Question / Help Stream pausing for a split second every few seconds

W

wigglez

New Member
I did a search for this and tried tweaking my stream a bit with some of the suggested suggestions from some other threads where other streamers had the same problem. I'm guessing there are different fixes for this. So my most recent logs...

http://pastebin.com/VbciDksw

I have been streaming for about a year now and up until a month ago, I use to never have this problem. I use to stream without any pauses in my stream at all and I really don't know what the settings really do in OBS. Any help would be REALLY appreciative!
 
L

Lain

Forum Admin
Lain
Forum Moderator
Developer
Your system seems great (outside of the video card at least). I'm not entirely sure. DO you have a video?
 
W

wigglez

New Member
Is my video card considered out of date? I've had it for 4 years or so now. Possibly 5? I have a recording of one of my latest streams on twitch if that helps.

http://www.twitch.tv/wigglez721/b/532001596

Also, I only have an upload speed of about 3 mbps, but I don't think it should really matter since I was able to stream without any of these pauses previously with an upload speed of 1 mbps a year ago.
 
Sapiens

Sapiens

Forum Moderator
Streaming at 720p on the fast preset might be a bit much for your CPU depending on the game. Try setting the preset back to veryfast. While you're there you should also enable CFR, change your profile to main, and set your keyframe interval to 2 seconds.

With 3 Mbps up you can probably afford to bump your bitrate to 2000 to compensate for the change in preset.
 
W

wigglez

New Member
I did all of the above Sapiens, but that split second pause is still occurring. It's just really strange how it started happened out of nowhere. It even happens when I stream card games where there is very little movement on screen.
 
T

Timothy003

Member
This happens to my friend whenever he watches his own stream while streaming (and he has a 4670K). Make sure you pause the video player so that it doesn't waste CPU cycles.
 
Jack0r

Jack0r

The Helping Squad
You are streaming to Twitch.tv. Then you have a few options to check if the fault is on your side or, as its often the case, on twitch:

Download the saved Video from Twitch and check it for pauses or missing frames. (You have to activate Archive Broadcasts in the Settings on the Twitch page)
Set OBS to save your Broadcast to disk (make sure a filepath and filename is set) and check the recorded video for errors.

If both these test do not show missing frames or pauses, its just your connection to twitch when checking the stream. If you see errors check the following:
Create a hitbox.tv account and try streaming there at the exact same settings.
You could also test streaming at a encoding preset with lower cpu usage (faster/veryfast).

In the log you only had some late or duplicate frames, but no dropped frames at all. So my guess is, its a Twitch problem, as usual. Oh and you could keep an eye on your CPU usages while testing.
 
W

wigglez

New Member
I'm pretty sure here will be pauses in the video. I have not had time to try it out yet, but my viewers see pauses, which is why I'm sure it's not just me viewing my live stream and seeing pauses.

I do notice in the bottom left corner of OBS that is does say "Cannot find window". I'm not sure if that is what may be causing it? I know in the past when I had slower internet speeds, in that bottom left corner it would start saying that I was dropping frames, then my stream would just die.

I'm pretty computer illiterate. How would I watch my CPU usage?

I will try doing those other things you had listed if I can figure out how to do it and report back.

edit: okay so I just made a hitbox.tv account and tried streaming there with nothing changed at all. Here is the video.

http://www.hitbox.tv/video/152635

I'm not streaming anything at all and what I'm watching for is my recent donors text scroll. It does not pause once in that one minute test stream, so it must be twitch? I did notice the "cannont find window" in the bottom left of OBS still. What should my next step be?
 
Last edited:
Jack0r

Jack0r

The Helping Squad
Cannot find window comes up when you have a Window Capture source active that "cannot find" the selected window :)
If you have a lot of sources in the scene, check if you can find out which Window Capture source it is.

Now the Hitbox video looks good (you confused me a bit with "nothing changed at all") and has no pauses. In this case it was probably twitch yea. You now have the obvious options of either staying with hitbox, or testing different settings for twitch.
I have to add, the experience on Twitch can change every 5 minutes. Not that other services never have problems, but to me its getting worse and worse with twitch.

They try to push more and more streamers and instead of upgrading the infrastructure they switched to a CDN system that definitely made the twitch experience worse than before, at least it seems to me like that. And the number of people reporting similar problems is BIG.
 
W

wigglez

New Member
Sorry about the confusion! I haven't slept much the last few days and I was typing out of the lack of sleep. I'd love to switch to hitbox since it does seem similar to twitch, but all of my viewers would then get left behind =\ I don't have a big viewer base, but I have a constant viewer base. I'm just not sure how to tweak my settings with OBS. I'm not sure which settings I should be tweaking in order to test and make that pause go away. It's just annoying how it just started appearing all of a sudden. And it only seems to be affecting a very small group of people. A lot of the big streamers don't seem to have it happening to them. Or it's either they figured how to get rid of it.

I really don't know what's going on with twitch, but I noticed that after they started to implement that 30 second delay, things on that site have been going to crap.
 
Jack0r

Jack0r

The Helping Squad
Oh sorry, I can actually only repeat myself, your output to hitbox seemed fine, so its a twitch problem. You can lower your bitrate until you get no buffering on twitch. I dont think any other setting will affect the connection quality of twitch to a viewer ;(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top