Bitrate Madness and Frame Drops When Streaming to YouTube

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HarmonicHeart

New Member
Hey there,

For the last year, my YouTube streams will randomly start having crazy bitrate fluctuations, eventually "stabilizing" around 7 or 8000kbps. There are also massive amounts of dropped frames and the whole stream basically becomes unwatchable. I have been streaming for years and never experienced this until last year. Strangely, when this starts happening, I can change the destination to Twitch (keeping everything else identical) and there are no issues. Then I switch back to YouTube and the issues are immediate.

LOGS:

Some info:
  • Internet connection is 1gig down, 150 up. Speed tests show perfect numbers even while the issue is occuring during a stream.
  • I've tried troubleshooting my network setup endlessly. Spoke to ISP many times, techs have come out, new modem, new 3rd party router, new mobo, etc.
  • I'm using OBS 31.0.0-beta 2 at the moment, but this was occuring with previous OBS versions just the same for the last year. I've never run a beta until recently and it has not affected the frequency or type of issue.
  • Only occurs for YouTube streams but not every time. Sometimes I have multiple days of perfect 5 hour test streams. Other times I see issues after one or two hours. Other times the issue is present immediately, like now.
  • My normal bitrate is 25,000 and has been for years. When the issue occurs, the bitrate fluctuates like crazy for a bit and then stays around 7 or 8000 with constant dropped frames. If I then set my bitrate at 6k or under, issues are gone. Anything over 8k results in the same issues. Again, no issues with Twitch.
  • I've tried using different ingest servers, different stream keys, new OBS default profile, fresh OBS install, running in safe mode - all the same.
  • Sometimes restarting my network gear solves the problem temporarily, sometimes it doesn't.
  • I've run a traceroute to YouTube and the results came back looking fine
  • In running a bufferbloat test, no issues were seen other than a maximum latency spike of 255ms, which could be an issue
I'm really not sure what else to do...so any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm fairly techy so you can speak techy to me and I should be able to follow, if need be. Thank you!
 
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DavidMM

New Member
This has recently started happening to me. I've seen other steamers saying they're having "issues" with YouTube streams lately as well. I am experiencing identical symptoms to you. I believe the issue is on YouTube's end and has not been confirmed as a known issue yet.

I've run all the same tests you described. My internet is working perfectly, but drops insane packet amounts to YouTube. The work-around I've found is to switch to the YouTube Backup RTMP server, start streaming, stop streaming, switch back, and then start/stop streaming until the bitrate stabilizes and the frames stop dropping. Sometimes it takes 8-10 tries, but once it stabilizes, it seems to work normally for the remainder of my live stream.

I hope this helps, and I hope YouTube acknowledges and resolves this issue soon.
 
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HarmonicHeart

New Member
DavidMM said:
This has recently started happening to me. I've seen other steamers saying they're having "issues" with YouTube streams lately as well. I am experiencing identical symptoms to you. I believe the issue is on YouTube's end and has not been confirmed as a known issue yet.

I've run all the same tests you described. My internet is working perfectly, but drops insane packet amounts to YouTube. The work-around I've found is to switch to the YouTube Backup RTMP server, start streaming, stop streaming, switch back, and then start/stop streaming until the bitrate stabilizes and the frames stop dropping. Sometimes it takes 8-10 tries, but once it stabilizes, it seems to work normally for the remainder of my live stream.

I hope this helps, and I hope YouTube acknowledges and resolves this issue soon.
Click to expand...
Hmm.. that's very interesting. I found some posts from a couple of years ago where people were talking about something similar. YouTube ended up acknowledging the problem and fixing it on their end with good results.

Is there some way we can let YT know more directly? Maybe a forum post somewhere...

Also, have you tried HLS streaming? I know there is an added latency cost but I'm curious if it would solve the packet drop issue for now...
 
Rhiow

Rhiow

New Member
Hey, chiming in to say over the past two weeks I've started having the issue as well. Crazy dropped frames JUST to youtube. I've tried RTMPs, RTMP Legacy, different computers, different versions of OBS, contacted my ISP. I start up stream, stream to Twitch - perfect, no issues. Stream to YT and IMMEDIATE frame drops.

Is there any way we can report this to YT? It really does seem to be an issue on their end, because if I try to stream straight from their browser stream it maintains an "Excellent" connection, but if I try to RTMP or anything else it freaks out and refuses to do anything.
 
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HarmonicHeart

New Member
Rhiow said:
Hey, chiming in to say over the past two weeks I've started having the issue as well. Crazy dropped frames JUST to youtube. I've tried RTMPs, RTMP Legacy, different computers, different versions of OBS, contacted my ISP. I start up stream, stream to Twitch - perfect, no issues. Stream to YT and IMMEDIATE frame drops.

Is there any way we can report this to YT? It really does seem to be an issue on their end, because if I try to stream straight from their browser stream it maintains an "Excellent" connection, but if I try to RTMP or anything else it freaks out and refuses to do anything.
Click to expand...
I'm not exactly sure where to post, but I have created a YouTube Community Forum post here which you can also reply to.
 
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