Question / Help Frame skips and scrambled screen

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Matt Eddy

New Member
Please forgive my newbishness, I don't have a whole depth of tech know-how.

I got OBS on a Macbook Pro bootcamped into Windows 10. The laptop is pretty old, maybe 8 years or so. I use a Roxio Game Capture HD Pro card, which USBs into the laptop. It all seems to get running fine in OBS, but maybe a minute or so into the game (and possibly sooner when I start recording), the video being captured starts skipping frames before it becomes a scrambled mess.

I would conclude that this laptop is just unable to handle the workload here, but everything works seamlessly if I use the Roxio proprietary recording software. No frame skips, no scrambling.

It sure seems like the laptop can handle it fine in the Roxio software environment, but I'd rather use OBS. I'm out of my depth here - are there any settings I can mess with to fix it?

Thanks so much for the time and attention.
 
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SumDim

Member
Go out and get a new computer with these kind of specs:

Ryzen 1700 or Intel i7-7700
16 GB RAM
Nvidia GTX 1060 or better
2TB Drive
Ethernet Gigabit port for 10/100/1000
OBS Studio 19.0.2
Win 10 64-bit USB Flash

The likelihood that the laptop you have is not powerful enough is probably one of the reasons why you are having problems.
 
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Matt Eddy

New Member
That's fair, but why would it be good with the Roxio in-house software and not OBS? Is OBS that much more of a load on the system?
 
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SumDim

Member
There are two ways to scale to a resolution and encode video and audio data. You can do it either in execution of a software library (X264) or by asking a hardware device to do it (NVENC h264/5). The software method used by OBS puts a heavy load on your computer. You need a very high end CPU to pull it off at high resolution sizes. And with both methods, it depends on the what each algorithm does with the data. It can very well be that hardware encoder may do something differently than the software based encoder. An example would be that the hardware encoder may try to "predict" the next few frames movement.

The result is what matters through judged by you and your viewers eyes in how good it looks and how fast it is delivered to their platform without having drops or image quality problems.

To give you an idea of load, I use NVENC streaming 1080@60. I don't play games on the box - it is a dedicated stream PC box. The CPU load is below 10%, often times just 5%. I let the NVENC module on the Nvidia GPU handle the rescaling and encoding to H264 to offload the burden on the CPU. Essentially, the scaling and encoding is on the GPU card doing all the heavy lifting.

So it all depends on what you are doing. If you are running applications on the same streaming box and to what extent the application (like games) push the CPU and GPU. A highly animated frame movement requires high FPS to take more snapshots to make playback look smooth as opposed to a static like application (say PowerPoint slide presentation or crossword puzzle game) that doesn't change its output frequently.

Its why you should consider a dedicated PC streaming box running OBS on it and forgo trying to run applications on the same box. You can then attach a XBox One/PS4/PS4 Pro console to it with a video capture card. Or another PC with enough specs to run your game and send the output from the capture card to OBS and deal with it locally or pass it to its GPU to do the encoding and scaling.
 
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