Hardware adequate?

[Farquar1000]

I support my church's installation of OBS. My background is in IT support before I retired (I thought I did, but not sure if anyone else realized). The system that was originally installed is a Beelink GTR Pro Mini PC. It has an AMD Ryzen 5 3550H Processor with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx GPU and is rated at 2.10 GHz. Installed RAM is 8 GB. It is running 64 bit, Windows 10 Pro version 22H2. The system uses two cameras, an AIDA HD-ND!-200 and an OTTICA-NDI-HX movable camera with separate joystick controller keyboard. For the most part the system works okay for our church event streaming to our Youtube channel. We experience a few issues which if resolved would provide a much better stream experience. The small PC obviously works very hard during streaming as the internal fan revs up to max speed. The video feed of a static image from either camera is very clear and stable. However, when anyone is moving, playing an instrument, speaking from the pulpit, etc, the video image tends to slightly blur every few seconds and there is always a distinct sync issue between audio and video. If we can tweak come settings in OBS, or the PC, camera's etc. to resolve these minor issues, great. If our CPU, GPU and / or memory are not adequate, it would be helpful to experience users to render their opinions. Please see the attached screenshots and thank you for anyone that contributes a response.

 

[PaiSand]

Don't usee advanced output setting. Keep it in simple ouput.
Run the Auto-configuration Wizard and apply the settings it gives. Do NOT change a thing.
Restart OBS.
Now test it.

Look inside Help menu. Upload the current log file and paste the url to the log in here. Click on the Analize button to start troubleshooting common issues.

8GB of RAM is kind of too low. You need at least 16GB.
Rmemeber some of this RAM is used by the iGPU.

 

[Farquar1000]

Thank you for your quick reply and suggestions. I will give them a try and report back. Thanks again!

 

[bcoyle]

if you have an audio board connected to your microphones and that connected to obs along with your video , you will always have a video-audio sync problem. The audio is basically real time and the video is often delayed by several video frames as it comes off the camera, and goes thru the frame grabber in your video switcher. We have the same problem in our church. If all your cameras are the same, you can determine the required audio delay and somehow (i don't know how personally) delay the audio enough to match the video camera feed. I have used premier pro in the past to match up video and audio. I usually look for a loud noise like a hand clap. You can then determine the required delay in your system. My old church used to have a audio delay line for our speakers, that we could set, when matching up the sound from one speaker to another.

 

[bcoyle]

PaiSand is absolutely right about the low memory. 16g min. I inherited my wife's hp pavillion laptop and wanted to use it for streaming. It was horrible. 8g ram, 1T hard disk. So slow. I brought a SSD drive to replace the hard disc. It is at least 5x faster. I increased ram to 16G and would have done 32 if it had had space. Suddenly the laptop started to act like a reasonable computer. When obs is running, the vlc source sucks up about 1 meg of ram p[er second. When It fills up the standby ram, the computer starts to page the memory to the hardback. to mad room for the new standby memory. The ssd helps with this because it is faster. In addition, i use a free app call rammap. I set it up in the task scheduler to run every half hour. What it does is clear the standby memory and gives obs a memory that is always free. A lot of my problems with obs crashes went away. This was on win 7 and there may be settings in win 10,11 that can do this without using rammap. The laptop is very stable now. Hope that helps.

 

[bcoyle]

In you last attachment, it shows that the frame rate is 25. Most cameras are 29.97 or 30. In the obs configuration, it's set for 30. SO mismatch?? When the video source is mismatched to the obs frame rate, the computer has to work harder. This is just my experience, so grain of salt.

 

[Farquar1000]

Don't usee advanced output setting. Keep it in simple ouput.
Run the Auto-configuration Wizard and apply the settings it gives. Do NOT change a thing.
Restart OBS.
Now test it.

Look inside Help menu. Upload the current log file and paste the url to the log in here. Click on the Analize button to start troubleshooting common issues.

8GB of RAM is kind of too low. You need at least 16GB.
Rmemeber some of this RAM is used by the iGPU.

 

[Farquar1000]

In you last attachment, it shows that the frame rate is 25. Most cameras are 29.97 or 30. In the obs configuration, it's set for 30. SO mismatch?? When the video source is mismatched to the obs frame rate, the computer has to work harder. This is just my experience, so grain of salt.

We do use a separate audio board and the current changes have decreased the audio/video sync gap. I will further fine tune. This Beelink CPU is running Windows 10 Pro via a SSD and seems to have plenty of ability for our need. The memory addition helped substantially and I believe is better able to handle the CPU and GPU threads. I have standardized the frame rate to be consistent at 30 fps. Thank you all for your valuable input.
Thanks for your suggestions. I upgraded the memory to 32 GB. I increased my virtual memory settings accordingly. I am now in Simple output mode. I ran the Autoconfiguration as suggested and saved those settings.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

For audio/video sync, I'm always up for a better approach, but the one I used for our HoW setup a few years ago was the free sync video from streamgeeks (PTZ Optics team).. run video on laptop or tablet, point camera at screen and record. During playback, you'll sync what the sync offset is. The challenge is if the sync offset is not consistent between cameras

 

[Farquar1000]

Thanks. I have entered some settings in the internal OBS audio sync adjustment panel and will test over the next week or so. I am hoping some final tweaking will yield the desired results.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

I'm totally NOT into making guestimate adjustments. the nice part of the video I mentioned is that it is easy to get a fairly accurate measure of the sync variance
my links references on A/V Sync

• Paul Richards of PTZ Optics/StreamGeeks video I use https://streamgeeks.us/how-to-fix-obs-audio-and-video-sync-issue-with-a-new-tool/
• https://streamshark.io/obs-guide/audio-delay

 

[Farquar1000]

I believe I have resolved most of the video related issues with all of your assistance. The steps included upgrading memory and running the Auto-Configuration wizard. The only remaining problem reported was graininess of the online video. Apparently looks great on OBS console as the live event is occurring, but the streamed version is "more" grainy" according to reports. Any suggested tweaks to stream settings?

 

[PaiSand]

Pixelated. That's normal when you can only stream with low bitrates. In the past 6000kbps where enough for a great quality at 480p or 720p. This isn't enough for 1080p.
If you stream to youtube you can use higher values and get better quality, but your computer and network connection ot Internet needs to be able to manage this amount of data.

Do you have a log file from one of the tests streams?

 

[qhobbes]

Add a static border along the edge(s) of your screen.

 

[Farquar1000]

At this point, with all of your help, I believe the issues I have described have been minimized. Thank you for your individual suggestions.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

for our church livestream to FB, I run a 7000kbps 1080p30 stream, and that appears to be ok
For our service bulletin, I did change the re-scale filter (to bi-cubic, from memory, done years ago) as we have plenty of spare CPU to spend a few more cycles on clearer TXT.

 

[Farquar1000]

So after some more tinkering and sound source resolution we seem to be in a pretty good place. However, I am unsure of how to insure audio and video are synced on a reliable basis. I performed a test stream on the 19th. The audio and video seemed to be very close to sync. Please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewbpAVv_eMo&t=89s at about 1:56 to observe. Yesterday, on Sunday, we performed a full service stream, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8YOPpQNHK0&t=3201s . Please go to around 53:30 of the video and see the distinct gap.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

After your tweaks/updates, is your audio sync shifting from service to service, or drifting over time? hopefully not. fortunately, with my NDI setup, that is not an issue I have to deal with. I see 2 main approaches
1. get overall network and hardware setup suck that sync adjustment is consistent every service
2. be prepared to run a test before every service (which seems like a problem for typical House of Worship/volunteer type setup)
with the link I posted above, certainly possible to get a new 'sync' value every stream quick and easy enough... but not that quick, and it typically requires a mobile device (laptop, tablet, smartphone, portable DVD player, whatever) to play the video with house camera(s) and mic pointed at device.

if sync is changing during livestream, first thing I'd check is OBS Studio log for audio devices using differing sampling rates (and fix at driver/Operating System level if that is the case). The other common cause is the Operating System (OS) getting overwhelmed during livestream, and as audio and video take different paths and have vastly different processing requirements, easy for OS to get let them 'drift' in terms of timing.