Question / Help Heavy Stream Lag to Twitch on an Aging Macbook Air

kevbosearle

New Member
Hi all,
My first stream to Twitch from OBS was really rocky. The audio seemed to run fine but the video lagged way behind and eventually halted altogether. I'm using an old Iphone for my webcam using the OBS Camera app. I think my internet connection was solid: I ran an ethernet cable directly from a usb port to a wifi extender.
Here are my system specs:
Model Name: MacBook Air
Model Identifier: MacBookAir5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 1.7 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB

I ran the activity monitor during a test stream and this is what it showed for OBS: CPU / 70.8% || Memory / 200.9 MB | 36.3 MB Compressed || Energy Impact / 77.5 || Disk / 38.6 MB read || Network / 54.9 MB sent.

Also, the log file is attached below. (Holy cow, I just looked at it.)

I'm a novice as far as streaming and computers. Do these numbers add up to creating a lag? If so, what could I do to improve my stream quality? Would other data be more helpful in assessing the problem? Thanks so much for having a look under my hood.
 

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Narcogen

Active Member
The MacBook Air is particularly ill-suited to this task.

In addition, the logfile indicates you should be selecting a lower quality of streaming from your iPhone because the macbook cannot keep up with the one you have selected.

06:06:37.709: [obs-ios-camera-plugin] Video Decoding queue overloaded. 26 frames behind. Please use a lower quality setting.

You're overloading your GPU slightly.

20:16:44.280: Output 'adv_stream': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 4471 (2.4%)


And you're overloading your CPU slightly.

20:16:44.281: Video stopped, number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 3935/188550 (2.1%)

 
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