OBS suddenly won't stop recording - tried everything, nothing helps!

[Dr V]

Hey folks,

I'd love to some help here. I have been using OBS for recording window captures and audio (for social media content and for lectures and the like) and it has always worked perfectly fine. Now, suddenly since yesterday whenever I record something that's longer than a few minutes it won't stop recording no matter what I do.

There is no way to force stop, and I the file is always unusable - even when I save it as a MKV file (it will miss the last few minutes). All latest updates are installed and I tried uninstalling and reinstalling to no avail. Please help!

I am attaching two log files here as well.

Thanks in advance for any help.

V.

 

[Dr V]

Addition: this problem only seems to occur when I record for longer than 35 minutes.

Up until that point I can still pause the recording as well, once it goes over 35 minutes I suddenly can't pause nor stop the recording.

I made longer videos than that before though, so this is new. And nothing changed in my computer or the software.

Anybody has any clue what this could be?

 

[Dr V]

Anybody else ever encounter this issue? There must be somebody who had this and got it fixed?

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

a quick glance/scan of first log didn't show any problems, 2nd log did NOT include a Recording session
And OBS Studio log won't show what else is going on with your computer, and if you are running into any hardware resource contention (CPU, GPU, RAM, Disk I/O, etc)

Your description tends to go along with a computer that is overloaded for some reason (which could be OBS Studio and what you've set it to, or somethign else running on your computer). Do you have a need for a base canvas/output resolution of 60fps? Are you using Studio Mode (tends to be 2X rendering workload as 2 preview windows)

 

[Dr V]

Thanks for the response, Laurence!

This is super strange though as this is a capable laptop that can handle games as well. And I was not even using Studio Mode and this also happened when there wasn't anything else running at all. So really strange.

I can try reducing the fps - but I doubt this will be a relevant factor in CPU usage. Maybe some mysterious unknown application is using up CPU and RAM in the background without me knowing?

 

[rockbottom]

Disable HAGS. Test

 

[Dr V]

Thanks just tried switching off HAGS. Let's see if it works now with longer videos.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Thanks for the response, Laurence!

This is super strange though as this is a capable laptop that can handle games as well.

Being capable is good... but
- laptops, all but the best engineered (ie, expensive for performance, not thin & light), will thermally throttle at some point. and that can be tricky as RAM, SSD, CPU, GPU may throttle at different times, and there isn't a standard easy way to monitor for such, that I'm aware of (OS and H/W vendors way behind the curve on this one)
- being able to run a demanding game is one thing, being able to run that game AND an even more demanding real-time video rendering at the same time... only a relatively recent capability (in overall compute years). And as the capability has become generally available, folks with optimization awareness and top-end systems started adding even more demanding tasks, like chromakeying, etc. so very easy to overload a computer if one isn't careful

And I was not even using Studio Mode and this also happened when there wasn't anything else running at all. So really strange.

There is almost always a LOT running in the background.. Check Task Mgr -> Processes.. see that hundred-ish log item list?.... granted most of those typically not doing much/anything... but they are running. And sometimes stuff running (cloud sync tool, etc) consumes network bandwidth... only if you are doing real-time network monitoring of LAN/WAN to do KNOW what is actually taking place. Some goes for disk i/o, etc

I can try reducing the fps - but I doubt this will be a relevant factor in CPU usage.

The trick is for you to understand how game to video driver to video buffers, to video buffer capture works, and where issue can arise in that chain. Depending on the code of the game and its video rendering approach, along with which video card and driver you have, you can easily have 1 game work fine, and another won't... nature/maturity of the technology involved.