Hi folks,
I'm posting this in case mr recent experiences may be useful to some of you. (or if anyone would like to correct/improve upon what I'm posting)
I'm a newcomer to OBS, a musician who's had to start Live streaming to keep the music going during these troubled times.
I couldn't afford expensive equipment, had an old Nikon DSLR which has clean HDMI so started using OBS with Sparkocam but the video quality wasn't good...so got a Chinese capture card (Elgato was way out of my budget) and to my delight I managed to get good 1080p streaming,
(I'm running a Win10 PC with 32GB RAM, have a Presonus Fire Studio audio interface (FireWire connection), when I'm streaming the CPU never exceeds 50% utilization, internet upload speed stable 50Mbps > DSLR connects via a HDMI capture card which goes into PC's USB 3.0 port) I stream on Facebook and YouTube
BUT it seemed like getting the video running in OBS was a dicey thing, I'd have the video freeze or not display at all when starting OBS, despite using the exact same settings as previously, sometimes I ended up having the deactivate-reactivate the device, sometimes even having to uninstall-reinstall the capture card via Control Panel....it all seemed so random and was driving me nuts. Here are some ponts I seem to have noticed.
1. OBS doesn't have a "Save settings" option, and realize that it just sort of auto-saves whatever configurations we're working with, then when it restarts it loads the last-used configuration.
2. The Capture-Device seems to suffer from some inconsistency, anything that interrupts the video feed tends to result in OBS not recognizing the re-connected feed, even a slight interruption seems to cause the video to freeze and/o not show on restart.
3. There seems to be something strange going on if I start OBS, then turn on the camera, then turn on the FireWire interface unit...the video capture is unstable and inconsistent.
4. If I have had a stable video stream, when I end the stream if I switch off the camera before Exiting OBS, subsequent sessions become unstable again.
5. If I get a stable video session, and after stopping the stream I EXIT OBS while the camera is still on, (turn off the DSLR only after OBS has been switched off)..... then for the next session I start the camera and wait about 30 seconds before starting OBS....Eureka! The next session is stable!
6. Once my OBS session is started, I don't minimize it, I just leave OBS window run in the background, and open other windows on top of it if needed.....I just haven't done tests with OBS minimized, but apart from this I've done almost a dozen sessions without any problems at all....the trick seems to be turning on everything else first, and turning on OBS last, and when finished to turn off OBS first before turning off the DSLR. A bit of waiting for each program to properly load also probably helps.
I hope this info is helpful, and would appreciate any feedback on how I could modify/improve upon this.
Cheers,
Raggy.
www.raggyproject.com
www.youtube.com
I'm posting this in case mr recent experiences may be useful to some of you. (or if anyone would like to correct/improve upon what I'm posting)
I'm a newcomer to OBS, a musician who's had to start Live streaming to keep the music going during these troubled times.
I couldn't afford expensive equipment, had an old Nikon DSLR which has clean HDMI so started using OBS with Sparkocam but the video quality wasn't good...so got a Chinese capture card (Elgato was way out of my budget) and to my delight I managed to get good 1080p streaming,
(I'm running a Win10 PC with 32GB RAM, have a Presonus Fire Studio audio interface (FireWire connection), when I'm streaming the CPU never exceeds 50% utilization, internet upload speed stable 50Mbps > DSLR connects via a HDMI capture card which goes into PC's USB 3.0 port) I stream on Facebook and YouTube
BUT it seemed like getting the video running in OBS was a dicey thing, I'd have the video freeze or not display at all when starting OBS, despite using the exact same settings as previously, sometimes I ended up having the deactivate-reactivate the device, sometimes even having to uninstall-reinstall the capture card via Control Panel....it all seemed so random and was driving me nuts. Here are some ponts I seem to have noticed.
1. OBS doesn't have a "Save settings" option, and realize that it just sort of auto-saves whatever configurations we're working with, then when it restarts it loads the last-used configuration.
2. The Capture-Device seems to suffer from some inconsistency, anything that interrupts the video feed tends to result in OBS not recognizing the re-connected feed, even a slight interruption seems to cause the video to freeze and/o not show on restart.
3. There seems to be something strange going on if I start OBS, then turn on the camera, then turn on the FireWire interface unit...the video capture is unstable and inconsistent.
4. If I have had a stable video stream, when I end the stream if I switch off the camera before Exiting OBS, subsequent sessions become unstable again.
5. If I get a stable video session, and after stopping the stream I EXIT OBS while the camera is still on, (turn off the DSLR only after OBS has been switched off)..... then for the next session I start the camera and wait about 30 seconds before starting OBS....Eureka! The next session is stable!
6. Once my OBS session is started, I don't minimize it, I just leave OBS window run in the background, and open other windows on top of it if needed.....I just haven't done tests with OBS minimized, but apart from this I've done almost a dozen sessions without any problems at all....the trick seems to be turning on everything else first, and turning on OBS last, and when finished to turn off OBS first before turning off the DSLR. A bit of waiting for each program to properly load also probably helps.
I hope this info is helpful, and would appreciate any feedback on how I could modify/improve upon this.
Cheers,
Raggy.
www.raggyproject.com
Raggy Singh C
www.youtube.com