Question / Help Taking to long to encode skipping frames

[MacheteForChristmas]

I am a little perplexed with this problem. This is the first time I am trying to use OBS and I got my settings from a friend with a laptop that has less performance than mine does and his streams work fine. I do have Optimus but I have set OBS to open with the GTX 670m as opposed to the Intel Graphics 4000. I'm pretty sure my GPU and Processor should be able to handle streaming with these settings with no problem. Also the stream preview runs for about 3-5 minutes without problems and all of a sudden and I get the error "Taking to long to encode skipping frames."

 

[Lain]

Your CPU is decent, so you generally shouldn't be getting this error unless a game is eating up all your CPU. What game are you playing? Worst comes to worst, you may have to turn down either OBS settings (more downscale), or turn down the settings of whatever game you're playing.

 

[MacheteForChristmas]

I'm streaming Call of Duty: Ghosts on the xbox 360 and the laptop I am using is only being used for that single task while streaming. The in Game Capture HD settings aren't that high either. It is set to HD 720p but on the lowest 720p quality possible. I was wondering if it might be a start of a hardware failure with either CPU or GPU. The laptop is about 2 years old so I think its possible but unlikely.

Additional Info: I have never overclocked my CPU or GPU to damage them, but I do run high settings on the games that I play on my laptop which causes it to get very warm, not hot but very warm.

 

[Lain]

Oh you're using an elgato -- hm, very strange. I don't know if it's a hardware failure, I don't think so. All I know however is that this is unusual, I know plenty of people with a similar setup (laptop + elgato) that don't have this sort of issue. You actually have your stream settings set up pretty much perfectly, so I'm really confused. There's got to be something else on your computer eating up your CPU or something, or bad power-saving settings. You're running the laptop while plugged in to the wall, right? This is definitely unusual otherwise.

 

[MacheteForChristmas]

You were right the cpu usage is spiking but i was watching in the task manager and for some reason its obs that causes the cpu spike. I previewed stream for about 20 mins and the first 15 the cpu usage was around 35 percent. (fluctuating from 20-45) All of a sudden it spikes and went to around 90 percent and would stay mostly around 90 with a spikes back down to 30ish percent. In task manager it showed obs with about 90 percent and task manager would change from 0-2 percent.

Yes, the laptop is plugged directly into the wall. The power settings are set to custom which is basically a max performance settings with some tweaks such as brightness changed down, sleep settings changed, etc. However, the process power management is set to active, the usb selective suspend setting is set to disabled, the graphics power plan is set to max performance.

When the fan kicks on that is when it seems to spike but i'm not sure why it is spiking since the system cooling process is set to active and the maximum processor state is set to 100 percent. Is it possible that the fan doesn't kick on until the processor has started to slow even in an active setting? I don't know what else to think other than the processor slowing before even turns on the fan.

 

[MacheteForChristmas]

This is the log from the last try when testing the cpu usage.

 

[MacheteForChristmas]

I went and cleaned my laptop fans a little, they weren't that dirty but just wanted to make sure I was doing everything I could think of to resole this issue. Went and tried to preview stream again and the same thing happened. When I tried to stop the stream preview OBS crashed so I thought I would post the crash log here. Not sure if it will help in any way but I want to be as thorough as possible.

 

[Lain]

Yea, this definitely feels unusual for your machine, I don't quite know what to suggest other than maybe using slightly more downscale to prevent it from popping up again. It'll reduce your stream pixel ratio but it will most likely also prevent the encoder from lagging.