Question / Help Desktop Lag & Lack of Video

nohaboa97

New Member
I have a newer computer with Windows 7 currently installed. I've been trying to get OBS to work for about a week now. I have figured out how to record my microphone audio as well as the in game audio without any issues. The problems occur whenever I try to record any kind of video. First of all, whenever I open OBS anything I do gets laggy (as in, if I try to move a file without OBS up, it goes instantly. With OBS it take several seconds). I even experience this problem while moving a window. The problem does not clear up whether I am previewing stream, recording (I have bad internet, so I use OBS to record videos instead), or just letting it sit open. The problem does go away whenever I exit OBS. Then there's the video issue. Whenever I try to record something with OBS, even if it's just my desktop and no matter what viewer I use, the video comes up black. I have tried all of the different kinds of sources but none of them respond to video. Whenever I stop the recording I still get an MP4 "video" that I can hear both ends of audio to, but so far they have all been black. I'm using AAC codec for my audio, so I don't know if that has anything to do with it. I'm just tired of searching the internet for answers that almost help me.

Thanks

PS: Log from most recent recording
https://gist.github.com/c132256dc4e60036cdfc
 

nohaboa97

New Member
I'm looking at my settings right now and under Encoding > Audio Encoding > Codec it says AAC. Also, I lowered the resolution downscale to it's lowest (3.00), have my FPS set to 30, and my x256 CPU Preset is now on Ultrafast and I still have no video. I do, however, get a white box in the middle of the screen now (but only when I use Game Capture). Is there something specific causing this? I do want to say that this got rid of the lag problem though, so thank you for that!
 

dodgepong

Administrator
Community Helper
Odd, for some reason I thought the log said MP3 but after reading it again, it says AAC. Ah, well.

What are you trying to capture? You really shouldn't be using Monitor capture, as it is the worst capture method, and is slowing you down a lot.
 

nohaboa97

New Member
I've tried capturing a number of things with more capturing options than just the monitor capture. I've tried to capture my desktop, Minecraft, Wizard101, steam, Skype, Google Chrome, and a folder (each with monitor capture, game capture, and window capture). For some weird reason any capture shows up with a white box and whenever I use game capture I can't see anything on the preview section while using "Preview Stream" or "Start Recording", but while using either of the other two I can see what I should be seeing.

This is the most recent capture log now:
https://gist.github.com/5a99e95230b78a9478ea

Also, I keep analyzing my log to see if I can find anything and it's still telling me I'm using monitor capture despite the fact that I have no Global Sources, one scene, and one game capture source. Any clue what's going on there?
 

nohaboa97

New Member
Just making sure this hasn't died... I still have not found a fix to the issue, but after doing several more recordings and using various playback resources, I noticed that Quicktime has a nifty little "Movie Inspector" that tells you various things about what you're watching. Two of the stats say "Movie FPS" and "Playing FPS". While the video was playing the Playing FPS section said 0, even though Movie FPS was at 30.32. Everything else looks correct. I'm not sure what it means when it says it's playing 0 frames because it obviously knows it was recorded at 30 frames. Any clue there?
 

Hopewithinchaos

Forum Moderator
Glancing at the specs, it seems you've actually got a somewhat lower tier Windows Vista rig. It shows at "Windows 6" which is vista, with a subpar 5 year old CPU and a pretty old GPU. I wouldn't doubt that part of your problem is the rig itself. Also, make sure your drivers, DirectX, etc. are all up to date, see if that helps.
 

nohaboa97

New Member
So I figure it's probably my computer that is causing all this problem because I've tried using camstudio, OBS, and other various video recording software and all of it fails in some way. So now I'm pulling from my funds set aside for just such a case to upgrade my computer. I'm not much a pro when it comes to the computer hardware, so I don't know whether it would be better to upgrade a certain component (and if so, what) or if I should just be looking into buying a better computer as a more cost effective option. Thoughts?
 
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