Question / Help Occasional Frame Drops ONLY After Upgrading to Windows 10

[Rory]

Hi, I've read through the suggestions on frame drop issues, but none seem to help with this peculiar problem. A few days ago, my laptop upgraded to Windows 10 from 7 (on it's own...), and ever since, I'm dropping more frames. A 3-hour stream on my internet used to yield under 100 frames dropped, if any, but now it'll be over 1,000 during that time. I even get around the same number of dropped frames when I lower my bitrate, but I used to get 0-100 at max Twitch bitrate anyway. I've already disabled all of Windows 10's invasive network features, and nothing else has changed besides the upgrade. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

From today: https://gist.github.com/4bac3591e405565146f268add8a84ff3
From before upgrade to Win10: https://gist.github.com/005b647b2af4d05634b145671e55d15c

 

[Boildown]

So before Windows 10 you weren't using a webcam, after Windows 10 you were. Try disabling the webcam and see if the results match what you had before. Also in your before logs you weren't streaming, just recording, and in your after logs you were streaming over wireless, which can cause all kinds of problems.

 

[Rory]

So before Windows 10 you weren't using a webcam, after Windows 10 you were. Try disabling the webcam and see if the results match what you had before. Also in your before logs you weren't streaming, just recording, and in your after logs you were streaming over wireless, which can cause all kinds of problems.

Thanks for your reply, I probably chose a bad previous log, let me find a better one. I always stream wirelessly and use a webcam, I thought the log I posted was from a stream but I guess I did a recording that day

Edit: Here is a log from a stream before the upgrade https://gist.github.com/dee539d866813ee1c312ae3f01f88736
And another from the same day which was actually forced to shut down by the auto-upgrade https://gist.github.com/2198124f92114fb84220fbf6dd632920

 

[Boildown]

So this is from your only encode without a webcam:

21:40:12: Total frames encoded: 55064, total frames duplicated: 23 (0.04%)

Every other encode with a webcam has over 1% duplicated frames, usually 2% or more, whether you're on Windows 7 or Windows 10. I'd still say you should try removing your webcam (as a test) and doing a five minute or longer stream of high action content on Windows 10 and see what the result is.

The C920 is a frequent cause (or scapegoat) of problems for people on these forums, but usually it only presents itself when running in 1080p mode, and yours is set to 720p. So I'm not sure, but I think you should eliminate it as a possible cause of your problems. Its a complication that confuses the root cause at best. I'm not saying "you can't use a webcam", but just as a matter of testing, lets remove it and see what happens.

As for your wireless streaming, there are a few unstable connection messages, but they're rather infrequent, so your setup must be pretty isolated from sources of interference. In any case I don't think they're the cause of your problems here. Just know that when you're sending out video, wireless is mostly a bad idea, whereas buffering makes it so that receiving video generally works fine. Try to hardwire it if you can, especially if you see unstable connection messages in the logs in the future.

 

[Rory]

So this is from your only encode without a webcam:

21:40:12: Total frames encoded: 55064, total frames duplicated: 23 (0.04%)

Every other encode with a webcam has over 1% duplicated frames, usually 2% or more, whether you're on Windows 7 or Windows 10. I'd still say you should try removing your webcam (as a test) and doing a five minute or longer stream of high action content on Windows 10 and see what the result is.

The C920 is a frequent cause (or scapegoat) of problems for people on these forums, but usually it only presents itself when running in 1080p mode, and yours is set to 720p. So I'm not sure, but I think you should eliminate it as a possible cause of your problems. Its a complication that confuses the root cause at best. I'm not saying "you can't use a webcam", but just as a matter of testing, lets remove it and see what happens.

As for your wireless streaming, there are a few unstable connection messages, but they're rather infrequent, so your setup must be pretty isolated from sources of interference. In any case I don't think they're the cause of your problems here. Just know that when you're sending out video, wireless is mostly a bad idea, whereas buffering makes it so that receiving video generally works fine. Try to hardwire it if you can, especially if you see unstable connection messages in the logs in the future.

I understand, wireless is my only option unfortunately.
My logs might not be the best because I only have 2 days worth from before the upgrade, but I can assure you that I've streamed DOZENS of times with this same wireless connection using the exact same setup (C920 and all) and I've had many streams go without 1 frame dropped. I never had the amount of frames consistently dropping as I do since the upgrade, and literally nothing has changed except for the upgrade (and whatever it brought with it).
So even if I disconnect my webcam and get better results, that does nothing for me because I never had issues while using the webcam before.

Thanks again for your help