Robertjm
New Member
Hi all,
My church has been streaming our Sunday services using a 2020 i5 Quad Core MacBook Pro with 16gb RAM for a few years now. There were hiccups at the start. But, up until recently things were going OK. But, now the CPU usage is going through the roof, and I cannot figure out what's going on.
Currently running macOS Ventura 13.6.4 and OBS 30.0.2. Installed the NDI 5.x plug-in for getting slides from another machine on the network. Networking is using Cat-6 ethernet cabling. Our ISP speed tests at approximately 800/800 using Speedtest.org. We use a Canon g70 camera connected via a Camlink 4k capture device (hooked up by Thunderbolt 3).
The CPU usage had been in the 20%-35% range. But, last weekend it actually climbed to 70%+, and I got a ton of "Encoder overloaded" error messages. I completely removed OBS and the NDI plug-in and started from scratch. But, no luck.
What are people using for settings these days?
I had it set to x264 for the encoder because that laptop doesn't include a built-in GPU. Running using 60fps and bandwidth setting is CBR at 6000 Kbps. CPU Usage preset is currently using Veryfast, though I have tried superfast in the past. My recording settings are set to "Use Stream Encoder" for video an CoreAudio AAC for audio.
Originally, this computer crashed any time I tried the "Apple VT H264 Software Encoder" so always used x264. But, I gave it another try with the Apple encoder, and it didn't crash today; ad the CPU usage stayed in below 40% as a general rule. However, when I ended the streaming it seemed to take forever to end the recording, and the CPU usage skyrocketed until it eventually ended a minute, or two, later.
Unfortunately, the image quality of the file archived at Vimeo was ghostlike at times; and not at all satisfying.
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As an experiment, I tried streaming with my M2 MacBook Air. CPU usage never got above 11% when using the "Apple VT H264 Hardware Encoder" setting. But, the bitrate during the stream was bouncing all over the place; sometimes as low as 750kbps.
Surely, there are people using the newer Apple Silicon laptops for streaming?
At this point, I'm even entertaining leaving OBS if this issue can't be resolved, though it hurts thinking about that.
My church has been streaming our Sunday services using a 2020 i5 Quad Core MacBook Pro with 16gb RAM for a few years now. There were hiccups at the start. But, up until recently things were going OK. But, now the CPU usage is going through the roof, and I cannot figure out what's going on.
Currently running macOS Ventura 13.6.4 and OBS 30.0.2. Installed the NDI 5.x plug-in for getting slides from another machine on the network. Networking is using Cat-6 ethernet cabling. Our ISP speed tests at approximately 800/800 using Speedtest.org. We use a Canon g70 camera connected via a Camlink 4k capture device (hooked up by Thunderbolt 3).
The CPU usage had been in the 20%-35% range. But, last weekend it actually climbed to 70%+, and I got a ton of "Encoder overloaded" error messages. I completely removed OBS and the NDI plug-in and started from scratch. But, no luck.
What are people using for settings these days?
I had it set to x264 for the encoder because that laptop doesn't include a built-in GPU. Running using 60fps and bandwidth setting is CBR at 6000 Kbps. CPU Usage preset is currently using Veryfast, though I have tried superfast in the past. My recording settings are set to "Use Stream Encoder" for video an CoreAudio AAC for audio.
Originally, this computer crashed any time I tried the "Apple VT H264 Software Encoder" so always used x264. But, I gave it another try with the Apple encoder, and it didn't crash today; ad the CPU usage stayed in below 40% as a general rule. However, when I ended the streaming it seemed to take forever to end the recording, and the CPU usage skyrocketed until it eventually ended a minute, or two, later.
Unfortunately, the image quality of the file archived at Vimeo was ghostlike at times; and not at all satisfying.
-------------
As an experiment, I tried streaming with my M2 MacBook Air. CPU usage never got above 11% when using the "Apple VT H264 Hardware Encoder" setting. But, the bitrate during the stream was bouncing all over the place; sometimes as low as 750kbps.
Surely, there are people using the newer Apple Silicon laptops for streaming?
At this point, I'm even entertaining leaving OBS if this issue can't be resolved, though it hurts thinking about that.