Jo Li KMC
New Member
Greetings. I am having a problem with the most recent versions of OBS Studio that I can't figure out. For some reason, my encoded randomly goes from 60 FPS to 30 FPS for a while. But the thing is, while steaming or recording, OBS Studio does not report any errors. There's no "encoder can't keep up" warnings, the Statistics info box didn't report any dropped or missing frames, nothing like that. Needless to say, I was baffled.
On the 4th of July, I streamed about two hours of Mega Man Maker, a fan-made game in the Mega Man series. After the stream, I took a look at the footage and noticed something odd. Seemingly, the video would drop from 60 FPS to 30 FPS at random. Much later on, I decided to record some gameplay from the same app. When I was editing the video, though, I noticed the exact same thing had happened: the video switched from 60 FPS to 30 FPS. This issue persisted with Mega Man Maker for the entire month, so I decided to do some tests.
I tried recording some gameplay from FCE Ultra X, a popular NES emulator, and got 60 FPS across the board with that. And that led me to believe that Mega Man Maker was, in fact, the one-and-only culprit. Another user on YouTube had gameplay footage which was plagued with halved FPS for seemingly no reason, too, and I was able to stream Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition – a cross-platform port of the same-named MS-DOS game – for two hours without experiencing any unreported frame rate adjustments, so I was pretty much convinced that it wasn't OBS. I decided I even made a video about it, the other day, after seeing someone else experience the same problem. It seems like v1.8+ is the problem… but then, I saw something that made me rethink things…
I was watching someone play Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia – a Nintendo DS game – through the melonDS emulator. While watching the gameplay, I noticed that the video dropped to 30 FPS completely at random, just like with Mega Man Maker. Which just makes me even more confused for reasons I'll get into momentarily. But, seemingly… Mega Man Maker isn't the only "problem app" for OBS Studio, as I'd thought.
Now, I've read in other forum threads that if the computer is overworked or otherwise unable to share resources, OBS can occasionally run out of resources and be unable to perform as intended even without generating errors or warnings. I have a budget laptop from three years ago, so any time OBS doesn't like what I'm doing, I expect it to give me an error… which it usually does. But, as I said, with this particular case… OBS does not toss up any errors or warnings of any kind. Additionally, in the case of Order of Ecclesia, I know for a fact that the person playing that game has a much more powerful computer than mine, so they shouldn't be experiencing any sort of "resource strain" which might lead to unexplained and unaccounted for FPS drops.
Frankly, I'm also at a loss as to why OBS doesn't like Mega Man Maker, anymore. It seems to get along fine with other apps and games and things, but not Mega Man Maker – which uses even less resources than either Rise of the Triad or especially melonDS. It wasn't always like this, either, as I can see that a video from May 1st has a perfect 60 FPS framerate. Going by that, it seems as though OBS Studio 29.1 might be the problem, as that version was officially released on May 2nd of this year. In fact, I just tried recording something with v29.0.2 and found that I, once again, had a consistent 60 FPS across the video. (Or, at least, I didn't have extended, intermittent periods of 30 FPS.) So, while that does fix my problem… it doesn't exactly fix compatibility, going forward.
I hope to hear back about something good, here. And, I hope that my post has been informative enough.
Thank you,
J
And yes, I tried all the usual troubleshooting stuff in modern OBS Studio; reducing the video bitrate, changing the Color Range from "full" to "limited", changing the Color Space from "sRGB" to "Rec. 709", changing the codec, using Simple mode, et cetera. Even when I reduced the window size and video size down to 256 x 240, I still got 30 FPS intermittently in my recordings. That tells me something just isn't working nicely between Mega Man Maker 1.8 and OBS Studio 29.1.
On the 4th of July, I streamed about two hours of Mega Man Maker, a fan-made game in the Mega Man series. After the stream, I took a look at the footage and noticed something odd. Seemingly, the video would drop from 60 FPS to 30 FPS at random. Much later on, I decided to record some gameplay from the same app. When I was editing the video, though, I noticed the exact same thing had happened: the video switched from 60 FPS to 30 FPS. This issue persisted with Mega Man Maker for the entire month, so I decided to do some tests.
I tried recording some gameplay from FCE Ultra X, a popular NES emulator, and got 60 FPS across the board with that. And that led me to believe that Mega Man Maker was, in fact, the one-and-only culprit. Another user on YouTube had gameplay footage which was plagued with halved FPS for seemingly no reason, too, and I was able to stream Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition – a cross-platform port of the same-named MS-DOS game – for two hours without experiencing any unreported frame rate adjustments, so I was pretty much convinced that it wasn't OBS. I decided I even made a video about it, the other day, after seeing someone else experience the same problem. It seems like v1.8+ is the problem… but then, I saw something that made me rethink things…
I was watching someone play Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia – a Nintendo DS game – through the melonDS emulator. While watching the gameplay, I noticed that the video dropped to 30 FPS completely at random, just like with Mega Man Maker. Which just makes me even more confused for reasons I'll get into momentarily. But, seemingly… Mega Man Maker isn't the only "problem app" for OBS Studio, as I'd thought.
Now, I've read in other forum threads that if the computer is overworked or otherwise unable to share resources, OBS can occasionally run out of resources and be unable to perform as intended even without generating errors or warnings. I have a budget laptop from three years ago, so any time OBS doesn't like what I'm doing, I expect it to give me an error… which it usually does. But, as I said, with this particular case… OBS does not toss up any errors or warnings of any kind. Additionally, in the case of Order of Ecclesia, I know for a fact that the person playing that game has a much more powerful computer than mine, so they shouldn't be experiencing any sort of "resource strain" which might lead to unexplained and unaccounted for FPS drops.
Frankly, I'm also at a loss as to why OBS doesn't like Mega Man Maker, anymore. It seems to get along fine with other apps and games and things, but not Mega Man Maker – which uses even less resources than either Rise of the Triad or especially melonDS. It wasn't always like this, either, as I can see that a video from May 1st has a perfect 60 FPS framerate. Going by that, it seems as though OBS Studio 29.1 might be the problem, as that version was officially released on May 2nd of this year. In fact, I just tried recording something with v29.0.2 and found that I, once again, had a consistent 60 FPS across the video. (Or, at least, I didn't have extended, intermittent periods of 30 FPS.) So, while that does fix my problem… it doesn't exactly fix compatibility, going forward.
I hope to hear back about something good, here. And, I hope that my post has been informative enough.
Thank you,
J
And yes, I tried all the usual troubleshooting stuff in modern OBS Studio; reducing the video bitrate, changing the Color Range from "full" to "limited", changing the Color Space from "sRGB" to "Rec. 709", changing the codec, using Simple mode, et cetera. Even when I reduced the window size and video size down to 256 x 240, I still got 30 FPS intermittently in my recordings. That tells me something just isn't working nicely between Mega Man Maker 1.8 and OBS Studio 29.1.
