Windows Surface Pro 7-Into a streaming machine

[Need4joe]

I have a Surface Pro 7 that I wish to turn into a streaming machine. I have used it last year to stream live football games to an audience. I used my personal phone as the camera source and had it connected to OBS using DroidCam. I also had an overlay running on OBS for a scorebug. I then live streamed to my Youtube channel.

This worked fine and did the job over the football season, however there were several occasions that it was a little choppy and slow. I don't believe it had anything to do with the network but with my PC and OBS settings.

I don't know much about OBS, and quite frankly, I'm a noob when it comes to OBS. So I feel like I could've got better quality and everything if I had made some adjustments here and there on OBS first. My goal is to turn my laptop into a streaming machine, meaning I don't want to use it for anything other than streaming the football games. At the time, I can't afford to buy another laptop or anything to improve the quality. I'm pretty sure a Surface 7 has what it takes to stream at least decent quality based off some of the specs and little research I did. I don't use my laptop for anything else really.

What can I adjust and set on OBS, based off some of my system specs as shown in the screenshot below, to produce good to excellent quality streams, going off the assumption it's not the network/wifi signal, but the computer that's causing the problems. Maybe it is the network, I'm not entirely sure to be honest. Here is a screen grab of the stats while I did a practice stream. Mind you, the practice stream was very short and not after 30 min or so of recording. I just started the stream and ran the stats, did a screen grab and then ended the stream. Maybe someone could see something I don't from the stats and base my settings off it.

I'm sure there's someone out there that had a similar issue or problem with their Surface and found a fix or alternative way to stream. By the way, I would prefer using OBS for the overlay. I must have the overlay for the scoreboard/scorebug.

Thank you for any help and suggestions.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

A surface pro is in the thin, light, optimized for battery life and intentionally has low (relative) performance. real-time video encoding is computationally intensive (opposite). doable, *IF* you are careful and have realistic expectations..
Though possibly ok, 8GB RAM is unmistakably on the low side, and may be an issue. [but if soldered RAM, then nothing you can do about it]
As such, optimize both the operating system and OBS Studio to keep RAM usage down. that means checking/testing/monitoring plugins, your settings, etc. (you probably should get familiar with Task Mgr > Performance tab and/or Resource Monitor). I'd also advise researching how to monitor for thermal throttling on the specific make/model laptop (I'm not aware of a generic approach).

Do you need 60 fps? that takes extra processing (heat) and bandwidth [or, for same bandwidth, trading lower video quality for extra FPS]

With such low RAM, being attentive about background processes is likely to be important (ie, time to learn how to properly optimize Windows desktop OS, and beware YouTube nincompoops with really bad advice on how to do that). Personally, I start with VDI desktop style optimizations, and then go from there. Beware current tendency for Microsoft and everyone else to add their background processes to OS level auto-start. probably a good idea to start disabling the auto-start of a bunch of stuff (I do)

As for choppy... without real-time monitoring no way to know whether the Surface itself, or the network. could easily be either. Things like OS updates, background tasks, including security scans, and more can all impact your system. And if using WiFi or cellular, one should not expect those to offer consistent throughput, jitter, and latency over time (they aren't, you just might not notice)

As for specific OBS Studio settings, see pinned post about asking for help/question, and posting OBS Studio log from a Recording/Streaming session. Also, see a number of recent threads on system specs, laptops, under-powered systems
- ensuring right encoder settings
- things like avoiding re-scaling, CPU impactful audio filters/effects (like noise cancelling) etc [until you have a really good understanding of your hardware resource utilization levels, and confidence you aren't overloading your system],
- and don't expect to run things like RAM, CPU, network, etc at 90% and not occasionally have a glitch. you typically need a bigger safety buffer