KidoSwagomi
New Member
So I've been trying to get into streaming for a fair while now, but I've been very off-and-on about it due to consistent problems I've encountered while streaming. I decided to give the issue another look today and while I think I've made some progress (ruling out certain causes) I still haven't found a viable solution.
Here's what's happening: My streams are consistently interrupted by the video completely freezing for a few seconds at a time, every 4-5 seconds. Audio continues without problem. Example from my fiddling tonight can be seen here: https://www.twitch.tv/kidoswagomi/v/115318758
(ignore me babbling to myself in the corner. there's no voice audio deliberately)
At first, I thought it was a problem with CPU usage, but after changing settings in OBS (downsampling to 720p, reducing FPS to 30, among a few other things) the CPU issues vanished, but the bigger issue remained.
I took a look at R1CH's TwitchTest, and found it giving me pretty low ratings across the board (R1 says a score of 80 is optimal for streaming); http://puu.sh/tp72k/d7ea036281.png This is when I realized my problem was most likely bandwidth. This wasn't much of a shock; I live in the middle of nowhere in south-central Ohio (about 30 minutes south of Columbus) and our internet has always been pretty spotty. But I do pull an average of 2-2.4Mbps from both SpeedTest AND TestMy, which from my understanding should be a fair bandwidth for streaming. When watching the kbps counter in OBS, though, it's rarely utilizing over 1500kbps.
I took a look on the Twitch Inspector, and got these results (This is the graph for the stream linked above): http://puu.sh/tp7hc/6a814e8376.png
Both Bandwidth and FPS are ALL over the place, which was consistent with what I was seeing by just watching the kbps counter in OBS.
My bitrate is currently set at 1200, which seemed more than fair judging by the speed test results. FPS set to 25, resolution to 540p, ultrafast CPU preset, and streaming to the Ashburn, VA server (Chicago is closer but on TwitchTest Ashburn was the lowest ping).
I guess where my confusion is coming in is that, as far as I can tell, my upload speed on its own is fine, but it seems like OBS is just severely underutilizing it (or something else is consuming it? I don't think The Division uses that much bandwidth), leading to the pauses in the video feed. The OBS log for this stream also shows around 40% of frames were dropped due to bandwidth problems.
tl;dr: Thought I had CPU problems, turned out to be bandwidth, upload speeds SEEM fine until OBS starts streaming then everything goes downhill.
Also, here's the log file from the above-linked stream: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rbscrosp2w1idcp/2017-01-16 23-36-00.txt?dl=0
I didn't attach it to the post because it just wasn't uploading for whatever reason. All that it seems to confirm is that the dropped frames are in fact caused by bandwidth problems.
Since it could be helpful, here's my specs, as well;
Here's what's happening: My streams are consistently interrupted by the video completely freezing for a few seconds at a time, every 4-5 seconds. Audio continues without problem. Example from my fiddling tonight can be seen here: https://www.twitch.tv/kidoswagomi/v/115318758
(ignore me babbling to myself in the corner. there's no voice audio deliberately)
At first, I thought it was a problem with CPU usage, but after changing settings in OBS (downsampling to 720p, reducing FPS to 30, among a few other things) the CPU issues vanished, but the bigger issue remained.
I took a look at R1CH's TwitchTest, and found it giving me pretty low ratings across the board (R1 says a score of 80 is optimal for streaming); http://puu.sh/tp72k/d7ea036281.png This is when I realized my problem was most likely bandwidth. This wasn't much of a shock; I live in the middle of nowhere in south-central Ohio (about 30 minutes south of Columbus) and our internet has always been pretty spotty. But I do pull an average of 2-2.4Mbps from both SpeedTest AND TestMy, which from my understanding should be a fair bandwidth for streaming. When watching the kbps counter in OBS, though, it's rarely utilizing over 1500kbps.
I took a look on the Twitch Inspector, and got these results (This is the graph for the stream linked above): http://puu.sh/tp7hc/6a814e8376.png
Both Bandwidth and FPS are ALL over the place, which was consistent with what I was seeing by just watching the kbps counter in OBS.
My bitrate is currently set at 1200, which seemed more than fair judging by the speed test results. FPS set to 25, resolution to 540p, ultrafast CPU preset, and streaming to the Ashburn, VA server (Chicago is closer but on TwitchTest Ashburn was the lowest ping).
I guess where my confusion is coming in is that, as far as I can tell, my upload speed on its own is fine, but it seems like OBS is just severely underutilizing it (or something else is consuming it? I don't think The Division uses that much bandwidth), leading to the pauses in the video feed. The OBS log for this stream also shows around 40% of frames were dropped due to bandwidth problems.
tl;dr: Thought I had CPU problems, turned out to be bandwidth, upload speeds SEEM fine until OBS starts streaming then everything goes downhill.
Also, here's the log file from the above-linked stream: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rbscrosp2w1idcp/2017-01-16 23-36-00.txt?dl=0
I didn't attach it to the post because it just wasn't uploading for whatever reason. All that it seems to confirm is that the dropped frames are in fact caused by bandwidth problems.
Since it could be helpful, here's my specs, as well;
- i5 3570k 3.4GHz
- HyperX 16GB DDR3-1866
- MSI GTX 770 4GB
- ASUS PCE-AC56 Wireless-AC1300 (yea, wireless. unfortunately I still live at home and the router is on the complete other side of the 1st floor of the house, and I can't go running wires along the walls into my room, this thing rarely gives me trouble though).
