Where's the log file analyzer? I've been there before, but I can't find it now. I've restarted and closed OBS again since this problem, so even "Upload previous log" doesn't catch the relevant one, but I did find it in the config folder. As important as it is, can a direct link be added to the navigation bar?
Thanks
@Lawrence_SoCal for having it in your signature!
OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers or record your own videos with high quality H264 / AAC encoding.
obsproject.com
Now if only it were easy to find without that...
Anyway:
I set it up at home and let it run for a few hours. Ran perfectly. I was hoping to catch it with a verbose log, but no. It just worked.
So I ran the Slave log above through the Analyzer, and it said:
0.2% Rendering Lag
Your GPU is maxed out and OBS can't render scenes fast enough. Running a game without vertical sync or a frame rate limiter will frequently cause performance issues with OBS because your GPU will be maxed out. OBS requires a little GPU to render your scene.
Enable Vsync or set a reasonable frame rate limit that your GPU can handle without hitting 100% usage.
If that's not enough you may also need to turn down some of the video quality options in the game. If you are experiencing issues in general while using OBS, your GPU may be overloaded for the settings you are trying to use.
Please check our guide for ideas why this may be happening, and steps you can take to correct it:
GPU Overload Issues.
I figured 0.2% was just a handful of frames when it was still doing its startup initialization. Personally, I wouldn't start counting frames until the init was done, but I see this a lot and don't worry about it. Should I?
The
GPU Overload Issues page also has some interesting points:
- Check for Other Programs Using the GPU
- I have two copies of OBS, and a DAW that also uses the GPU. I didn't think it was *that* intensive though!
- Build Simpler Scenes
- Yes in general, but I'm already about as simple as it gets: one video source per scene, some live and some files, plus some global audio.
- The remaining points were about manually optimizing a game (which this isn't) or Windows specifically (hmm, I wonder why?)
Having just done the math now, 0.2% is a full second, on average, every 8 minutes or so. That *does* seem significant. It'd be nice, then, if the log would show *when* the dropped frames actually are. Maybe verbose does that?
The one verbose log that I have shows 1 dropped frame over 5 hours. Searching it for "frame" returns nothing interesting, and I'm *not* looking through 60MiB manually for something that *might* be it!
Encoder start error
An encoder failed to start. This could result in a bitrate stuck at 0 or OBS stuck on "Stopping Recording". Depending on your encoder, try updating your drivers. If you're using QSV, make sure your iGPU is enabled. If that still doesn't help, try switching to a different encoder in Settings -> Output.
Yes, it did. Good job! Can you tell me why??? Maybe if I knew that it was going to do this and had the verbose log to start with...?
That brings up an interesting question of software diagnostics: "Can/should it detect that something has gone wrong and force verbose on, even retrospectively (timestamps possibly out of order, but at least they're *there*!), so that intermittent non-reproducible problems have a better chance at being understood?"
I guess in the meantime I can *always* use the verbose option, just in case......except that the Analyzer doesn't like a 60MiB text file! I can get it down to 46KiB though, just by removing the repetitive "everything is normal" messages (that version is attached here), and then the Analyzer says it's all good...except that
Your OBS version identifies itself as 'which', which cannot be parsed as a valid OBS version number. What!?!
The driver question immediately came to mind before seeing this report, but I'm already on the latest supported driver for this 2015-era GPU, which I installed manually because the graphical driver manager doesn't have it. (it does have one that was ancient even then) Other encoders are
FFmpeg VAAPI H.264, which always throws an error immediately, and
x264, which I really want to stay away from if at all possible!
Third-Party Plugins (3)
You have the following third-party plugins installed:
- advanced-scene-switcher
- source-copy
- source-defaults
Yep. All of these are here on purpose, but I can see how this report would be useful for people who do anything and everything they happen to think of and don't remember any of it. ("How did I get that? *I* never installed it!" Uhh...yes you did.)
I think that's about all I can get out of the logs, at least until it fails with a verbose one. (if it ever does)
One more possibility might be thermal throttling??? I didn't think to look at the temps, but:
- The fans on this laptop draw air from the bottom and push it out the back through some good-looking heatpipes and fins. (I've had the cover off a few times)
- It was sitting directly on a solid plastic shelf when it failed, compared to a slightly elevated dock on an open plastic grid for the 5-hour test at home.
I guess it could have taken about 45 minutes to reach the throttling temperature, at which point it could no longer keep up with the encoding load. But if that's what happened, then what we see here is a pretty lousy way to report it! It would also explain the inability to restart immediately, but not (as an outside observer anyway) the indefinite hang on "Starting Recording..." Surely it didn't stay hot for 45 more minutes doing (almost) nothing!
