. So in that use case, the bitrate may be fine.

What we need is his log file. And also a list of stream requirements from his CDN.