VLC Video Source - Audio Delay

PlatyPete

New Member
I've noticed a very long audio delay using VLC Video Source, like a second or longer. Just using the monitor without recording anything, I can see the bars in the mixer are responding sooner than the corresponding audio plays. It's most obvious when I skip to the next track in the playlist, or hit the stop or pause button and it takes a long while for the music to stop playing. This is reflected in recordings: I use the Waveform Visualizer plugin while I play music during breaks, and it's very obvious the audio is far behind the visualizer as well. Other sources like my microphone and capture card have unnoticable delay, if any: it seems to be only VLC Video Source. I've monitored CPU and memory usage, and they remain very low during streaming and recording.

I'm using the PPA OBS Studio 30.1.2, and I have VLC 3.0.16-1build7 installed. I have tried the default libfdk AAC audio and x264 video encoders, as well as FFmpeg AAC and FFmpeg VAAPI H.264 with no apparent difference. I'm currently using the FFmpeg encoders.
My distro is Mint 21.3, Cinnamon desktop. I had some issues with audio elsewhere, so I set PulseAudio to default to 48,000 Hz bitrate and matched that in OBS. I also disabled a timer schedule feature that can apparently cause various audio issues: load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

Here's my latest log from a brief recording test I did. The delay was noticable right away: https://obsproject.com/logs/B6Z2KwT6zqVpfWqt

For now I've hidden the visualizer because it's so distracting, but I'd love to resolve this so I can include it in my streams again. Thank you!
 

PlatyPete

New Member
Well, I'm going to throw in the towel for now and use an alternate solution: play my songs in VLC with the "Now Playing in Texts" plugin and connect it to OBS using Jack. This way I can still display the track title, artists, and album, and show a visualizer, but of course I have to start up VLC by hand every time, so it's not ideal :P
 
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