OBS/ NginX HLS delay of 60 to 120 seconds

[Souledge]

I was wondering if there's anything I can do to reduce the delay of my streams, while maintaining the ability to keep the playlist (index.m3u8) as long as an hour. It's between 60 to 120 seconds now.
I don't know if this is an NginX issue or an OBS issue, but I tried fiddling around with the HLS conf file, with no difference in delay, even if I change the fragment size to as low as 3 seconds. Could this be an OBS issue? It's a custom HLS stream, so any website requirements don't apply for the settings.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Depends on what you mean by 'delay of my streams' -
If you mean the delay from the time you send out a stream and to when other can watch that stream... speed of light isn't that fast, and a lot technically going on at the stream provider (content delivery network) side that usually involves re-encoding the stream to a more bit efficient codec, driven in part by usage levels, distribution, etc.
Today's (mostly free) streaming is designed for bandwidth efficient from CDN to end-user/watcher, not latency reduction from content creator to end-user.
There are numerous technical articles that go into the details of what is required for someplace like YT or FB to receive a stream and re-distribute. complex and interesting reads.

Or is you issue the time it takes for OBS to receive and process your inputs?
What have you done to determine and isolate the data path and measure the lag/latency in the various segments?

 

[Souledge]

It's not any kind of service streaming but for streaming to my and some other mobile devices. I basically have nginx and OBS on the same computer, so the computer itself is the stream server. I opened up some ports and now other users can watch the stream through vlc or mxplayer on their devices.
As far as i can see, the HLS fragments get created almost instantly (since the quality neccesary isn't that large) if i look at the HLS folder if that's what you mean with the encoding time.
But yes, whatever happens on my computer during the stream takes on average 60 seconds to happen on the tuned in devices that are connected to the stream.

 

[Tomasz Góral]

Read about LLHLS - Low Latency HLS

 

[Souledge]

thanks for the replies. Fixed it by replacing the HLS fragments location from usb stick to usb HDD. I can now set fragments to 1 second, and the latency is like 5 seconds max. Usb stick seems to not be able to keep up with the generation of the fragments.

Will this approach damage the disk in any way? Since it's making files every second.

 

[Tomasz Góral]

Use Ramdisk 512MB is enough.

 

[Souledge]

thanks again, sounds like a great solution that won't deteriorate components.