Question / Help Insane # of Frames Dropped

Matt Landberg

New Member
I haven't streamed in about a year now. When I used to stream I never had any issues with the quality and didn't have dropped frames. I just tried streaming again tonight and was having about 80% of my frames dropped. My OBS settings are the same as before and my hardware hasn't changed. The only thing that has changed is my internet. It's the same provider as before but I have much faster download and upload speeds. I've uploaded a log of my most recent stream attempt (it was brief). Any help you can provide would be great. I'm trying to stream Overwatch by the way.

https://gist.github.com/24cfff887b3e51fca5c7
 

FerretBomb

Active Member
Could be that you just have a worse route to the ingest than before, with the new connection. But if you look at the log, you'll notice it spammed with this:
19:05:53: CLRHost:: Browser 1: %cTNotifier (TNotifier Error): FAILED to connect to TNotifier Quartz
I'd try removing that source, and see if it clears up... could be that CLR is going nuts because it can't talk to that resource, and might be jamming up the network.

Grab the Twitch Bandwidth Tester and run it as Admin, to take a peek at your throughput to Twitch (speedtest.net is useless for livestreamers due to how they test):
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/tech-support/478845-twitchtest-twitch-bandwidth-tester

Also, 2000kbps is nowhere NEAR enough for 1080p@30fps, much less on a high-motion application like an FPS. It's going to look horrible. Downscale to 720p.
Also, turn Aero ON. The only reason to turn it off is if you have to use a Monitor Capture under Windows 7, and there's a much better workaround for that now. Aero on actually makes OBS run significantly smoother and more efficiently, especially in the case of window captures, and to a lesser extent game captures.
 

FerretBomb

Active Member
In the new log, you've moved to 3500kbps, which will only make the problem significantly worse.
19:39:55: RTMPPublisher::SocketLoop: Stalled for 6691 ms to write 456113 bytes (buffer: 0 / 459776), unstable connection?
19:40:02: RTMPPublisher::SocketLoop: Stalled for 6826 ms to write 455759 bytes (buffer: 0 / 459776), unstable connection?
This says your connection to the server is weak/flaky. It wasn't doing this before at 2000, so yep, it's worse now by a lot.

What are the results from the Twitch Bandwidth Tester?
 

Matt Landberg

New Member
I've also run the twitch bandwidth test and all of the servers are coming up with horrible bandwidth (around 1000kbps). I'm always around 10mbps upload while doing speed tests on Testmy.net. I feel like there's an issue causing my twitch band width to be super low. Any idea how to fix that?
 

Matt Landberg

New Member
My ISP is supposed to be providing 200mbps download and 10mbps upload. I know I'm not always going to be at the max but both of those should be more than good enough for streaming, correct?
 

FerretBomb

Active Member
It's not just bandwidth across your local link, but your route(s) to the Twitch ingest(s). Some ISPs will throttle or outright shape traffic to Twitch to prevent people from streaming, as it's very bandwidth intensive. Then again, you may just have bad luck and be stuck with a bad route.
There's other reasons like improperly bonded IP connections (so you can only talk to a server at the max rate of one of the channels) but those are rare occurrences in this day and age, and a speed test would show those.

If you have the technical skills, you could try something like setting up a private VPN to a DigitalOcean droplet (do NOT use public/free VPNs! They have access to all data going across their link, including private data like your stream key, and can steal it as a man-in-the-middle... and usually have terrible throughput anyway).

Beyond that, only thing to do is turn down your bitrate until it stops dropping frames, or switch ingest servers.
Or yell at your ISP, but they'll just say they're not responsible for your connection to other people's servers outside their infrastructure, unless you can prove that they're the ones shaping/throttling it, and even then they may just insist that it's a quality-of-service thing or part of your contract or any of a thousand other BS excuses.

But yeah, unless you're a Partner, you don't want to exceed 2000kbps anyway. But it looks like you'll have to go lower and test more. Do try power-cycling your modem, just in case.
 

Matt Landberg

New Member
I'm receiving pretty consistent download speeds of 100+mbps and upload speeds of 8+mbps. Doesn't matter the time of the day or night. These speeds remain constant. However, as soon as I attempt to connect to twitch.tv or stream to twitch.tv my speeds are reduced dramatically. Attached is a picture of the results of the twitch bandwidth test. I did a few tests and all of them come up about the same. The speeds are terrible. I've contacted my ISP about the issue and I'm waiting to hear back from them. Is there anything else that I can do on my end?

Here's the most recent OBS log. Had to reduce bit rate down to 500kbps in order to get rid of most (but not all) dropped frames. This is really disappointing. I used to stream at a much higher quality with no issues..

https://gist.github.com/ed088f2ca8c8f14b4e00
 

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FerretBomb

Active Member
Have you tried running a speedtest before, and while streaming? Not TBT, but testmy or speedtest to see if your whole connection is being stomped.
I'm not sure if ShaperProbe still works, but it might be worth a shot? http://netinfer.net/diffprobe/shaperprobe.html

That looks to be the same logfile, unless I'm mistaken. OBS only closes out the logfile when you exit, so may have re-uploaded the last one again by accident.

From that test though it does look like you may get better results streaming to New York than you are to Seattle.
 

Matt Landberg

New Member
Here's the updated log. Sorry for the last one being a repost.

https://gist.github.com/dfe7288b2ee63505c593

According to Testmy.net

I'm consistently at 9 - 10 mbps upload speeds when not streaming
I'm consistently at around 50mbps download speeds (I'm paying for 100mbps so that's not great but overall still a decent speed)

I dropped to 7 - 8.5 mbps upload speeds while streaming
I dropped to around 40-45 bps download speeds while streaming

Lastly, I live in Idaho so it's really bizarre that my bandwidth test was giving better results to New York than to Seattle.

Any thoughts on these results/information?
 

FerretBomb

Active Member
Definitely don't run on Superfast or Ultrafast. Those are worse compression methods. Just mentioning; the slower the preset, the more CPU it uses and the better the video will look at the same bitrate.

Yeah, your connection isn't being stomped.
The only thing I can think of as an additional fix-attempt would be trying to use a repeater service like restream.io... I'd strongly recommend resetting your streaming key after testing through them though, so they no longer have access to your stream. There's good reason Twitch says not to share your key with anyone.
This wouldn't guarantee anything if it doesn't work (same dropped-frames problem), as your ISP could be limiting rates to that site too. But if it starts working instantly? Almost definitely an ISP throttling of Twitch.

Network routes are influenced by geography, but are NOT guaranteed. When I lived in SoCal, I had a better network route to a server in NY than I did to one in Sacramento (norcal). Being close-by just gives the potential for lower latency or a shorter/stronger route.
 

Matt Landberg

New Member
Just thought I'd throw this in here. Did another twitch bandwidth test and got amazing results for San Jose when all previous tests have been terrible. The numbers I'm getting are so inconsistent it's ridiculous.

I'll update my compression method. My CPU is an older Haswell i-5 processor so I've been hesitant to make my CPU work too hard. Thanks again for all your help, you've been great.

Edit: Computer just restarted itself instantly after changing the CPU preset from Super Fast to Very Fast

Edit: Reverted to Super Fast and I'm streaming to the San Jose server and having zero issues. Not a single frame dropped. Quality is fine. I don't know if it'll continue to stay this way but for now it appears that I've got the problems resolved.

Thanks again!
 

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