I'm entering my second season live streaming high school swim meets through Facebook and continue to struggle with stream quality. We have no access to wired or wireless internet and let's assume for the purpose of this thread that we're limited to LTE cellular speeds. I'm still very much an amateur and don't understand most of the settings/options within the software or how they will affect the stream for viewers.
I've settled on the GoPro 9 Black as my camera because it's the only one I've found that can capture the entire pool from the ideal angle as well as handle the bright sun reflecting off the water. When I launched a test run before our first meet of the season, Facebook made some specific recommendations (setting the keyframe interval between 2 and 4, and lowering the bitrate to 150Kbps). After making those adjustments, the broadcast started with too much pixelation, but at least there was no lag or freezing up of the video (which happened a lot last year).
Within the first hour, the lag and freezing started up (dropped frames). By the 2-hour mark, the image within OBS Studio started glitching. It was as if it was flipping back and forth between two still images recorded several seconds apart. The message at the bottom of OBS Studio said "Encoding overloaded! Consider turning down video settings or using a faster encoding preset." Unfortunately, I have no idea what settings this message is suggesting I "turn down."
I began evaluating things as soon as I got home and found that while OBS was set to 30 fps, the GoPro was set to output 60 fps, so I've changed the GoPro output. Based on other recommendations that I've found on the internet after the meet, I also changed the following settings in the GoPro: bitrate to standard, ISO min to 100, and ISO max to 400.
Because the issues appeared within OBS Studio itself, I'm assuming that they had little to do with the upload speeds and more to do with the video input and encoding. The bottom line is that I want to eliminate lag and freezing of the feed while producing the best possible picture quality that the upload speed can safely handle.
I've settled on the GoPro 9 Black as my camera because it's the only one I've found that can capture the entire pool from the ideal angle as well as handle the bright sun reflecting off the water. When I launched a test run before our first meet of the season, Facebook made some specific recommendations (setting the keyframe interval between 2 and 4, and lowering the bitrate to 150Kbps). After making those adjustments, the broadcast started with too much pixelation, but at least there was no lag or freezing up of the video (which happened a lot last year).
Within the first hour, the lag and freezing started up (dropped frames). By the 2-hour mark, the image within OBS Studio started glitching. It was as if it was flipping back and forth between two still images recorded several seconds apart. The message at the bottom of OBS Studio said "Encoding overloaded! Consider turning down video settings or using a faster encoding preset." Unfortunately, I have no idea what settings this message is suggesting I "turn down."
I began evaluating things as soon as I got home and found that while OBS was set to 30 fps, the GoPro was set to output 60 fps, so I've changed the GoPro output. Based on other recommendations that I've found on the internet after the meet, I also changed the following settings in the GoPro: bitrate to standard, ISO min to 100, and ISO max to 400.
Because the issues appeared within OBS Studio itself, I'm assuming that they had little to do with the upload speeds and more to do with the video input and encoding. The bottom line is that I want to eliminate lag and freezing of the feed while producing the best possible picture quality that the upload speed can safely handle.
- What settings deserve the most attention (I may be tweaking settings that have no impact on maximizing quality or minimizing upload size)
- Which settings impact image quality
- Which settings impact upload speed