demonboy
New Member
I ran my first YouTube live stream test this morning to fifteen people, and it went well. Thought I'd jot down some findings since I struggled to find anything useful on streaming via mobile phone. Hope this helps.
I live on a boat at anchor, currently in Malaysia. Connectivity is good and consistent with Hotlink 4G, even when half a mile offshore. A couple of broadband tests last night showed the upstream to be up to 20Mbs, but this is to be taken with a pinch of salt of course. I recently ran an hour-long broadcast to Facebook via phone whilst sailing around the coast so I was intrigued to find out how doing it through OBS to YouTube would fare. I couldn't find any information on comparisons between the two services, and specifically running OBS in this way, so here's what I found.
I'm using a Thinkpad W540 (i7-4800MQ @ 2.7GHz, 16GB RAM, Windows 10 with latest updates) so I set the CPU Usage Preset to 'fast'. I didn't change this throughout the broadcast. CPU hit 80% occassionally but mainly sat at 30%. I saw few frame drops, which was nice. Set OBS to 30fps.
We ran for two hours with me sitting at the computer, so little movement except me flapping my arms about. I used the crappy laptop cam and two SJCams and I changed the settings three times.
1) 2.5Mbps, buffer set at 2Mbps and audio at 160kbps.
Audio was good and the picture was good but the stream was choppy, lagged and buffered. The testers said it was acceptable but there were lots of comments on freezing. They said when I put overlays on, specifically animated loops and also video clips, it really struggled. I don't know if this was coincidence or not since I imagine it makes little difference what I'm sending out via OBS.
2) 1.5Mbps, buffer at 1Mbps and audio increased to 192kbps
Little difference between this and the last setting, although some viewers with a fast connection claimed there was an improvement.
3) 500kbps, buffer at 250kbps and audio still at 192kbps
This was the sweet spot. Suddenly the stream ran perfectly with no buffering or freezing. YouTube showed me the green icon to say the stream was good (previously it had shown red) and yet the viewers claimed there was no degradation in picture quality. I could run full HD video clips with music, animated loops, images etc and it was all good. I ran for another hour with two looped animations running the whole time. Even my flappy arms were rendered well.
I'd be interested to know how much contention had to do with these changes. I started broadcasting at 8am and ran until 10am. I imagine more people are on their phones as they're getting ready for work, and then put their phones down once at work, so maybe this had an impact.
The SJCams were good quality but there was a lag of about a second between them and the laptop audio.
Questions
1) Should running sources affect what the viewer sees? Was it just coincidence that buffering occurred when I ran these sources when streaming at 2.5Mbps?
2) Does creating full 1080 HD video clips make a difference? What if I'd made them in 720 at a lower bit-rate? I imagine this only impacts on the laptop, not the stream.
3) What was interesting was that after setting the video to 500kbps it was sometimes sending the stream out at 600-700kbps. Why is this?
4)Why can't I can't line up video clips in the preview screen like I can overlays?
5) What's the trick to syncing external cameras to the internal audio from the laptop mic?
Anyway, hope this helps anyone streaming from mobile, though I appreciate every scenario is different. Gotta say the whole OBS experience was very enjoyable so props to the developers for taking the time out to make it work.
For the record, I used to stream on an internet dance radio station 20 years ago (InterFace) from a studio in East London. Now I'm broadcasting from the saloon of my boat at anchor in Malaysia. Streaming has come a long way.
I live on a boat at anchor, currently in Malaysia. Connectivity is good and consistent with Hotlink 4G, even when half a mile offshore. A couple of broadband tests last night showed the upstream to be up to 20Mbs, but this is to be taken with a pinch of salt of course. I recently ran an hour-long broadcast to Facebook via phone whilst sailing around the coast so I was intrigued to find out how doing it through OBS to YouTube would fare. I couldn't find any information on comparisons between the two services, and specifically running OBS in this way, so here's what I found.
I'm using a Thinkpad W540 (i7-4800MQ @ 2.7GHz, 16GB RAM, Windows 10 with latest updates) so I set the CPU Usage Preset to 'fast'. I didn't change this throughout the broadcast. CPU hit 80% occassionally but mainly sat at 30%. I saw few frame drops, which was nice. Set OBS to 30fps.
We ran for two hours with me sitting at the computer, so little movement except me flapping my arms about. I used the crappy laptop cam and two SJCams and I changed the settings three times.
1) 2.5Mbps, buffer set at 2Mbps and audio at 160kbps.
Audio was good and the picture was good but the stream was choppy, lagged and buffered. The testers said it was acceptable but there were lots of comments on freezing. They said when I put overlays on, specifically animated loops and also video clips, it really struggled. I don't know if this was coincidence or not since I imagine it makes little difference what I'm sending out via OBS.
2) 1.5Mbps, buffer at 1Mbps and audio increased to 192kbps
Little difference between this and the last setting, although some viewers with a fast connection claimed there was an improvement.
3) 500kbps, buffer at 250kbps and audio still at 192kbps
This was the sweet spot. Suddenly the stream ran perfectly with no buffering or freezing. YouTube showed me the green icon to say the stream was good (previously it had shown red) and yet the viewers claimed there was no degradation in picture quality. I could run full HD video clips with music, animated loops, images etc and it was all good. I ran for another hour with two looped animations running the whole time. Even my flappy arms were rendered well.
I'd be interested to know how much contention had to do with these changes. I started broadcasting at 8am and ran until 10am. I imagine more people are on their phones as they're getting ready for work, and then put their phones down once at work, so maybe this had an impact.
The SJCams were good quality but there was a lag of about a second between them and the laptop audio.
Questions
1) Should running sources affect what the viewer sees? Was it just coincidence that buffering occurred when I ran these sources when streaming at 2.5Mbps?
2) Does creating full 1080 HD video clips make a difference? What if I'd made them in 720 at a lower bit-rate? I imagine this only impacts on the laptop, not the stream.
3) What was interesting was that after setting the video to 500kbps it was sometimes sending the stream out at 600-700kbps. Why is this?
4)Why can't I can't line up video clips in the preview screen like I can overlays?
5) What's the trick to syncing external cameras to the internal audio from the laptop mic?
Anyway, hope this helps anyone streaming from mobile, though I appreciate every scenario is different. Gotta say the whole OBS experience was very enjoyable so props to the developers for taking the time out to make it work.
For the record, I used to stream on an internet dance radio station 20 years ago (InterFace) from a studio in East London. Now I'm broadcasting from the saloon of my boat at anchor in Malaysia. Streaming has come a long way.
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