Facebook live streaming: by phone or by OBS Studio ?

[melodia_streaming]

Hello everybody,
stream videos on Facebook using OBS is not the same that stream videos using an Android phone.

I've made several tests to stream the live, using:
- PCs not particular powerfull and very powerfull workstations,
- WIFI Internet connection with upload speed not particularly high (8-10 Mbps) and WIFI Internet connection with good upload speed (24 Mbps)

Using OBS Studio, the live shooting of the scenes on the remote device (mobile phone, tablet, PC) is severely corrupted.
This also happens for the deferred images/videos transmitted with the OBS studio.

Using some cheap mobile phones (100 Euros) and modem with poor wifi internet connections (upload up to about 10 Mbps) the transmitted videos directly using the Facebook App are wonderfull.

Please, can you help me to understand this misalignment ?
Maybe is this due to a particular settings of the Facebook App (unknown at the people) ?

Is it possible repeat with OBS Studio the behaviour of the Facebook App ? In which a way ?

I hope to hear you soon

Thanks in advance.

Melodia

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Biggest consideration for me is that Facebook scheduled live videos have a URL that allows non-FB folks to watch. Last I looked, you can't schedule a FB Live Video from a mobile device.

WiFi will always be less reliable and performant than a wired connection... so unless you know how to do WiFi spectrum analysis, ensure absence of conflicts/contention, just know that WiFi connection will always be a risk. Some may argue they can stream video (Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, whatever) and that works fine or WiFi so I must not know what I'm talking about... wrong. First, live streaming is traffic going in the other direction and most home Internet connections have different upload/download speeds. And the streaming apps have buffer capability built into them to overcome such WiFi issues...

You mention remote device... Are you trying to capture a remote video feed into OBS and then livestream that? You do realize that would be competing for bandwidth (even with opposite direction traffic there are still ACK packets to account for)? Time to follow basic scientific method and eliminate variables to isolate cause.
To determine if your computer is up to the task, record, but don't stream, your broadcast. If a local recording looks goods, then its time to troubleshoot your upstream connection (and if anything else is using that same connection) and CPU impact of encoding for streaming

I could be way off base, but I'm suspecting an OBS setup issue, or the computer itself. For reference....
I only recently started using OBS (3.5 months ago), so I'll share my feedback for Facebook live broadcasting (no gaming) with numerous pre-recorded (some 4K) and live video scenes, going to Facebook at 720p
The upload Internet connection (DSL) is only 5mb/s... so I achieved relatively stable connections to FB only after I dropped bit rate to 3000kpbs

I tried livestreaming using a laptop with an i5-6300HQ @2.3 GHz [4c no HT] 8GB RAM, SSD, and a GTX 960M GPU [CPU is circa Fall 2015] and it failed miserably. I have a Logitech webcam USB connected, with a PowerPoint window capture and a variety of pre-recorded video segments (super simple transforms, most being a 90deg rotation and a resize to fit screen) interspersed with live video. The CPU was completely overwhelmed (again no gaming) and couldn't maintain a 4000kbs stream. I've heard CPU load isn't small for a USB webcam.
now.. if I edited the videos in advance (rotate,resize, etc) added some RAM, stopped using USB camera... maybe... not worth it, this laptop getting donated

An workstation class laptop (Xeon E-2176M 2.7GHz (6c/12t) 64GB RAM, NVMe and Quadra P2000 [CPU is circa Spring 2018]) can handle the same workload without breaking a sweat... and it isn't really using the GPU much ...

 

[melodia_streaming]

I'm suspecting an OBS setup issue

I'm also suspecting a wrong OBS setting issue.
Please, let me report what I have.

WORKSTATION
Dell INSPIRON, Intel® Core™ i7-1065G7, 10th Generation (8 MB cache, up to about 4 GHz),
16 GB, 2 of 8 GB, DDR4, 2.666 MH
HARD DISK PCIe NVMe M.2 da 512 GB
NVIDIA® GeForce® MX230, 4 GB RAM.

CAMCORDER
Old CANON XL2, DV PAL 720x576. I set camera to 16:9, so I can shoot with an Aspect Ration equal to: 1,4587 (so giving to my scenes an Anamorphic look).

OTHER SOURCES
A variety of pre-recorded video segments with the same camera.

OBS SETTINGS

More, I use filtering to change the aspect ratio to 16:9.

Please, can you tell me what settings are wrong ?

Thanks very much in advance.

Melodia.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

My recommendation - basic scientific method... start simple, eliminate variables to focus on problem

so start with local (to PC) content only - no remote WiFi connected cameras. period (no, I'm not kidding)..
- try recording only (not streaming)? how is the video and audio quality? if ok, then move onto next step. if not ok, look into optimizing encoder and other settings (lots of articles on that)
- ok, still with no WiFi in the mix (nor remote camera), try streaming. If stream looks good, then you know PC and Internet connection, stream settings, etc all ok... then you can focus on how you are getting video feed... which may or may not having anything to do with OBS
. again start with remote camera feed and record only (no stream).. then check recorded video. if okay, then watch (Task Mgr) PC performance and try streaming and see if anything getting overloaded... your PC seems sufficient, so I'm not suspecting this.

 

[nottooloud]

Using OBS Studio, the live shooting of the scenes on the remote device (mobile phone, tablet, PC) is severely corrupted.
This also happens for the deferred images/videos transmitted with the OBS studio.

Using some cheap mobile phones (100 Euros) and modem with poor wifi internet connections (upload up to about 10 Mbps) the transmitted videos directly using the Facebook App are wonderfull.

Are saying streaming via OBS looks bad when *viewed* on a remote device, but the same PC streaming via Facebook's web interface makes streams that look good on that same device?

If that's correct, open the Stats window in OBS and watch while you stream. Look for dropped frames and high CPU usage.