Uh, the DOZENS of threads on this same topic, is same forum, in recent years
No such thing, typically, as OBS Studio being Open and NOT doing anything.
OBS Studio is doing relatively little, to nothing, when Open ONLY if in a Scene collection with NO Sources requiring processing ... otherwise OBS Studio is doing plenty (regardless if you notice it or not, whether displayed or not).. Why? so when you click on a scene that does have such sources, that the content can instantly be displayed (composited) as configured. There are some nuances to this, which I'll leave you to dive into deeper, or someone else can comment. I recall there is a consideration regarding the the 'display' icon impact for a Source, but don't recall exact details and if that has changed over OBS Studio versions in recent years
1. don't ignore the pinned post in the forum about posting your OBS Studio log when asking for help
2. Do yourself a favor, first submit that log to automated analyzer (see my .sig), then manually review the log yourself. if you see lots of errors... figure them out before posting (streamelements plugin pukes all over the log... if you have that, good luck)
Basic considerations often overlooked
- Starting OBS Studio means all the rendering is taking lace (most of, if not the bulk, of the computational heavy lifting ... Streaming and/or Recording is just outputting that existing rendering (for the most part, there are nuances)
- Using Studio Mode = 2X rendering workload (though good you noted not using Preview window already, but for reference for others)
- Some 3rd party plugins (looking disgustingly at streamelements) are known problem children... so to speak.
- Doing CPU intensive tasks (like chromakeying or certain other filters/effects) can overload a system
- beware basic Operating System hygiene, unnecessary background tasks, etc.
- And don't assume you LAN/WAN connection to streaming server is ok, unless you have real-time monitoring in place, and know how to interpret the results. Trying Recording (only) first... resolve performance issues if lag is a problem (rendering/encoding, game, etc). Then stream, if problems resolved with Recording, and issue only with streaming, the issue may not have anything to do with OBS Studio (see related FAQ)
- the mixing of Window and Display Capture in same scene (not my issue, but I've seen plenty of cautions, so look into details yourself)
- That the various screen Capture methods each have own Pro's & Con's and work better for some applications vs others, and application (incl game) updates can change things. see you need to research yourself if your chosen game needs adjustments for a good capture
Then there is the issue of new/different screen refresh rates and how video buffer capture works for streaming, that can work against each other. So, don't have monitors at different refresh rates (unless you really research in depth the implications), and don't use a monitor with an uneven simple multiple refresh rate vs fps (ie don't use 144MHz refresh with 60fps, use 120MHz)
ALL of the above can be quickly gleaned from scanning the many threads on OBS Studio impact on gaming (and/or overall system) performance when running
food for thought... dropping webcam frames over USB means either USB Root hub overload (unlikely in the scenario you mentioned) or more likely simple CPU overload. Are you using the latest, paid version, or the earlier free (but basically a poorly written BETA) utility?
Also, last I recall, the EOS webcam utility only works at camera USB speed (which is often USB 2.0 except on latest mirrorless cameras), so only a fraction of typical resolution output capability. Canon themselves used to recommend (when I last looked) using HDMI output and a HDMI capture device for higher resolution/quality.
- what are you doing for real-time hardware resource (CPU, RAM, GPU, Disk & Network I/O, etc) utilization monitoring?
I'm guessing you've overloaded your system and CPU pegged at 100%... in this scenario, things tend to behave badly at that point
I do not set out to offend, but OBS Studio is Free, Open-Source software, so the user is obligated to RTFM, or PEBKAC (and telling users that offends some... but that is their problem)
Side note for those with streamelements PoS plugin
- previously ( and I have no reason to suspect things have changed), streamelements replaced core portions of OBS Studio when installed, meaning to troubleshoot without StreamElements means simply disabling plugin won't suffice. You'd either need to re-install OBS Studio, or use a separate OBS Studio portable mode 'install' to test
