Mark Scudder
New Member
Hello. Relatively new OBS user here, and getting ready to use it heavily, and I'm having a very frustrating problem. I cannot afford to purchase Wirecast.
I am attempting to stream to YouTube using a Logitech c920 with audio from an old M-Audio MobilePre USB into a Mid-2015 15" Retina MacBook Pro, which has a 2.5GHz i7 (presumably Haswell or Broadwell), 16GB RAM, and an AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB of its own RAM.
I'm trying to use OBS because of its support for GPU encoding. When it works, OBS claims to be using 5% CPU (other utilities say it's maxing out one core), but it runs better and quieter than CPU-based encoding. In my application I am using microphones on the stream which absolutely cannot have full-blast fan noise on them.
OBS will run for a random period of time - from seconds to hours - without incident, and then suddenly will begin increasing dropped frames at a rate which seems to indicate all frames are being dropped. The streaming rate in the lower right of the interface will drop from about 4,000kb/s to about 160kb/s. YouTube will similarly report that "The stream's current bitrate (160.00 Kbps) is lower than the recommended bitrate. We recommend that you use a stream bitrate of 4500 Kbps." This, obviously, completely stops the stream from being watchable on YouTube, and you get the animated throbber over a still image that you get when a video is stalled or buffering.
No matter how long I leave it in this state, the stream never restarts, and never stops dropping (all) frames. I am always recording a local copy at the same time, and this local copy continues recording after this happens, with no noticeable issues.
If I stop the stream and restart it, it typically connects and begins streaming immediately, and we go back to waiting for it to do it again. Again, sometimes it takes seconds, sometimes it'll run for hours.
I don't believe this has anything to do with my internet connection, which is not otherwise loaded while I am streaming. I think this because an intermittent load on my internet would eventually go away, allowing the stream to send again at the correct rate. This never happens. I never get finished with a four-hour stream and have, say, six dropped frames. It's either zero dropped frames or all of them.
I have tried different bitrates, different keyframe intervals, different resolutions, and the backup YouTube ingest server. I have checked and unchecked "Limit bitrate" and "Enforce streaming service encoder settings." I have not tried switching from the Apple Hardware Encoder because this would make OBS useless to me.
Screenshots follow:
OBS is working normally. Low CPU, correct framerate and bitrate.
YouTube reports that the stream health is "good."
OBS stops successfully streaming, the bitrate drops to ~160kb/s, OBS reports all frames dropped.
YouTube reports a similar bitrate, but the stream has died at this point and has stopped playing.
My Output settings. Recording is enabled and is set to "use stream encoder." My internet upstream is only 5mb/s so 3500kb/s seemed to be a safe setting.
I have uploaded a log, but it shows no failure I can determine:
https://gist.github.com/ddd19c81cfae8ba677a522202f859bef
I appreciate any assistance you can provide.
I am attempting to stream to YouTube using a Logitech c920 with audio from an old M-Audio MobilePre USB into a Mid-2015 15" Retina MacBook Pro, which has a 2.5GHz i7 (presumably Haswell or Broadwell), 16GB RAM, and an AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB of its own RAM.
I'm trying to use OBS because of its support for GPU encoding. When it works, OBS claims to be using 5% CPU (other utilities say it's maxing out one core), but it runs better and quieter than CPU-based encoding. In my application I am using microphones on the stream which absolutely cannot have full-blast fan noise on them.
OBS will run for a random period of time - from seconds to hours - without incident, and then suddenly will begin increasing dropped frames at a rate which seems to indicate all frames are being dropped. The streaming rate in the lower right of the interface will drop from about 4,000kb/s to about 160kb/s. YouTube will similarly report that "The stream's current bitrate (160.00 Kbps) is lower than the recommended bitrate. We recommend that you use a stream bitrate of 4500 Kbps." This, obviously, completely stops the stream from being watchable on YouTube, and you get the animated throbber over a still image that you get when a video is stalled or buffering.
No matter how long I leave it in this state, the stream never restarts, and never stops dropping (all) frames. I am always recording a local copy at the same time, and this local copy continues recording after this happens, with no noticeable issues.
If I stop the stream and restart it, it typically connects and begins streaming immediately, and we go back to waiting for it to do it again. Again, sometimes it takes seconds, sometimes it'll run for hours.
I don't believe this has anything to do with my internet connection, which is not otherwise loaded while I am streaming. I think this because an intermittent load on my internet would eventually go away, allowing the stream to send again at the correct rate. This never happens. I never get finished with a four-hour stream and have, say, six dropped frames. It's either zero dropped frames or all of them.
I have tried different bitrates, different keyframe intervals, different resolutions, and the backup YouTube ingest server. I have checked and unchecked "Limit bitrate" and "Enforce streaming service encoder settings." I have not tried switching from the Apple Hardware Encoder because this would make OBS useless to me.
Screenshots follow:
OBS is working normally. Low CPU, correct framerate and bitrate.
YouTube reports that the stream health is "good."
OBS stops successfully streaming, the bitrate drops to ~160kb/s, OBS reports all frames dropped.
YouTube reports a similar bitrate, but the stream has died at this point and has stopped playing.
My Output settings. Recording is enabled and is set to "use stream encoder." My internet upstream is only 5mb/s so 3500kb/s seemed to be a safe setting.
I have uploaded a log, but it shows no failure I can determine:
https://gist.github.com/ddd19c81cfae8ba677a522202f859bef
I appreciate any assistance you can provide.
