Question / Help Teacher struggling with obs recording on a (very) low end laptop

[goumoun2000]

Hello everyone,

I'm a french history and geography teacher. As you know, we're actually all in containment in the country, and the schools are obviously closed. I'm trying to upload lessons on Youtube for my students, and I chose OBS since I 'd like to capture pdf files shown on screen and a webcam at the same time, without the hassle of video editing.

I managed to understand the basics and I was able to upload content on Youtube without difficulties, but my settings are obvioously sub-par and the webcam image lags a lot. I have a decent PC at home, but alas I'm not contained there, and I have to work with a very old basic laptop. Here are the specs : i3-m370, 3go ram, AMD mobility radeon hd5000. The only decent thing is the audio, since I play music in a band : decent audio-technica pro8he mic through a behringer x18 digital mixer.

I'm already downscaling everything in 1280x720, and it seems to be the limit : under that resolution, texts are very difficult to read. I chose 24fps, hoping to save some power, flv format, x264 encoder (no choice), CRF set to 15 and ultrafast. Audio is set at 48khz, 320 rate.

The cam is a USB microsoft livecam cinema set at 1280x720, 24 fps, with the buffer on to try to prevent lags (I estimated the latency around 350 ms and applied that value to the audio in the advanced properties panel).

Obviously I won't do any activity on the pc that sollicitates the processor or the graphic card, besides capturing a screen and a webcam flow, while filming.

Are there any settings I could choose to get a decent result with these tools ? I obviously know it's a lot compromised by the obsolete laptop...

Sorry for my crappy english too !

Thanks in advance for the answers...

 

[goumoun2000]

I bump the thread, for I need answers... ty !

 

[FerretBomb]

Unfortunately @goumoun2000, that system will not be able to record smoothly. An i3 is solidly in the "email machine" category (especially a laptop-grade i3, which are cut-down even further from their already-anemic desktop counterparts), and that GPU does not provide hardware compression to alleviate the very heavy load that real-time video encoding requires. If x264 Ultrafast still overwhelms it, your only option is to upgrade your hardware. You could try downscaling even further, and run your desktop at a lower resolution to improve the readability of text, and/or lower the framerate to 15 or 10fps. But those both are a very long shot.

Baumleipzig, we'd need more information. But generally if a system can't handle x264 Ultrafast, it isn't going to be suited for recording.