It's been a frustrating winter when it comes to stable broadcasting for me and I wanted to share my experiences and hear if there are more people with the same experience as me.
I have a amateur channel on Youtube where I stream for my favourite bandy team in Norway!
I bought a new PC in March 2022 to increase the quality of my images.
Nvidia RTX 3070 TI, Core i7-12700K, 64GB RAM, Win 11 (21H2)
OBS version 27.2
Worked like a charm. Broadcasting a sports event in 1080p 50fps (PAL) to YouTube with 10K bitrate.
This was last event of the season, so I packed away the equipment for summer.
In the fall I brushed away the dust and decided to upgrade all software components (yup, I am a fairly optimistic guy and believe the latest versions are the greatest!) :-)
I upgraded Windows 11 to 22H2 , chipset drivers, my Nvidida GPU drivers, OBS (version 28.0), stream deck and everything else I could find.
This lead to three months of a lot of hazzle, headache and troubleshooting. :-(
The most severe issues I faced seems to be related to Windows 11 and the upgrade in the fall to 22H2.
After disabling HAGS (Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling) - OBS stopped freezing randomly.
The upgrade to Win11 corrupted the Windows installation and I decided to go ahead with a fresh install of Win11.
Everything seemed to be working fine, but I felt my streams was not nearly as smooth as back in March. From time to time, graphics and Windows in general, just seemed to be lagging, with high memory consumption and background processes taking a lot of both cpu and ram.
I have some simple graphics which I made using animations in Powerpoint. My powerful machine could not render a simple box with some basic animations in a smooth way in Powerpoint, but if I saved the animation as mp4, the video ran really smooth (btw, a great way to build animated graphics for OBS for non-graphical people like my self). I was not able to figure out if it was related to some drivers or Windows.
OBS 29 was launched here the other day, so on Friday I decided to give it a go. At first it seemed to be working like a charm as well.
20 mins before my broadcast, I got a BSOD error. Rebooted, started OBS, another BSOD immediately.
I was a bit stressed and not so much interested in figuring out the root cause - rather just coming up with a quick fix.
As far as I could understand from logs it seemed related to the Lower Third plugin failing (not sure, but my guess at the time)
My quick fix was to just uninstall OBS and all plugins. Reinstall OBS ver 28.1.2 (with no plugins) and I got to stream my event just fine.
Still had some minor lagging in Windows in general, which also affects my stream.
After my stream ended I decided that I am tired of all my problems. I no longer believe latest is the gratest! :)
I decided to wipe my PC clean and did a fresh install of Windows 10 with OBS version 28.1.
All chipset, gpu and any thing else is latest (stable) versions.
I started at 9 in the evening and was done before 6 in the morning! Really motivated to fix these problems!
On Sunday I tested streaming 4 matches in a day, and it was a total success.
No frames lost during rendering, cpu running on 3% or less, gpu around 40%, avg time to render frames less than 5ms.
So if you have been struggling with issues after upgrading to Win 11 (22H2) and, as me, not able to figure out the root cause. Perhaps it's Win 11 (22H2).
It might be ok to downgrade to Win 11 (21H2) - but I didn't want to spend time testing it, so I would recommend to go back to Win10 for now.
Would love to hear your comments and if there are more people struggling with Win 11 or if you have some best practise on how to actually run smoothly on Win11.
Thanks
Knut
I have a amateur channel on Youtube where I stream for my favourite bandy team in Norway!
I bought a new PC in March 2022 to increase the quality of my images.
Nvidia RTX 3070 TI, Core i7-12700K, 64GB RAM, Win 11 (21H2)
OBS version 27.2
Worked like a charm. Broadcasting a sports event in 1080p 50fps (PAL) to YouTube with 10K bitrate.
This was last event of the season, so I packed away the equipment for summer.
In the fall I brushed away the dust and decided to upgrade all software components (yup, I am a fairly optimistic guy and believe the latest versions are the greatest!) :-)
I upgraded Windows 11 to 22H2 , chipset drivers, my Nvidida GPU drivers, OBS (version 28.0), stream deck and everything else I could find.
This lead to three months of a lot of hazzle, headache and troubleshooting. :-(
The most severe issues I faced seems to be related to Windows 11 and the upgrade in the fall to 22H2.
After disabling HAGS (Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling) - OBS stopped freezing randomly.
The upgrade to Win11 corrupted the Windows installation and I decided to go ahead with a fresh install of Win11.
Everything seemed to be working fine, but I felt my streams was not nearly as smooth as back in March. From time to time, graphics and Windows in general, just seemed to be lagging, with high memory consumption and background processes taking a lot of both cpu and ram.
I have some simple graphics which I made using animations in Powerpoint. My powerful machine could not render a simple box with some basic animations in a smooth way in Powerpoint, but if I saved the animation as mp4, the video ran really smooth (btw, a great way to build animated graphics for OBS for non-graphical people like my self). I was not able to figure out if it was related to some drivers or Windows.
OBS 29 was launched here the other day, so on Friday I decided to give it a go. At first it seemed to be working like a charm as well.
20 mins before my broadcast, I got a BSOD error. Rebooted, started OBS, another BSOD immediately.
I was a bit stressed and not so much interested in figuring out the root cause - rather just coming up with a quick fix.
As far as I could understand from logs it seemed related to the Lower Third plugin failing (not sure, but my guess at the time)
My quick fix was to just uninstall OBS and all plugins. Reinstall OBS ver 28.1.2 (with no plugins) and I got to stream my event just fine.
Still had some minor lagging in Windows in general, which also affects my stream.
After my stream ended I decided that I am tired of all my problems. I no longer believe latest is the gratest! :)
I decided to wipe my PC clean and did a fresh install of Windows 10 with OBS version 28.1.
All chipset, gpu and any thing else is latest (stable) versions.
I started at 9 in the evening and was done before 6 in the morning! Really motivated to fix these problems!
On Sunday I tested streaming 4 matches in a day, and it was a total success.
No frames lost during rendering, cpu running on 3% or less, gpu around 40%, avg time to render frames less than 5ms.
So if you have been struggling with issues after upgrading to Win 11 (22H2) and, as me, not able to figure out the root cause. Perhaps it's Win 11 (22H2).
It might be ok to downgrade to Win 11 (21H2) - but I didn't want to spend time testing it, so I would recommend to go back to Win10 for now.
Would love to hear your comments and if there are more people struggling with Win 11 or if you have some best practise on how to actually run smoothly on Win11.
Thanks
Knut