[Guide] Two PC configuration without Capturecard

After further testing I'm thinking the behavior I was seeing was simply running out of cpu. Using a faster preset than medium made the issue I was seeing go away. I still some some slight stuttering but it seems completely unrelated.
 
I've spent a lot of time troubleshooting the stuttering. I think it is on the VLC side. If you watch the codec details while watching a LAN or internet RTMP stream, VLC fails to decode several frames every now and then. If you go to http://www.wowza.com/resources/3.5.0/examples/LiveVideoStreaming/FlashRTMPPlayer/player.html and put your RTMP URL into the site, you'll find that your stream runs perfectly.

What I really wanted to post was news that I built a virtual server in Virtual Box with the intent for people to be able to start it up and have it work out of the box. The NGINX streaming service starts automatically. Debian is the operating system with no graphical user interface, which helped keep the entire server size down to 1.7 GB! Compressed, it is 414 MB and should be available tomorrow. I made this for a friend of mine and figured I could save others a lot of time if I shared it.
 
Yeah, that's a good idea. I knew about that thread and would have used the pre-configured VM except the download links didn't work.
 
I was thinking of using my older AMD Phenom II x4 965 (OC'd to 3.8GHz) computer as a dedicated "streaming/encoding PC". Is this guide still viable if I have a capture card in use (how does it change)? Or is there an easier solution for those that have a capture card? In my current test setup, my Win7 streaming PC doesn't use much of the CPU (up to about 40% max) on faster and fast settings (problems on medium, but no CPU usage increase).

Cheers.
P.S. Just to clear things up (in case it's needed at some point)
- Gaming PC:
cpu: Core i7 2700K (can't OC atm b/c of watercooler probs)
mobo: GA-Z77X-UP4TH
gfx: GeForce GTX 660 Ti

- Streaming PC:
cpu: Phenom II x4 965 (OC'd to 3.8GHz)
mobo: GA-890GPA-UD3H
gfx: GeForce GTX 560
capture: Avermedia Live Gamer HD

I stream mostly modern MMORPGs (they use lots of CPU). My upload speed is a crappy 2mb (wired DSL), so good encoding is a must. I stream (usually) only to Twitch.
 
Wouldn't you set up OBS on the streaming PC and use the capture card as the input feed? That way, your gaming PC would use nearly no CPU power. The RTMP server this thread is talking about wouldn't be necessary unless you want to output to multiple places.
 
That's what I have on my Win7 test setup. The problem however is that OBS isn't using much CPU on it. It's about 20% CPU load when streaming still pictures and about 40% (spikes) when streaming action. That's with faster, fast and medium profiles. But like I've said, there are problems with medium profile saying "encoding takes too long, skipping frames". I would love a solution that'd enable my streaming PC to compress/encode stream data even better (at least 60% CPU load on average). Or is there a setting somewhere in OBS that allows it to use as much CPU as it is available?

Cheers.
 
Hello again. I have tried for a while now to get the second PC setup to work on my dual-core opteron @1.8 box. However it quickly starts dropping frames and never recovers. So I am looking into a new box for this. With a budget of under $100 I can either get an old server with two quad cores @ ~2Ghz or a old amd quad core and over clock it. So my question is which would work better in this situation, eight cores or four cores running 1Ghz faster.
 
Lebo said:
Hello again. I have tried for a while now to get the second PC setup to work on my dual-core opteron @1.8 box. However it quickly starts dropping frames and never recovers. So I am looking into a new box for this. With a budget of under $100 I can either get an old server with two quad cores @ ~2Ghz or a old amd quad core and over clock it. So my question is which would work better in this situation, eight cores or four cores running 1Ghz faster.
Click to expand...
Put the processor models in at http://www.cpuboss.com
 
ZagatoMKR said:
That's what I have on my Win7 test setup. The problem however is that OBS isn't using much CPU on it. It's about 20% CPU load when streaming still pictures and about 40% (spikes) when streaming action. That's with faster, fast and medium profiles. But like I've said, there are problems with medium profile saying "encoding takes too long, skipping frames". I would love a solution that'd enable my streaming PC to compress/encode stream data even better (at least 60% CPU load on average). Or is there a setting somewhere in OBS that allows it to use as much CPU as it is available?

