Question / Help Force Audio Playback Delay?

[KevinDurden]

I have a rather weird scenario that I was wondering if it would be possible to perform.

Currently, I have an 8 channel microphone mixer that has 7 microphone inputs all working flawlessly through OBS, however in order for the audio and video to sync, I have to setup a manual delay through OBS of about 1100ms or so. Now the issue with this, is that the audio that is playing back from my system naturally is 1100ms ahead and I'm unable to delay that.

So my question for everyone is whether there's a way to intentionally delay my system audio on top of my microphone input audio and have that all synced up with my video to have the delay?

 

[dodgepong]

Can you tell us more about your setup and why you have to use a delay?

 

[KevinDurden]

I'm using a TASCAM US-1800 input device as my recording mixer and was using my soundcard to playback audio. For some strange reason due to the mixer, it comes up with a delay between the video (a Logitech C910 webcam) and the audio (the TASCAM US-1800). In order to sync the video and audio up, I have to use the input device delay on OBS at around 1100ms. The only downside with this is that now the audio that's being played back from my soundcard (Creative Fatal1ty Titanium Professional) is delayed by the amount that I had in order to get the A/V sync correct.

Hope this helps as convoluted as it may sound. Let me know what else you may need.

 

[dodgepong]

So the video coming from the webcam is delayed by 1100ms, and you have to delay the audio by that much to match it?

That sounds excessive for the C910...what resolution and Output format is the camera using?

 

[KevinDurden]

Yes, I'm able to match my input from the TASCAM and the C910 if I delay them both, but I need to figure out a way to delay the audio being played back from my system, a la Spotify and such.

I'm outputting at 1920x1080 but could always try to downscale to 1280x720 to see if that fixes it. It's only at 30FPS (could also drop that to 23.97 if need be), and RGB32 for the format.

 

[FerretBomb]

If you need to set up a webcam delay to sync the webcam video, that's manageable separately from the webcam's source (or preferably, global source) properties.

If you want to delay the system capture video (game cap, window cap, etc) and audio so you don't have a delay between what's happening on the system and your responses/reactions (eg: so you don't react a second after action happens on-screen, with that 1100ms delay) I have no idea if that's possible, but I'd like to know as well... I'm stuck with a 300ms delay to sync my webcam with my mic, which annoys people when I hum along with in-game music... but a half-second behind the music.

Is there a reason you're not using the System Audio for recording system audio, and instead looping it through your mixer (apparently)? It'd definitely simplify things, and give you a channel back on the board. Use the volume sliders on the main OBS screen to normalize the audio levels between the system and mic (the 'bars' can be slid back and forth, which a number of people have missed, and the meter underneath gives a rough idea of comparative volume levels).

 

[KevinDurden]

So here's the thing - I'm not streaming a game, at all.

What I want to do ideally is stream my webcam, with audio being played from Spotify/iTunes/Pandora/YouTube (the output device is set as my mixer as well as I can plug my headphones into it), and my microphone is the mixer as well.

There's no game involved in this, it's just three devices.

- Webcam
- Microphone
- Music from some type of software on my PC.

I can get my webcam and microphone to sync up perfectly without any issue, the only problem is that the music from the PC itself is always early by almost a full second to when my webcam and microphone come in. I've tried with no delay on the webcam and microphone but can't get it to match, which is why I wanted to find a way to delay the system audio to match up with everything else.

Make sense at all? :)

 

[dodgepong]

I would definitely try some other resolutions on the webcam...something's wrong if it has that much delay. There may be some on-board encoding or something going on at 1080p, since ordinarily you can't transmit raw 1080p video over USB 2.0. In fact, even on the Logitech program, I don't think you can record video in 1080p, just 720p, and still photos in 1080p.

A primary reason people buy webcams is for real-time video communication, so it doesn't make sense that a webcam would have more than a second of delay on the capture.

 

[KevinDurden]

I just tried doing local file recording without any webcam, and the audio itself from the microphone is still being delayed from the music played over Spotify by about a half a second.

So, is there any way to delay the system audio to match up with the natural delay of the microphone and webcam?

 

[dodgepong]

Oh, I didn't realize there was delay from the microphone as well...And by Microphone you mean the TASCAM device inputting into your computer? Are out inputting analog into your sound card's line-in port?

Sorry if it sounds like I'm avoiding your question, because it sounds like you shouldn't need a delay at all. Adding a delay is a band-aid to the real problem, which is that your mic has an inherent delay, and that shouldn't be the case. So let's try to fix the real problem.

 

[KevinDurden]

Yep, the TASCAM itself.

So, after tinkering with the settings for a bit, I tried adding a Scene Buffering Time of 1000ms to give myself the ability to essentially fastforward the microphone and webcam with a negative ms buffer. It seems to work with a microphone buffer of -80ms right now, but the webcam buffer won't go any lower than 0ms so it's always slightly out of sync by the 80ms.

Any ideas on how to correct that?

 

[dodgepong]

It blows my mind that that mixer would introduce such significant delay over an analog connection...there has to be a problem in there somewhere.

Is there another program somewhere that you can test the delay with for the mixer?