Simultaneous recording and streaming

[CamaroZ28c]

Hello, I use OBS to record/stream my church services to YouTube. We had a thunderstorm roll through during our service this morning and our internet provider must've had problems because our bandwidth crashed and OBS was showing only a couple hundred kbs instead of the usual 6000 kbs. We always simultaneously record because I thought it would record in perfect quality as a backup in case we ever lost bandwidth, allowing us to upload after the service was over to replace the bad quality one.

Unfortunately, when I looked at the recorded video, it was the same quality as the stream! I thought OBS would record the service independently of the stream, but instead it seems like it is recording the stream and not what it is actually receiving. Is there a setting that would let it record what it sees and not the stream, or is this just the way it works? Thanks!

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Depends on your setup, I suspect
I also record and stream church service. However, as our community is on Facebook, I stream at 720p. I record at 1080p, and my recordings are NOT impacted by the stream. But if you record the stream exactly as streamed, and you have dynamic bitrate on, then you got exactly what you asked for.
If you have the GPU and CPU, I'd recommend not having the recording be the stream, so this doesn't happen to you again. I'm not in front of OBS, so can't comment on the exact recording settings, but they are well documented

 

[koala]

Is there a setting that would let it record what it sees and not the stream,

If in Settings->Output->Recording you set your recording encoder to "same as stream" resp. "Use stream encoder", you're recording exactly the same video data that is sent for streaming. If you want to record with different settings, set this to something different. However, if you do this, you will run 2 encoders in parallel, one for streaming and one for recording, which is too much stress for many PCs. It could work if both are hardware encoders.

 

[CamaroZ28c]

If in Settings->Output->Recording you set your recording encoder to "same as stream" resp. "Use stream encoder", you're recording exactly the same video data that is sent for streaming. If you want to record with different settings, set this to something different. However, if you do this, you will run 2 encoders in parallel, one for streaming and one for recording, which is too much stress for many PCs. It could work if both are hardware encoders.

Thanks Lawrence_SoCal and Koala, I'll change that! I built the computer we use to record at church with a Ryzen 7 3700X and a Radeon RX580 8Gb and it only uses 9% CPU when recording/streaming now so I think it'll handle two. I'll do some testing on it before next Sunday.