Hardware encoding causing streaming issues?

[itpromike]

I'm new to all this so please forgive me if I ask something ignorant or missed a simple setting. I'm running a Late 2014 iMac with OBS 26.10. I've been using this setup to stream with OBS since April. All of a sudden a few weeks ago I started getting a lot of "Frames skipped due to encoding lag". In troubleshooting I realized that Iv'e been using software encoding - so I chose hardware encoding... That does indeed take away the encoding lag. However with hardware encoding selected, stream just no longer works. I click the "Start Stream" button but on the streaming endpoint when I check the stream it's frozen...

 

[itpromike]

I'm new to all this so please forgive me if I ask something ignorant or missed a simple setting. I'm running a Late 2014 iMac with OBS 26.10. I've been using this setup to stream with OBS since April. All of a sudden a few weeks ago I started getting a lot of "Frames skipped due to encoding lag". In troubleshooting I realized that Iv'e been using software encoding - so I chose hardware encoding... That does indeed take away the encoding lag. However with hardware encoding selected, stream just no longer works. I click the "Start Stream" button but on the streaming endpoint when I check the stream it's frozen...

Sorry, I just realized this post wasn't specific enough. I'm asking, is there a setting I'm missing that would cause hardware encoding to break streaming or is there a nuance in the settings I'm missing that I need to configure? Also are there any known issues with hardware encoding and streaming that I should be aware of?

 

[sirbryan]

What's your bit rate and other settings for the stream? What service are you using (and what are their expectations)?
A screenshot of your encoding settings window might help.