How do I get the best performance on OBS

[AwesomeKalin55]

Hi, I'm struggling to get the best settings for OBS. Here are my specs:
AMD A6-9225 (from 2014 or 15)
AMD Radeon R4
4gb of RAM (planning to upgrade to 8gb)
1920x1080 screen resolution
Since I am currently on my phone, I will upload a log later
I want a minimum of 720p and 30fps, although if I have to lower this, I will.
I prefer resolution over frame rate.

 

[koala]

This CPU is one of the weakest CPUs for the cheapest smallest Windows notebooks in existence.
Forget live video encoding on this machine.

 

[AwesomeKalin55]

I'm not doing live video encoding, I'm just recording

 

[koala]

Recording is live encoding. Or call it real time encoding. It's obligatory that the CPU is able to encode each video frame within the time to the next video frame. If you record with 30 fps, it's 1/30 s or 0,33 ms time available for each frame. You need a sufficiently powerful CPU for encoding this.
You can see the encoding times if you terminate OBS, restart it, then look at the previous logfile. On exit, OBS appends a statistics footer to each logfile, so you need to terminate and restart and look at the previous logfile for this.

This is in contrast to re-encoding an existing recording with a tool like Handbrake. For that you have unlimited time - you can let it run over night.

 

[AwesomeKalin55]

Thanks, so basically I have to setup OBS/reprogram OBS so that it only encodes at the end or it ignores the fact if it hasn't finished a frame. Or go the laze route and find a plugin that does this for me

 

[konsolenritter]

Sorry, you can't change the most inherent working principle of foreign software, just as you wish. OBS have to encode what it records, within split second! There is no such amount of ram you could "record" just minutes or hours and encode later. You would be forced to write all content uncompressed to your hard drive in between. That way your machine isn't capable, too.

(In reality it works such way: In science there is spent thousands of dollars for special computers that can - ummmmh - save a couple of seconds or minutes on ultra-fast raid systems, to work on that data later.)

To be honest, read again what koala wrote.

Recording is recording whats happening just in the moment. Otherwise it wouldn't been recording. If a machine can't keep up with the incoming data, it cannot record (beyond the possibility to record to nirwana, or - as unix users say - to /dev/null).

What you wanted is an tape recorder and say: "Let's record now. But that nasty tape i will put into the recorder two hours later..." - that doesn't work due to physics laws.

Keep with the early hint, that your AMD-A6 is not suitable for such task. You'll save alot of frustration and try&error for yourself if you better look for a suitable up-to-date machine for your needs.

 

[AwesomeKalin55]

I'm not going to upgrade, because I don't have the money and my device is only 1.5 years old! The only reason it has bad specs is because of business practices!

 

[konsolenritter]

Business practices... Yepp, i understand. Welcome at the real world of technical issues beside business decisions. *sigh*
Understand well. So come back if you have an tangible issue and send your log, we will see...
But be warned.

 

[koala]

Use Tools->Auto Configuration Wizard to get settings suited for your machine. OBS runs recording benchmarks and chooses appropriate settings with this.

If you want to manually figure out the best settings, start with canvas and output size of 320x180 and 10 fps. Try a test video. See if there is any encoder overload. If there isn't, increase the fps to 15, then to 30. If all this works, reset fps to 10 and increase the resolution to 426x240 (240p) and start again through all fps. Then back to 10 fps and resolution 640x360 (360p), again all fps, then 854x480 (480p), then all fps, then 1280x720. You will see which combination of fps and resolution will work best for you without lost/lagged frames.

Doubling the fps will need double the computing power to encode.
Doubling the resolution will need 4 times the computing power to encode.
Doubling both at the same time will need 8 times the computing power to encode.

Use simple output mode and "Software (x264 low CPU usage preset, increase file size)" as encoder.
The quality doesn't matter for CPU required, however better quality means more data to write, and with a slow hard disk this may be a bottleneck.