Question / Help Choppy video stream but no fps drop

[Armads]

Here's the log: https://hastebin.com/gegotozivi

I honestly don't know what to do or what the problem is. The game runs fine at 60 fps, obs says it's outputting at 60 fps, but when viewing the stream, it's choppy. It's not my internet or my viewers internet, that we tested. It's not the fps, as it happens both with 60 and 30 fps. It happens both with hardware and software encoding. It isn't maxing out my cpu or my gpu. It's not the bitrate, which is 2200, it's not the resolution, because I'm streaming at 1280x800. Obs seems fine, my pc seems fine, but the stream is choppy with video, but not audio. Audio doesn't seem to lag.

Any ideas as to how to fix this? I'm not sure what's causing it since I've run through the usual things, I think.

 

[___Maggi___]

Hello,

I have two suggestions.
1) change the resolution to 1280x720. 1280x800 seems kind of strange?!!??!??!

15:45:13.826: [NVENC encoder: 'simple_h264_stream'] settings:
15:45:13.826: rate_control: CBR
15:45:13.826: bitrate: 2200
15:45:13.826: cqp: 0
15:45:13.826: keyint: 120
15:45:13.826: preset: default
15:45:13.826: profile: main
15:45:13.826: level: auto
15:45:13.826: width: 1280
15:45:13.826: height: 800
15:45:13.826: 2-pass: true
15:45:13.826: b-frames: 2
15:45:13.826: GPU: 0

2) your bitrate is set to 2200 which is pretty little... especially when you are playing/streaming First Person Shooter games with high motion actions scenes. You should at least stream with 3500 bitrate. Twitch accepts a bitrate up to 6000 for non-partnered streamer.

 

[generalbrothers]

I think it's a new bug related to the latest windows 10 update. I'm experiencing the very same thing recently, no bottleneck anywhere...

 

[I3ordo]

I had the same issue, my stutters were periodic like every second, there is a dublicate frame periodically.. I got rid of it but i am left with a more than clean scene. I am slowly building up my scenes again, always a tad better than the last one.

I THINK THE Browser-Page.exe process that spawns under OBS (task manager) is creating the microstutters.

Here is its current state with an actual game running with x264 encoder, 3000 bitrate, faster , high 720p60
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/320972668

Here is my suggestion to get you going.

*Create a blank scene collection and close OBS.

then open open it again, you should open into the empty scene as you created one earlier.

Check task manager and see if OBS exe has no underlying process like browser-source exe , it should look like this

*Then on the clean scene, add this media source which is a1080p60 mp4 file without sound.
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AlqRP3b38Zvs9QwusY2rguHVDlpO

the media source settings should be like :

This will give you a looping media with reasonable resource usage, alot less than what a game would have but , we are trouble shooting here.


* Now , create a fullscreen preview of your broadcast.

Even without having an active stream or a local video recording recording, you should have a very smooth video preview. Check for the sides of the screen at Poles and trees, if there is framepacing issues, you will notice them there more.

I dont know the specs of your system but if you still dont have a fluid motion on your preview window, go to settings\output\ and set the Base and output resolutions to 1280x720. Remember to select the "60" fps option underneath it.

Next, you are gonna set encoder to x264 and make a "3000 birate, faster, High 60fps and for both stream and recording(same as stream encoder)

I will be around.

 

[Armads]

Thank you all for your replies. I set the bitrate low because I thought most people didn't have fast enough internet to handle faster speeds? But I can certainly increase it and see if it works.

As for the scene thing, the issue isn't getting fluid motion in obs, that's fine. It's only on the stream itself that there's an issue. OBS's preview is fine, as is the game. I'll try changing the resolution and the bitrate and see if it changes anything and report back.

 

[I3ordo]

Well, try restream.io, my stream was having 1-2 second still frame pauses which i did not have at all when streaming to restream and have it distribute it to tw and yt.

 

[Armads]

So after some more testing, turns out the problem was the bitrate. Apparently, 2200 bitrate was too low? I doubled it to 4k bitrate, and that seemed to fix the problem. Apparently, my understanding of bitrate was incorrect; I thought around 2k was average, but obviously that was a mistake on my part. As it turns out, all the hardware in the world doesn't matter if you're not outputting at a decent bitrate. I'm not exactly sure what counts as a decent bitrate, but it looks pretty good now.

Thank you everyone for your assistance! Never would have considered the bitrate being an issue.

 

[I3ordo]

interesting... 4000kbps was a better choice for not dropping frames than 2200? thats nonsense...

 

[Armads]

interesting... 4000kbps was a better choice for not dropping frames than 2200? thats nonsense...

Well again, I wasn't dropping frames. I dropped 0 frames, that was why it was confusing. I was trying to stream, wasn't having fps issues in either the game or obs itself, but the stream was still choppy.

As it turns out, not having a high enough bitrate created a situation where the stream output wasn't large enough to handle what I was streaming. So doubling the bitrate gave a far smoother viewing, and removed the choppiness.

 

[I3ordo]

glad you got that over with. as long it works, cheers.

i have a "supposedly" nicer problem cause i can see the problem in the preview window without going live but it s hard to pinpoint and blame something. it can be audio sources, image processor or my hardware video decoder... cant really now...

 

[KerooSeta]

Hello,

I have two suggestions.
1) change the resolution to 1280x720. 1280x800 seems kind of strange?!!??!??!

15:45:13.826: [NVENC encoder: 'simple_h264_stream'] settings:
15:45:13.826: rate_control: CBR
15:45:13.826: bitrate: 2200
15:45:13.826: cqp: 0
15:45:13.826: keyint: 120
15:45:13.826: preset: default
15:45:13.826: profile: main
15:45:13.826: level: auto
15:45:13.826: width: 1280
15:45:13.826: height: 800
15:45:13.826: 2-pass: true
15:45:13.826: b-frames: 2
15:45:13.826: GPU: 0

2) your bitrate is set to 2200 which is pretty little... especially when you are playing/streaming First Person Shooter games with high motion actions scenes. You should at least stream with 3500 bitrate. Twitch accepts a bitrate up to 6000 for non-partnered streamer.

I am rezzing this 5 year-old thread just to let you and future readers know that this solved my problem (changing the resolution to 1280x720. I was streaming at a higher resolution (I think 1900 something by whatever) and getting the same problem as OP: laggy stream and backup recording that went away when just recording, but no dropped frames according to OBS. Changing the resolution fixed it. Thanks!