Bug Report OBS freezes/locks up and stops streaming. Requires reboot to start stream again.

[rdfiasco]

Around 5-20 minutes into my stream, the OBS preview will freeze on a single frame, and OBS will stop sending video to the streaming service. If I click the "Stop Streaming" button, it locks on "Stopping Stream...." and the frozen frame remains. When I click exit, I am warned that I am currently streaming and that closing OBS will stop the stream. When I relaunch OBS, it won't start streaming again; I click the button and nothing happens. This behavior persists until I reboot.

This issue has appeared suddenly within the past 2 weeks or so, and I have not made any changes to my streaming configuration. It's possible it's related to a recent Windows update, as it appears to be the same issue reported in several other posts by the following users:

JACRunner
Opt1kal
lycaon
BrettFX

I have attached a log file from a recent stream in which I experienced the issue.

EDIT: Please see the attachment titled "2016-09-15 21-49-52.txt." The other attachment is irrelevant.

 

[OG See OH Zee]

That's the same problem I have on games that use a high amount of VRAM such as the Redux mod for GTA V and ARK: Survival Evolved on Medium textures. I know it causes it when the VRAM is low on the GPU.

 

[rdfiasco]

That's the same problem I have on games that use a high amount of VRAM such as the Redux mod for GTA V and ARK: Survival Evolved on Medium textures. I know it causes it when the VRAM is low on the GPU.

Interesting insight. I noticed that I had no issue while streaming Rocket League, but when I fired up Rainbow Six: Siege, the stream froze up. Maybe I'll try turning the settings down in Siege to see if that makes a difference.

 

[OG See OH Zee]

Rocket League doesn't use as much VRAM. I would try setting textures to low on R6S and use Temporal Filtering on multisample to reduce the VRAM and see if that resolves it.

 

[rdfiasco]

Ok, so I turned settings down on Siege and was able to stream for 4 hours without any issues. This leads me to believe that high VRAM usage is, indeed, the problem. However, this was not an issue at high game settings a few weeks ago, so something was broken somewhere.

 

[OG See OH Zee]

I'm thinking that the updates for Windows 10 Anniversary Edition is breaking OBS Studio, especially on VRAM-bounded games. It's been going on since then and we haven't gotten an update to OBS Studio since August 8th.

EDIT: I tried the older OBS builds as well, and they too suffer from the 'freeze on high VRAM' issue when they didn't before. Tried reproducing it on OBS Classic, crashes when VRAM is maxed out. It is indeed a Windows 10 update that broke OBS.

 

[TrinityC]

I was having the exact problem, things that worked fine suddenly froze OBS after a VERY short time. But I found that switching to hardware encoding solved it. Call it a workaround for now if you like. I hope the problem gets fixed up but I thought you might want to know that for now this solution is working for me on Ark regardless of how high my settings are.

Edit: After finishing a recording or stream sometimes OBS hangs. Afterwards that is, the recorded files still come out fine. I shut down OBS and fire it back up and all is good.