Cheers.
Click to expand...
I'm not experienced with capture cards but my technical experience makes me think that's where you need to look. I know that the quality can be limited by the capture card. That leads me to believe it could be a bottleneck if it can't handle the amount of data you're passing through it. What model do you have?
 
014 said:
Put the processor models in at http://www.cpuboss.com
Click to expand...

Thank you for the suggestion. However I do not see any relevant data on cpuboss pertaining to FFMPEG performance when streaming using two quad-core Zeons at 2Ghz (a.k.a. eight slow threads) versus one quad-core Phemon @ 3Ghz+ (four faster threads). This would be a great site to consult of I wanted to compare benchmark results between single processor systems. I am actually interested in FFMPEG performance in multi-cpu systems.

Normal encoding the two Zeons would complete the job faster due to FFMPEG using all available threads. However, would this translate to the re-streaming process we are doing here? As we are taking a RTMP feed and re-encoding it. Would the higher frequency allow for better performance despite the fewer threads? I have been told it will but I am naturally dubious.
I get the idea that the job can be done with four cores easily and the extra frequency would allow for faster response times picking up frames for processing but I am not actually sure how FFMPEG is doing what it's doing.
 
Which model Xeons? If they're each hyperthreaded, they'll probably add up to be faster than the Phenom alternative.
 
2x http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... 40+2.00GHz
vs.
1x http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... +Quad-Core

Well the Intel solution wins, alone those chips are equivalent, but you said you get two chips if you choose Intel, so it wins.

But why did you say the AMD was 3GHz? That Phenom is only 2.2 GHz, and a cursory look didn't reveal anyone OCing it to 3GHz. Even if you could increase its performance by 50% with OCing, it would still lose to two Xeon E5335s.

That said, all those chips are really getting old. Just look how they compare to the 2600k on those charts: around 30% of the speed. It might be able to do the job, you said it'll cost you $100. I would make sure that for $100 its a fully functional system, you don't want to have to put more money into this, because its too old to be worth it. For not much more than $100 you can get a modern CPU that's faster.
 
This guide will be very useful with the new nvenc options...

I tested this with using just ultrafast shipping to my a8 linux server, (but its semi overloaded cpu wise already)....

This is just going to rock with nvenc :)
 
Just did a quick test with NVENC and BF4, which is currently my most CPU limited game, using identical settings as I do with QSV (copied mostly from the OP here). Performance wise, it definitely felt faster than when using QSV, but still not as smooth as not streaming at all, which seems odd since it implies that NVENC still uses a lot of CPU (maybe this is obvious to the more knowledgeable). I haven't quite refined my eye for quality, but it beat my expectation based on some other vods I saw. Very high action does seem to wash out more than I remember QSV doing... but anyway, you be the judge!

http://www.twitch.tv/okurakutest/c/3667999

gaming pc
i5 2500k @ 4.46 GHz
2x GTX 670 SLI
OBS v0.60b
25000 rate (to transcoder)
NVENC Preset: High Quality
1080p 60fps

transcoder
i7 930 @ 3.5 GHz
4000 rate
preset 'faster'
720p 60fps lanczos downscale
 
Looked pretty good to me. I'm pretty sure Twitch creates a loss of quality. If I use the same settings and upload to Twitch and my own JWPlayer site at the same time, my site looks sharper. (For the network minded, yes, I also streamed to one location at a time to rule out bandwidth contention.)
 
So I upgraded my gaming PC to a 4770k with a goal of getting a big QSV quality jump for this configuration... unfortunately now I can't stream with QSV because it's "taking too long to encode" and freezing up. I posted my logs for comparison over here if anyone wants to help me out. Can this kind of thing be caused by a driver issue? It seems like a misconfiguration somewhere...
 
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