Bug Report Stream shutting off/going black

Klaent

New Member
Two days in a row I've noticed that the stream shuts down after a few ours for no apperant reason. Yesterday the stream just went black and didnt come back. Today, after a few hours of playing I noticed I wasent streaming anymore, and when I tabbed out to check the streaming had stopped in OBS, and i had to click Start Streaming again. Then a few hours later the stream when black on me again, and I had to turn it off and on again.
This might very well be an issue on my part, so wondering if anyone else has similar problems?
 

Lain

Forum Admin
Lain
Forum Moderator
Developer
Looks like I'll have to do some extra long multi-hour sessions to see if I get it on my end, and to try to verify if the app is the cause or not. I've done like 2 hour sessions before, but I should probably try having it on all day and seeing what happens. There's any number of reasons why the stream could be stopping unrelated to the application as well. Could you link me to a video? How long specifically, and does the stream itself actually stop, or does it just go black?
 

Klaent

New Member
I dont have every momement of it happening saved. So im no realy sure.
http://www.twitch.tv/klaent/b/331708694
But at the very end of that video you can see that it laggs for a bit, then shuts off completely., i had to press "Start Streaming" again.
If it happends again I'll get you video of it aswell.

For now, lets just assume the problem is on my end, if more people start to mention this, then you should look into it. Just leave it for now imo.
 

Lain

Forum Admin
Lain
Forum Moderator
Developer
Hm, did you see if the indicator was going past green, into yellow/red territory ever? Like a little after 2:14:40, when you start fighting the dragon, you have a major missing section of frames. This indicates that you must have gone into red territory. Your framerate also seems inconsistent, but I'm not entirely sure if that's the game or the stream.

If you spend too much time outside green territory it starts dropping disposable frames to compensate for your bandwidth. This is actually okay and normal as long as you don't do it too much, and you won't really notice it all that much on stream. But you generally want to try to make sure it stays fully green as much as possible if you're not already. If the color isn't mostly in green territory you definitely want to turn down your bitrate/buffersize.

Red is bad, though. If you go full red it starts dropping important frames as the only other means to compensate for your bandwidth, and you'll see spikes of missing video on the stream like that. It's okay to have it happen on rare occasions as flukes for whatever reason they can occur but you really want to avoid it at all costs if possible. If you get red occurrences every time you stream that's also a good sign you should definitely turn down the bitrate/buffersize.

Also, I don't know for certain what situations cause twitch to decide to disconnect a user. It's possible that if you're dropping important frames too often it could decide to disconnect you at some point, but I honestly just do not know. If the button turns itself to "Start Streaming" again, that means that it disconnected you for some reason (note to self: need to add a "disconnected by server" message box when disconnected by the server). I should also start logging the network data that twitch uploads or something to see if twitch is sending any specific disconnect message. I'll see what I can do on my end with what I know so far.

I've been doing long multi-hour sessions since you reported this and haven't really run in to much trouble myself.. Still, I don't like to assume that it's just something on your end, as I don't want to take any chances, so I'm going to continue checking this out to be sure.

Would love to hear if this is occurring to other people or not.
 

Klaent

New Member
I did not notice the indicator at all, cant see it while ingame.
http://www.twitch.tv/klaent/b/331799041
at 25:19 in that video the stream freezez. The sound keeps going but the picture never comes back. At the end of the video the stream shut down and i had to press "Start Streaming" again. It happend twice today, the first time it happend i had only been streaming for 30min or so, can get you that video aswell if needed.
 

R1CH

Forum Admin
Developer
Twitch does disconnect the source after a certain number of drop events. You can even cause it to occur by setting a low frame rate.
 

defunct

Member
I get disconnected normally around 2-3 hours. Perhaps it was a connection issue of some kind but I have lots of 8 hour + ffsplit streams so it could be something else. I noticed I set my bitrate at 2500 but I see the meter going well above that sometimes to around 3500. If you need further information, I'll be happy to provide it.

Note, I'm not getting black streams but it just stops the stream at some point after 2-3 hours and happened twice in one night.
 

R1CH

Forum Admin
Developer
Do your log files indicate a lot of dropped frames whenever you get disconnected?
 
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