OBS "banding" problem

[Curbuntu]

Sorry if this is an "obvious answer" question, but I'm relatively new to OBS. (FWIW, I'm using OBS 28.0.0 on Ubuntu Mate 22.04.1.)

I have a newly installed IP camera connected to OBS. The steam coming straight to the computer (by means of a login to the camera's interface) is fine. (See right side of screenshot attachment).

However, the OBS display, most of the time, displays "banding" (i'm not certain what to call it) that corrupts anywhere from 1% to 50% of the lower half of the OBS display screen. It's a situation that's in a state of constant change. Every 10 seconds or so, the OBS display is fine for a moment. (See the left side of the screenshot attachment.)

Since the non-OBS display is trouble free, I'm guessing that there must be one or more incompatibilities in my OBS settings which are at the root of the problem; but having no experience in video, I have no idea where to look.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[Curbuntu]

I have fiddled with settings on both the camera and in OBS and it seems to have fixed things.

One of the new setting-matches makes sense to me: The camera, an Amcrest, can only output a top frame rate of 15 fps or below. OBS doesn't offer 15fps, so I settled for 10 fps on each. A little better, but still no joy.

The other setting works, but I don't why. On a lark, I set the camera from H.264 to H.265. OBS doesn't offer me that option, so it's set in FFMPEG VAAPI H.264. Now everything is working well. Is H.265 backwards compatible with H.264?

 

[Tuna]

This is either packet loss or incomplete frame due to receiving deadline. And no, H.264 and H.265 do not have any compatibility whatsoever.

 

[Curbuntu]

…H.264 and H.265 do not have any compatibility whatsoever.

@Tuna , thanks for the reply. I thought I was ignorant before, but now I know I am. (Hardly a surprise!) Nevertheless, this mismatched setting (i.e., H.265 in the camera and H.264 for OBS) stopped the problem entirely. At least, it went away. I'm not disputing what you're saying. But now I'm wondering why making this setting change worked!

 

[Tuna]

Implemented differently.. Change of used bandwidth.. defaults to another transfer protocol... impossible to say from the outside.

 

[AaronD]

I have fiddled with settings on both the camera and in OBS and it seems to have fixed things.

One of the new setting-matches makes sense to me: The camera, an Amcrest, can only output a top frame rate of 15 fps or below. OBS doesn't offer 15fps, so I settled for 10 fps on each. A little better, but still no joy.

The other setting works, but I don't why. On a lark, I set the camera from H.264 to H.265. OBS doesn't offer me that option, so it's set in FFMPEG VAAPI H.264. Now everything is working well. Is H.265 backwards compatible with H.264?

I think you're getting confused with things having to match. OBS decodes what it gets into a completely uncompressed image for each frame and uses *that* for all the processing / compositing / rendering (so now the incoming compression no longer matters), and it also resamples the frame rate to match the global setting before doing anything with it (so now the incoming frame rate is no longer a deal-breaker). After everything is done and it has a single uncompressed image for each final frame, *then* it uses the encoding that you set it for to re-compress it.

It's generally better to use an integer multiple (1x, 2x, etc.) of the incoming frame rate, but not strictly necessary. That said, OBS does have a Custom option...