Question / Help obs random pauses.. when NOT streaming or recording

[Sephnroth]

Hi guys, been googling this one for a while and just turning up false positives to do with bad encoders or under powered pc's etc and I don't think any of that is the case here. OBS will pause randomly, ie the entire preview will just freeze for maybe 1 or two seconds and then suddenly catch up with where it should be.

I started streaming again earlier in the week and it was happening whilst streaming which did indeed show on my actual twitch stream; every 20-30 seconds a pause, but no dropped frames or anything like that. I then noticed it continued to happen when obs was neither streaming nor recording, just sitting there with a preview. I had no webcam at that point but a cam arrived yesterday and i made a scene with just the webcam in to see if it was a scene item causing freezes but its still happening with nothing but the camera involved.

I have tried updating obs, ensuring I have latest nvidia drivers and obviously rebooting my pc. Nothing appears in the log file after start up except notifications when I change scene. I will post the startup section of the log:

11:31:14.919: CPU Name: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Eight-Core Processor
11:31:14.920: CPU Speed: 3693MHz
11:31:14.920: Physical Cores: 8, Logical Cores: 16
11:31:14.920: Physical Memory: 16331MB Total, 11267MB Free
11:31:14.920: Windows Version: 10.0 Build 18362 (revision: 295; 64-bit)
11:31:14.920: Running as administrator: false
11:31:14.920: Aero is Enabled (Aero is always on for windows 8 and above)
11:31:14.920: Windows 10 Gaming Features:
11:31:14.920: Game Bar: Off
11:31:14.920: Game DVR: Off
11:31:14.920: Game DVR Background Recording: Off
11:31:14.921: Sec. Software Status:
11:31:14.924: Windows Defender Antivirus: enabled (AV)
11:31:14.924: Windows Firewall: enabled (FW)
11:31:14.925: Current Date/Time: 2019-08-31, 11:31:14
11:31:14.925: Browser Hardware Acceleration: true
11:31:14.925: Portable mode: false
11:31:15.581: OBS 23.2.1 (64-bit, windows)
11:31:15.581: ---------------------------------
11:31:15.602: ---------------------------------
11:31:15.602: audio settings reset:
11:31:15.602: samples per sec: 44100
11:31:15.602: speakers: 2
11:31:15.634: ---------------------------------
11:31:15.634: Initializing D3D11...
11:31:15.634: Available Video Adapters:
11:31:15.662: Adapter 0: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
11:31:15.662: Dedicated VRAM: 4176478208
11:31:15.662: Shared VRAM: 4267327488
11:31:15.662: output 0: pos={0, 0}, size={1920, 1080}, attached=true
11:31:15.662: output 1: pos={-1920, 0}, size={1920, 1080}, attached=true
11:31:15.662: output 2: pos={1920, 0}, size={1920, 1080}, attached=true
11:31:15.665: Loading up D3D11 on adapter NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (0)
11:31:15.719: D3D11 loaded successfully, feature level used: 45056
11:31:16.753: ---------------------------------
11:31:16.753: video settings reset:
11:31:16.753: base resolution: 1920x1080
11:31:16.753: output resolution: 1280x720
11:31:16.753: downscale filter: Lanczos
11:31:16.753: fps: 60000/1001
11:31:16.753: format: NV12
11:31:16.753: YUV mode: 709/Partial
11:31:16.753: NV12 texture support enabled
11:31:16.756: Audio monitoring device:
11:31:16.756: name: Default
11:31:16.756: id: default
11:31:16.756: ---------------------------------
11:31:16.843: [CoreAudio encoder]: Adding CoreAudio AAC encoder
11:31:16.861: Failed to load 'en-US' text for module: 'decklink-ouput-ui.dll'
11:31:17.002: [AMF] AMF Test failed due to one or more errors.
11:31:17.002: Failed to initialize module 'enc-amf.dll'
11:31:18.367: Module '../../obs-plugins/64bit/libEGL.dll' not loaded
11:31:18.527: [obs-browser]: Version 2.4.0
11:31:18.679: NVENC supported
11:31:19.190: Couldn't find VLC installation, VLC video source disabled
11:31:19.226: No blackmagic support
11:31:19.304: ---------------------------------
11:31:19.304: Loaded Modules:
11:31:19.304: win-wasapi.dll
11:31:19.304: win-mf.dll
11:31:19.304: win-dshow.dll
11:31:19.304: win-decklink.dll
11:31:19.304: win-capture.dll
11:31:19.304: vlc-video.dll
11:31:19.304: text-freetype2.dll
11:31:19.304: rtmp-services.dll
11:31:19.304: obs-x264.dll
11:31:19.304: obs-vst.dll
11:31:19.304: obs-transitions.dll
11:31:19.304: obs-text.dll
11:31:19.304: obs-qsv11.dll
11:31:19.304: obs-outputs.dll
11:31:19.304: obs-filters.dll
11:31:19.304: obs-ffmpeg.dll
11:31:19.304: obs-browser.dll
11:31:19.304: logi_obs_plugin_x64.dll
11:31:19.304: image-source.dll
11:31:19.304: frontend-tools.dll
11:31:19.304: enc-amf.dll
11:31:19.304: decklink-ouput-ui.dll
11:31:19.304: coreaudio-encoder.dll
11:31:19.304: ---------------------------------
11:31:19.364: ==== Startup complete ===============================================

bit baffled now!

 

[Sephnroth]

further information: I have done a recording whilst this is happening and find the audio continues, its just the image that freezes for a few seconds. but it's still consistant and it happens even if im NOT streaming/recording, the obs preview freezes the same way.

 

[Narcogen]

Need a logfile from an output session where this happens.

Description suggests something is crashing the encoder, would need the log to confirm.

 

[Sephnroth]

i streamed tonight for many hours, here's a full log file from the stream. Stream quality has been great except for the video freezing every 30 secs or so, which as I said previously it does if i'm NOT streaming or recording. It's just something obs "does" consistently all the time regardless of what i'm doing.

 

[koala]

You have several media sources located on a remote fileshare that could not be reached. OBS will produce lags and even pauses if such sources are unreachable. Even if they are reachable, a stream or recording will not be smooth. It is recommended to put all these source on a local disk.

 

[Sephnroth]

that was totally it, problem has gone away! those remote sources were on old scenes from years ago I never ever use, not in the active scene at all - obs should not be polling those! Either way I have removed the old scenes and everything is hunky dory - thanks!