Question / Help Elgato lock-ups and crashes

[Conciliator]

Hey guys, I have a problem with OBS and Elgato, where when I switch to my scene that has the capture from the Elgato, or start OBS into the scene that has the capture from the Elgato, OBS will lock-up for a period of 5-10 seconds. This is something I can deal with, however I don't know if it's normal and just the way it is, or if there's something I can do about it. More problematically, sometimes when this happens OBS just seems to lock up permanently. I can let it sit for 1, 2, 5 minutes and it's just locked up. Even worse, when I force close OBS, I can't kill the obs.exe process from task manager, or even with using a taskkill /im /f command from a cmd prompt with admin rights(Windows 7). I have to actually hard boot my PC and try again. So far I haven't been able to find any pattern to this happening.

I use an Elgato HD60 pro, Logitech C920 webcam, have the most current version of OBS(not OBS studio). I run my Elgato card into an HDMI/audio splitter and then to my gaming monitor(don't think that's relevant as it also happened before I added the hdmi/audio splitter, but just listing anything that could be relevant). Here's my most recent log, where this lock up issues happened again: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/117c56d1e6a792c162c6d0f98ee19e63

Let me know what other info you need that I'm missing...thanks for your help.

 

[Boildown]

I don't know about the locking up part, but from your logs you're trying to stream with NVEnc encoding, which is a bad idea. NVEnc is for recording, x264 is for streaming.

What device are you recording that's the source of the video? A console, another PC?

 

[Conciliator]

It's a console, a PS4.

I've found that NVENC uses way less CPU in OBS, is that a misreading on my part? I feel like some games run much better for me when I'm streaming if I'm using NVENC.

Thanks

 

[Boildown]

The whole idea of a second PC (or console + PC) is that you don't have to care if the CPU usage is high, because the game isn't running on it, just OBS.

NVEnc requires high bitrate to look good. It looks like crap compared to x264 at bitrates that can be streamed. That's why NVEnc should only be used for recording, and for streaming you should use x264. Think of NVEnc's low CPU usage as a secondary consideration only important if you're gaming on the same PC you're recording on.

 

[Conciliator]

Ah, true, but we usually play something on PC and something on console on any given stream. But I guess it wouldn't be a big deal to switch my encoding and restart OBS as needed once or twice a stream.