Question / Help OBS consistently crashes

[SirCrazyApe]

For some recordings and streams I've been doing, OBS has consistently crashed ruining several of my videos and downing my stream. I don't know why it's doing this, but it's making it almost unusable. Any help would be most appreciated.

All the crash logs from the last couple weeks are attached.

EDIT: attached the correct log files.

 

[Harold]

None of those are actually the crash logs.

Crash logs are in %appdata%\obs-studio\crashes

 

[SirCrazyApe]

None of those are actually the crash logs.

Crash logs are in %appdata%\obs-studio\crashes

My bad. Wrong log folder. lemme fix that.

 

[Harold]

You have some media source playing some videos or audio in the stream.
What formats are those files?

 

[SirCrazyApe]

I don't have any media sources in any of my scenes. I have a scene with game capture, facecam, a webpage, and text. My other scenes are various combinations of those. No video/audio files.

 

[Harold]

The FreeType Text source is known to be unstable right now. Try without it.

 

[ThoNohT]

This seems to be an audio resampling issue. Are you using a non-standard sample rate or bitrate for audio anywhere? Could use a normal log.

 

[SirCrazyApe]

This seems to be an audio resampling issue. Are you using a non-standard sample rate or bitrate for audio anywhere? Could use a normal log.

Here's a log from the most recent session with a crash:

I have been using 44.1 khz , 160 kbps for the audio

Also, I switched to using .flv as my file output instead of .mp4 so I wouldn't lose as much footage, but now the picture quality is seriously degraded and full of compression artifacts sometimes and fine at others. Whether this is part of the problem or simply my system getting a bit overworked, I'm not sure, but it is frustrating.

I would like to add that my webcam won't show up in the scene after crashes, but the green on indicator light for it on my computer stays on. I don't know whether that is a symptom of the problem or some other sort of incompatibility.

 

[Harold]

Recording quality doesn't change magically going from mp4 to flv.

 

[SirCrazyApe]

Recording quality doesn't change magically going from mp4 to flv.

I don't know if you're being condescending, or I wasn't clear, but your reply comes across as a bit snide. That's exactly why I bring it up, because it shouldn't magically change, and yet my videos encoded as .flv don't look as good as the .mp4's even though the resolution, bitrate and fps are all the same. I'm not sure what caused it, but here are two videos I've recorded recently, the only change I made between these recordings was the file format.

output format (.mp4): https://youtu.be/s6ZmTS-0Sq8

output format (.flv): https://youtu.be/ly70QEYALuo

In the second one, you can occasionally see square artifacts blurring the image. I think this has something to do with the way flash video is compressed, but I don't understand why it sometimes looks like crap and sometimes it is fine.

 

[Harold]

Please don't rely on youtube to retain quality.

Also, are you converting or otherwise doing post-processing on the videos before uploading to youtube?

 

[sam686]

The crashes all (EDIT: not all but some) appears to be from obs-ffmpeg, which is used if using custom output.

Using flv container in FFmpeg output, and leaving video encoder as a "flv (default encoder)" then that will effect the quality compared to libx264 / x264 encoder.

 

[SirCrazyApe]

Please don't rely on youtube to retain quality.

Also, are you converting or otherwise doing post-processing on the videos before uploading to youtube?

Yes, but the artifacts are present before any post processing. I used this app (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/free-mp4-converter/id693443591?mt=12) to convert the video to .mp4 then edit into ~20 minute episodes with iMovie on my Mac. When I first noticed the artifacts, the first thing I checked was both of those programs, but after watching the original clip, I saw that it was present in the .flv file, so it didn't come out of the post processing. All the post processed files had a higher bitrate to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the process anyway.

 

[Harold]

So the artifacts are present BEFORE you run it through that converter (which isn't actually necessary to use to convert from flv to mp4. FFMpeg does a far better job, especially with retaining quality vs the original file)

Screenshot of settings -> output -> recording please.

 

[sam686]

If you want to convert .flv to .mp4, download ffmpeg, and try using:
ffmpeg -i "video.flv" -codec copy "video.mp4"

This keeps all the video and audio data unchanged which is a lot faster then converting video. This might not work unless video was encoded as x264 / libx264.

 

[ThoNohT]

There's always the remux recordings option in the OBS Studio File menu, which does exactly that.

The crash is in the audio thread at all cases. Mostly in the resampling code, some in another place, but still the audio thread. Try using a different audio bitrate, like 224 so the ffmpeg audio encoder is used instead of the mediafoundation encoder, though I doubt that's the issue. Also check if your audio device's sample rate matches that set in OBS.

 

[SirCrazyApe]

So the artifacts are present BEFORE you run it through that converter (which isn't actually necessary to use to convert from flv to mp4. FFMpeg does a far better job, especially with retaining quality vs the original file)

Screenshot of settings -> output -> recording please.

I just changed the settings for the audio to try and match what ThoNohT said.

 

[SirCrazyApe]

Thanks for the help everyone. Hopefully changing the audio settings will fix my crashes. If there's any fix for the artifacts in my video's that would be super appreciated too.

I'll keep this thread updated on whether that works.

 

[sam686]

Try changing video encoder to libx264, or increase bitrate, when using ffmpeg output. The video quality is mostly dependent on video encoder, bitrate, and sometimes encoder settings.

 

[Harold]

Try using x264 encoder with https://www.dropbox.com/s/suo2qdn5tu6rfo9/Screenshot 2015-10-16 14.18.04.png?dl=0 settings (except for path and audio track)