Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disable

[Boildown]

Instead of having a check box on the Advanced page to enable Constant Frame Rate, have a check box to disable Constant Frame Rate. Constant Frame Rate (CFR) seems to be messing a lot of people up. But CFR should be the default for streaming and recording computer video.

Variable Frame Rate (VFR) kind of makes sense in the transcoding world of ripping DVDs and whatnot. I know Handbrake seems to want you to use it. Perhaps people are just used to enabling VFR because of Handbrake and the like. Perhaps VFR sounds more flexible, which ought to be a good thing. But that's actually only ever true for transcoding. OBS is for making original copy, not taking one thing and making it something else. OBS users should always use CFR unless there's a real good reason not to.

My suggestion is to make it far more likely that people will default to CFR instead of VFR.

 

[paibox]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

CFR can currently (0.552b) cause problems when there are late frames, as it can take quite a while for the encoder output to recover, resulting in even more late frames. When this is fixed, maybe CFR should be made the default, but not at the time of writing this.

 

[Lain]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

CFR should be default, yes. Just a bug with it for older/slower computers currently that needs to be fixed (which annoys the living heck out of me), I'm going to have to fix that bug because of twitch's new requirements

 

[Bensam123]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

CFR has to do with Twitch enforcing CBR?

 

[dodgepong]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

Twitch seems to have problems detecting the correct keyint when CFR is not enabled.

 

[Bensam123]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

Does that disable some functionality or something? As far as I've seen you can still stream even if the reported keyframe is off or set to something else entirely.

 

[dodgepong]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

Starting in September 2013, Twitch will be limiting the availability if your stream if it is detected that your settings don't fully match their requirements: http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1253460

 

[Krazy]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

It's really only if you care about people being able to watch on mobile devices.

 

[Boildown]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

It's really only if you care about people being able to watch on mobile devices.

Constant Frame Rate also seems to eliminate a lot of common problems OBS users have with their streams, or their viewers being able to watch their streams, and being able to edit the video captured to disk in a NLE afterwards. Certainly not just compatibility with mobile devices. CFR should always be on for just about any OBS-related video creation task.

 

[paibox]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

Jim has made some major improvements to the late frame issue already, so CFR will most likely be the default in the next version of OBS, barring any possible major problems with the new implementation. Still in need of some testing, but it's looking really promising so far.

 

[Boildown]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

I'm still seeing a ton of Help requests on these forums because people don't have CFR on. I further request/suggest that it be made harder (or impossible) to turn CFR off.

Honestly I can't think of a good reason to not use CFR. Anyone have a reason that doesn't reveal their own massive misunderstanding of streaming and x264 encoding?

When CFR isn't used, people sometimes feel better about their encoding logs, but having CFR off just hides problems, it doesn't fix them. When there's a large spike, people feel the lag, and when CFR is off, it might not be recorded in the log as any kind of problem, and then they come here wondering why OBS sucks compared to program X, and use their clean log as evidence.

At worst, I think the ability to turn CFR off should be hidden on the Advanced page and it should take some effort against recommendations to turn it off. At best, it should be impossible to turn CFR off except perhaps with an ini file flag (similar to 444 lossless encoding).

I would much rather see the few people that know the difference come here and ask why the ability to have CFR off was removed and then we talk them out of having it off, than a bunch of people who have no idea what CFR is and are guessing at settings come here with problems because they have CFR off, as happens now.

 

[Krazy]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

Well, a lot of people with CFR off had probably started using OBS when CFR off was the default and new versions don't override settings. Maybe have an update that turns it on or something.

 

[Bensam123]

Re: Make Constant Frame Rate the Default, check box to disab

I keep CFR off in order to make sure everyone is relatively sync'd up. Instead of some people who may end up further behind the stream due to rendering times (slower computers) and buffering. I tried CFR for about a week and found people would randomly end up behind the stream by up to five minutes for some strange reason, which makes interaction hard, so I leave it off.

I don't have any problems streaming with it off though.