Question / Help Struggling to get a Live Stream Interview on Macbook Air

N

ntraicoff

New Member
Dear OBS Community,

I am looking for some help. I use OBS to record live advice streams for my Fantasy Football Website on my Macbook Air (2015 - 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5 w/ 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3). It works perfectly fine for solo videos -- a little laggy at times, but no major issues.

However, I would love to do Live Interviews (ideally via Skype), but when I have tried either Window Capturing or using NDI, the broadcast is either extremely laggy, or it just wont load at all and says "Encoder Overload: Consider turning down video settings or using a faster encoding preset." If it helps, I believe this is a copy of my last log: https://obsproject.com/logs/HhlJPaUwOE3X31c_


I am wondering 2 things:

1) What is the best way to conduct a Live Interview (Skype Window capture? NDI Source? Other recs) w/ the lowest encoding issues?
2) Is this an issue of the Macbook Air just not being powerful enough? If so, what would be the most budget-friendly streaming device for my needs (live shows & live interviews, not gaming at all)

Thank you so much for any help you can offer!

Best,
Nick
 
Narcogen

Narcogen

Active Member
20:43:02.999: Output 'simple_stream': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 11 (3.1%)

20:43:50.426: ==== Shutting down ==================================================
20:43:50.432: [obs-ndi] stopping NDI preview output
20:43:50.432: Output 'NDI Preview Output': stopping
20:43:50.432: Output 'NDI Preview Output': Total frames output: 3558
20:43:50.432: Output 'NDI Preview Output': Total drawn frames: 4753 (4886 attempted)
20:43:50.432: Output 'NDI Preview Output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 133 (2.7%)
20:43:50.448: [obs-ndi] stopping NDI main output
20:43:50.448: Output 'NDI Main Output': stopping
20:43:50.448: Output 'NDI Main Output': Total frames output: 4882
20:43:50.449: Output 'NDI Main Output': Total drawn frames: 4754 (4887 attempted)
20:43:50.449: Output 'NDI Main Output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 133 (2.7%)

At this point in time, a MacBook Air is probably the worst possible machine for trying to do this on.

That said, you're experiencing only a little bit of rendering lag, probably caused by the increased load associated with using NDI and Skype.

I'm not sure what you can do about it other than reducing canvas size. Reduce it to the same as your output size and resize your sources in the preview window to fit.

Ideally, canvas and output resolution are the same; there's no scaling and no loss of quality.

However, if your machine is constrained by its encoder or upload bandwidth, you can reduce output size and suffer the quality hit of scaling (the performance hit is minor). This is what you've already done.

However, reduced output resolution doesn't get rid of the load of rendering the frames first at the canvas resolution. And since rendering lag is what you're getting, reducin the canvas resolution to the same as your output might eliminate it, and again you'd have no scaling. (You'll still have less quality than if you were rendering and encoding at 900p, but that's just not an option for your Air I assume.

The requirements for running OBS and gaming are pretty similar. Go for a laptop running Windows with the best Nvidia card you can justify. This will also give you access to hardware encoding features that are available when using OBS on Windows with an Nvidia card that are either not available at all under MacOS, or available in an inferior form when using an AMD card.
 
N

ntraicoff

New Member
Narcogen - thank you so much for the information this is very much appreciated and so helpful. To be honest, I am about the least tech-savvy person out there. As a teacher with a minimal budget, do you have any recommendations for a laptop that would be sufficient for running Skype Interviews via OBS? What exactly is a Nvidia card? Thanks again for all the help!
 
Narcogen

Narcogen

Active Member
An nvidia card is a GPU (graphics processing unit) made by the company named Nvidia.

These particular cards support a feature that allow for the encoding of video necessary for streaming with good efficiency and quality without overloading a PC.

The best laptop for this task is a laptop with the fastest CPU and the newest Nvidia GPU that your budget can justify.

The feature you want to be sure the card supports is called NVENC. This is supported in nearly all Nvidia GPUs whose number begins with "GTX" (not just "GT") and whose series number is at least 7XX or higher.
 
J

Joel August

New Member
Narcogen said:
An nvidia card is a GPU (graphics processing unit) made by the company named Nvidia.

These particular cards support a feature that allow for the encoding of video necessary for streaming with good efficiency and quality without overloading a PC.

The best laptop for this task is a laptop with the fastest CPU and the newest Nvidia GPU that your budget can justify.

The feature you want to be sure the card supports is called NVENC. This is supported in nearly all Nvidia GPUs whose number begins with "GTX" (not just "GT") and whose series number is at least 7XX or higher.
Click to expand...

Is there any software/hardware combination that will allow musicians to play together in real time and stream?
 
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