Question / Help Impossible To Sync

[CyrilOfRhodes]

I have been trying for a hair-tearing 6 hours now, to Sync my Elgato, USB webcam, and USB Snowball Mic.

I can only Sync the Mic&Cam or the Cam&Elgato, never all 3.

Right now, I'm at the point where I've been able to finangle getting the Webcam and Snowball synced using a combination of the Global Sync Buffer (1,450) and buffer the webcam at (590).
I have no idea why, but for some reason, I absolutely swear that changing the Values for the Snowball's independent audio buffer makes ZERO difference, unlike the elgato audio buffer, which works fine.

My problem now is that unless I can figure out how to buffer the Snowball, or how to buffer the webcam without losing the sync with the Snowball, I need to find a way to Sync the Elgato to those two while they are in sync.

Sigh, I'm numb in the head from the amount of time I've spent playing around with buffers.

I'm using a powerful-ish laptop (Aspire V, 12GB of Ram, etc etc) and a solid internet connection (100/10 mps) , if that matters.

I'd love any possible solutions ASAP, so I've included screenshots of anything I thought might be helpful.

 

[Lain]

USB 2.0 devices have delay, and often varying delay. They're not ideal for compositing. I'm working on something to potentiall help with the issue but ETA is just totally unknown at this point.

Generally, the thing that frustrates me is that there are so many users out there on laptops who want to stream a console game but don't know what they're getting in to. Issue #1 is they want to make a serious stream, yet they want to do it with a laptop. Laptops have limited capability in terms of access to devices, lack of access to superior PCI-E devices in particular (though to be fair, PCI-E devices almost always can only just capture HDMI, which is not ideal if you want to capture composite or older consoles). Issue #2 is they buy any inexpensive capture device they can find and don't realize how much that will impact the stream. A USB 2.0 capture device is delayed, often the delay can be variable, as you've seen. It makes it so incredibly unideal for steaming that you're not that only person who gets numb in the head. I have to tell people about this all the time, constantly when ever they have configuration issues with their USB 2.0 devices.

So what are you supposed to do when you have a laptop? Well, generally there's not much choice, laptops can't use glorious PCI-E cards that have no delay, and USB 3.0 devices are expensive, so at this point in time, you've got to pretty much approximate the delay and live with what you get best you can, at least until some point in the future when I figure out how to automatically sync everything via code alone, which in and of itself is an incredibly cumbersome task. It's something I really want to spend time on automating, it would greatly reduce both of our headaches on the matter and make USB2 a little less cumbersome for streaming.

 

[CyrilOfRhodes]

My laptop is high end and fine. OBS is not at all intensive for it, and what you're talking about isn't the issue. I'm talking about being able to buffer everything except for the audio coming in the from the mic. The audio isn't coming in too late, it's coming in too early. I can't buffer the audio from the snowball mic, it doesn't make any difference to change values in settings. I'm using an elgato, which isn't cheap in terms of console cap. Try again, please.

 

[Lain]

You may have misunderstood what I wrote, or not read it entirely - laptops are fine in terms of speed usually, that is not the issue. Again, I'm referring to device capability, not the performance of the laptop or anything like that. Laptops perform great these days. However, they only have access to USB capture devices, USB 2.0 in particular being the most common people use. USB 2.0 capture devices are what I was referring to in terms of delay, not the mic. The elgato is a delayed device. The device itself has delay -- and often USB 2.0 capture devices can increase in their delay. So, you as the user of that device have to sync up your mic/webcam to it.

Anyway, try this:
1.) Turn global audio offset to 0 in advanced
2.) Go in to your webcam properties, and select your mic in the drop-down there. Then turn on "use buffering" for the webcam, and set the "use buffering" size to 1500. This will cause the mic to sync with the webcam, and set the webmac/mic delay
3.) Go in to audio settings, and disable the mic there, because you enabled it on the webcam itself.

If you do these things, the webcam and mic should be in sync with each other, and relatively in sync with the elgato. Note however that due to a design flaw in OBS, this will not work if you want to include stuff like skype.

Again, I want to program a means to automate the delay compensation in the future so users don't have to mess with buffers, but I don't have an ETA.

 

[CyrilOfRhodes]

I would love to, but the Microsoft LifeCam studio doesn't have any options for audio, it would seem.