If I had any hair, I would be pulling it out. I'm hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction.
I have a new desktop PC. i5 4670K CPU, 250 GB SSD, 4 TB HDD, 16 GB RAM, Win 8.1, onboard ethernet, no wireless. I've been casting to justin.tv for years on my old Win XP PC using Adobe FMLE. I have plenty of upload bandwidth, usually measuring between 3.8 and 4.0 Mbps. I am not trying to do a high bandwidth cast. I set my video at 500kbps max, and sometimes as low as 200kbps. Audio is 128kbps.
My problem is that on the new PC, sometimes my cast starts dropping frames like crazy and the little indicator square bounces around in the red and yellow range. Viewers see very jumpy and freezing video. I believe (but am not certain) the problem is somewhere in the new PC, but I can't pinpoint it. The other night I was having these problems casting on the new PC. Then I stopped that and started casting form the old PC without similar problems, which I think means that the problem is not on the JTV side nor is the problem with my ISP (Charter Cable).
The really interesting thing is that the problem only occurs when I am casting with either OBS or FME and I am running a browser (Firefox, Chrome, or IE). While streaming, if I open a browser, the stream becomes unstable. If I close the browser, the stream goes back to being stable. This is a repeatable phenomenon.
Here are some things I have ruled out: It's not the CPU (80% idle worst case), it's not RAM (no more than 3GB in use), its not bandwidth (testmy.net shows 3.6Mbps while the problem is occurring, ShaperProbe shows no shaping [but see note], JTVPing shows acceptable performance [and I have tried different servers]. I checked my NIC driver (it is the current one) and my router (I did discover a firmware update but it didn't resolve the problem). I ran TCPOptimizer to no effect. I disabled the Windows Firewall, also to no effect. I reset the TCP/IP stack using netsh. There's probably some other things I tried that I can't remember right now.
Here's an interesting thing about ShaperProbe. I ran it on the new PC and it reported no upstream shaper but only reported a 373kbps rate (with 2 browsers open but not really doing anything). Then I ran it on the old PC and it reported a 3210kbps rate, also no shaping (also with 2 browsers open but quiet). Both PCs are wired into the same router.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
I have a new desktop PC. i5 4670K CPU, 250 GB SSD, 4 TB HDD, 16 GB RAM, Win 8.1, onboard ethernet, no wireless. I've been casting to justin.tv for years on my old Win XP PC using Adobe FMLE. I have plenty of upload bandwidth, usually measuring between 3.8 and 4.0 Mbps. I am not trying to do a high bandwidth cast. I set my video at 500kbps max, and sometimes as low as 200kbps. Audio is 128kbps.
My problem is that on the new PC, sometimes my cast starts dropping frames like crazy and the little indicator square bounces around in the red and yellow range. Viewers see very jumpy and freezing video. I believe (but am not certain) the problem is somewhere in the new PC, but I can't pinpoint it. The other night I was having these problems casting on the new PC. Then I stopped that and started casting form the old PC without similar problems, which I think means that the problem is not on the JTV side nor is the problem with my ISP (Charter Cable).
The really interesting thing is that the problem only occurs when I am casting with either OBS or FME and I am running a browser (Firefox, Chrome, or IE). While streaming, if I open a browser, the stream becomes unstable. If I close the browser, the stream goes back to being stable. This is a repeatable phenomenon.
Here are some things I have ruled out: It's not the CPU (80% idle worst case), it's not RAM (no more than 3GB in use), its not bandwidth (testmy.net shows 3.6Mbps while the problem is occurring, ShaperProbe shows no shaping [but see note], JTVPing shows acceptable performance [and I have tried different servers]. I checked my NIC driver (it is the current one) and my router (I did discover a firmware update but it didn't resolve the problem). I ran TCPOptimizer to no effect. I disabled the Windows Firewall, also to no effect. I reset the TCP/IP stack using netsh. There's probably some other things I tried that I can't remember right now.
Here's an interesting thing about ShaperProbe. I ran it on the new PC and it reported no upstream shaper but only reported a 373kbps rate (with 2 browsers open but not really doing anything). Then I ran it on the old PC and it reported a 3210kbps rate, also no shaping (also with 2 browsers open but quiet). Both PCs are wired into the same router.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance.