I keep seeing everybody say "record in MKV so you don't lose footage" every time someone posts about the "stopping recording..." bug (that still to this day exists for some reason) but that's just not true. I ALWAYS lose HOURS of footage after this. The MKV file will have the first min or two but that's it. I may be able to see like two or three key frames if I scroll through the video but that's it (and, no, running corrupted files through mkvtoolkit or mkvcleaner or mkvxyz etc etc does NOT work). This is infuriating. I just want to screen record. Is there a better Windows screen recorder than this?
MKV DOES lose footage after "stopping recording..." crash
- Thread starter f0xh0und
- Start date
Lawrence_SoCal
Active Member
OBS can, but is NOT intended, as a Windows Screen recorder. Sound like you are using wrong tool for the job. And real-time video encoding is VERY computationally demanding - Is your computer up to the task?
If you are losing hours of footage you must be doing multiple things wrong. I'm suspecting your system is quickly overloaded, has too slow disk I/O [or low system resource and too much else running, etc,] and so stops recording quickly, but your aren't noticing for some reason. Having the red indicator that OBS is configured to record doesn't mean it is actually writing to disk
Are you watching OBS stats window and seeing dropped frames?
If you are losing hours of footage you must be doing multiple things wrong. I'm suspecting your system is quickly overloaded, has too slow disk I/O [or low system resource and too much else running, etc,] and so stops recording quickly, but your aren't noticing for some reason. Having the red indicator that OBS is configured to record doesn't mean it is actually writing to disk
Are you watching OBS stats window and seeing dropped frames?
Harold
Active Member
You're having other issues if the "stopping recording" issue is happening, probably because of bad settings.
Provide the OBS log from the launch of OBS where you had the issue.
Harold
Active Member
You saying this doesn't provide the log you were asked for. Please provide the log
Harold, stop it with the passive aggressiveness. You need to actually scroll back up and read how rude your post and sig sound.
It was the magnifier fix causing the stopping recording/high percentage of dropped frames. Could be something to look into as far as how certain Windows accessibility features work with screen recording.
With the exception of the last couple of times, I have experienced the stopping recording bug once or twice in the hundreds upon hundreds of times I've screen recorded and had corrupted mkvs, though. Read another post about changing the fragment size so I will try that for the one in a hundred chance it does crash.
It was the magnifier fix causing the stopping recording/high percentage of dropped frames. Could be something to look into as far as how certain Windows accessibility features work with screen recording.
With the exception of the last couple of times, I have experienced the stopping recording bug once or twice in the hundreds upon hundreds of times I've screen recorded and had corrupted mkvs, though. Read another post about changing the fragment size so I will try that for the one in a hundred chance it does crash.
Harold
Active Member
Please post a log with your issue! Here's how...
OBS Studio creates a log file each time you run it which contains very useful diagnostic information. Without a log file, it's much harder for any support volunteers to figure out problems and your post may be ignored. To upload a log file, go to the Help menu > Log Files > Upload Last Log...
Pinned thread in this forum. In order to troubleshoot what's actually going on, we actually will need it.
koala
Active Member
"Stopping recording..." is no bug. It's the symptom of some other issue, and this is the file write not being able to write a complete group of pictures (GOP). With h.264-encoded material, frames are grouped for compression purposes. In short, frames within a group might refer to picture data of some frame at the end of the group, if the encoder decides this gets good compression.
So the file write module never stops writing immediately, instead it waits for the current group to finish, then stops writing. Otherwise the end of the video would look corrupted or would be missing. For a normal 30 or 60 fps video, this waiting time is perceived as instantly.
As long as the encoder isn't outputting any frame, the file writer waits.
This can happen if the encoder is overloaded and unable to encode frames in time. Worst case is if the encoder aborts encoding some frame, because it gets too many new frames to encode. Then it starts to encode the new frame, but also takes too long, and need to abort this, and so on. In the end, the encoder outputs nothing or only one frame every few seconds - this is the slide show some people get as video.
It's also possible in this situation the encoder forgets about the group of pictures it started some time ago and cannot finish that group. Starting at this moment, nothing is written to the file any more, and if you stop recording, it is stopping indefinitely, because the encoder isn't able to deliver frames to complete the group.
Symptoms for this situation is an extraordinarily high number of frames lost due to rendering and encoding lag (80%+) in the logfile. And the situation that only the first few seconds or minutes are in the file, regardless how long the recording should be. The first seconds/minutes are in the file, because despite encoder overload, frames to encode are queued, but if the buffer for the queue gets full due to severe encoder overload, the frames are thrown away and the encoding is broken from then on.
So aim for a resolution and fps where you get no lost frames due to encoding or rendering lag. Watch out for the "encoder is overloaded" message in the OBS window (it must not appear), and watch for the frames missed and skipped in the stats window of OBS: they should remain at 0 or at at least at a very low value - below 1%)
Single lost frames are often unavoidable, but more than 1% lost frames are an indication the settings are too demanding for the machine.