Disconnecting to Facebook Live

[Mwright05]

I broadcast our church service to Facebook Live and constantly have issues with it disconnecting and reconnecting. I believe the problem is at the computer with what I'm seeing. The system is receiving both audio and video just fine and records perfectly. It is hard wired to the internet and our speed is supposed to be 10mbps, I'll be checking this, so sending the signal out should not be a problem. I assume that Facebook does not have an issue with receiving the signal. I think there has only been one Sunday in the months we've been doing this that we streamed with no issues. I think this only leaves the computer hardware/software and its ability to process and send the signal out. I also watch the broadcast on my phone so I can see what others are seeing. What I've noticed most Sundays is that during the service OBS will start dropping frames which starts to cause freezing and skips in the stream. If this gets too bad the stream will disconnect and then it takes 5 to 10 seconds for it to automatically reconnect and keep going. Most Sundays it will do this once or twice and we'll lose maybe 30 seconds of the service. Some Sundays it does this multiple times. I also watch the CPU usage which shows up on OBS and it is usually in the 20's to 30's, sometimes in the 40's or 50's so it does not appear to be chugging on something else in the background.

The laptop we are using is a Lenova AMD ryzen3 3200U 8MB RAM. The video input is from an Aver PZT camera and audio is a Yamaha 24 channel mixer.

Is the laptop strong enough? Could it be something in the OBS settings?

 

[crocket99]

I also stream of church services to Facebook Live and had different issues with 3 sessions this weekend, 2 on Saturday and 1 on Sunday am. My issue is that everything works perfectly in preview but when I choose to go live, it eventually says there's an issue and it won't. I'm using Brave with an old Canon t5i (thats the best we can do...) with Canon's EOS webcam software and a Zoom H4n pro for the audio. The only way I've avoided total disaster is to do a complete reboot and then it has worked. I have observed similar spikes with the CPU usage when it won't go into live mode. I nomally capture the video locally (just in case) but turning that on or off has not had an impact on the issue.

I'm using a Thinkpad with an I5 and 16GB of ram. I wish there was someway to trouble shoot this...

I will do some testing and maybe what I find out may help you....

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

real-time video encoding (what OBS is doing) is computationally VERY demanding
For House Of Worship live streaming, I had disconnect issues last summer due initially in part due to slow DSL line (dropped to only 5Mb/s upload) and I'm suspecting corporate security software on a engineering workstation laptop. I tried a fresh OS install on a gaming laptop with an i5-6300HQ (2.3GHz 4c/4t circa Fall 2015), 8GB RAM, SATA SSD, Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M and it came close to working but chocked.. I suspect with what I know now about OBS, I'd be able to get it to work.. barely. This is with a lot of knowledge on optimizing the operating system (not the joke advice found in most places online nowadays)

Once we got a new business class PC (avoid the junk-ware installs on most consumer systems), no more issues. This is an 8-core/16-thread desktop CPU, and a nVideo GTX 1660 Super GPU (for Turing NVENC, only wanted a GTX 1650 Super, but the PC model came with higher level GPU.. oh well)

What neither of you mention is doing overall hardware resource monitoring (Task Manager-> Performance Tab and/or Resource Monitor). How busy OBS is, isn't a really all that relevant. How busy is the system? Once you get into the 90% range, system instability can occur, especially something that is jitter sensitive like video encoding

An ultra-low power laptop (built for battery life) is a poor fit for live streaming. That AMD 3200U is a dual-core/4-thread CPU.. you need to be real attentive to lowering hardware resource demands by OBS for such a CPU. I'm not surprised you are having problems. To have a chance, you'll need someone who actually knows what they are doing, optimize Windows OS to minimize resource demands (turn off eye-candy, background processes/services, etc)

an OS Reboot is a classic way to clean out RAM, and indicates you have either -problem apps installed (memory leaks), or aren't closing app that should be, or a machine that is simply under-powered for what you are trying to do

 

[crocket99]

While your comment may apply in the first post. Respectfully, I doubt my setup is overtaxed. Once it goes live, it works well for the longest session we've had, approx 1 and 1/2 hrs. I've used the exact same setup for live streaming a 3+ hr session to youtube with no issues at all.

A 2018 circa business class thinkpad can easily stream 720p.

Facebook Live has always had some wonkyness with things working this way 1 week and then the next week, the feature is missing.

This behavior has only started within the last 2 weeks. I did some more testing and actually saw the window go LIVE for about 2 secs, then we get the Mars Attacks Sign of the Donut and after about 30 secs, Facebook Live reports there is a problem. This time I got it to work on the 2nd try without a reboot, just restarted the Facebook live side of the equation.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

A 2018 circa business class thinkpad can easily stream 720p.

You failed to mention the age or exact version of your i5 in your original post, which to me meant it could have been quite old, to current, and that can make a huge difference. In this area.. being specific matters.

a comment of "A 2018 circa business class thinkpad can easily stream 720p" is at best only sometimes/maybe true, and too generic. There are and were multiple models with different performance characteristics/levels and your comment is absolutely NOT true for all models. That your laptop is a not-so-old model, with a still unspecified version of an i5 that that is sufficient for 720p streaming - good for you.

Realize you are piggybacking on someone else's thread. You shouldn't assume my responses were directed at you, unless explicit reference to something specific, like the reboot

And I could easily take a non-gaming livestream scenario with a current i5 and bring it to its knees with some not unreasonable OBS settings. Anyone who understands how real-time video encoding works, and what OBS can do, knows that even the latest, top-level PCs (much less wimpy laptops) can be overloaded.

Facebook Live has always had some wonkyness with things working this way 1 week and then the next week, the feature is missing.

This behavior has only started within the last 2 weeks.

Yes, FB Live had some significant changes later in Dec (or was it Nov??) lasting until Jan/Feb but seem to have settled down more recently. However, your comments could easily be a sign of a local PC issue vs anything to do with FB... no way from this context to be certain either way

For reference, I don't EVER use FB's Go Live now, as that would exclude a decent portion of our audience. I ALWAYS use Scheduled Live Events, as that way you get a URL that allows non-FB users to also watch Live. And the Scheduled stuff has been stable for last few weeks (Auto starting of live stream was unstable for a while, definite FB issue. And FB's Live Producer page, which I always use/monitor, is less functional/effective when not using Chrome (for me).

As for troubleshooting.. there is a way... starting with what I mentioned of local hardware resource monitoring, then add local network monitoring. That, and knowing and doing proper OS maintenance and operations (that 95+% of folks don't), would probably cover the vast majority of streaming trouble/incidents

 

[crocket99]

I have encountered the same issue using chrome, edge and mozilla. It is not a local resource constraint. The workaround I have found is to simply reload the browser once FB displays its having a problem working. So far that has worked 5 of of 5 times when I've encountered it.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Normally re-loading Facebook's /Live/Producer page works for me as well... not on Sunday. no amount of reloading would get preview working (comments were displaying fine, and and another device we could see stream was ok, but you'd never know it by Live Producer... eventually gave up and ignored Preview... first time I've ever had to to that