Bug Report OBS crashing during live stream

[Tangential]

I've started having problems with OBS on my mac crashing. During a live FB stream yesterday before crashing my mouse disappeared and the stream kept stopping and starting (apparently due to lost connection.) I was monitoring the network connection and I had plenty of bandwidth so I am not clear what was impacting the stream. Also before the crash, VLC video objects would start to play and then the video would freeze but the audio would continue. (more on the audio below)

Once OBS crashed, oddly enough, I was able to restart it, and start streaming again without losing the FB connection. After the crash/restart OBS behaved perfectly. All videos played fine, no lag, no lost connection, etc. I am attaching the log of the session that crashed (2020-02-14 16-43-36) and the follow on session (2020-02-14 18-27-47).

This is a 2015 15" MBP with 16G ram and a 2TB SSD. It has a 2.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7. I am (sadly) running Catalina.

This is a 3 person talk show with some static content supplied by another mac and with some VLC video objects being used inside OBS. All audio is managed thru a mixer so that it can be played to the local audience as well.

I am bringing in 1080p camera input using a USB CamLink4k and scraping the screen of another mac using a Thunderbolt Blackmagic mini. No audio is used from either of these sources.

My audio setup is to bring all of the mics into a mixer along with audio out from the VLC videos on the OBS mac. Any videos in OBS are set to monitor only and I send the monitor audio out the mac's 3.5mm jack into the mixer. Then I bring the mixed audio out back from the mixer to the mac via a USB sound card that is mapped to mic/aux. It has monitor off. That is the only source of audio for the stream/recording.

Any insights would help.

 

[Narcogen]

You've got an NDI plugin that's not loading, either because it's improperly installed, is the wrong version, or some other reason. Don't know if that's related but since it's not loading you might as well either uninstall it or try reinstalling if you need it.

18:27:48.094: os_dlopen(/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/plugins/obs-ndi/bin/obs-ndi.so->/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/plugins/obs-ndi/bin/obs-ndi.so): dlopen(/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/plugins/obs-ndi/bin/obs-ndi.so, 257): Library not loaded: @rpath/QtWidgets
18:27:48.094: Referenced from: /Library/Application Support/obs-studio/plugins/obs-ndi/bin/obs-ndi.so
18:27:48.094: Reason: image not found
18:27:48.094:
18:27:48.094: Module '/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/plugins/obs-ndi/bin/obs-ndi.so' not loaded

Image or media sources that can't be found will cause OBS to look for them again every time you switch to a scene that includes them. This can cause performance issues.

18:27:48.880: Failed to open file '/Users/jrh/Desktop/Show/CoolORFunnyVideos/Val_Ad2.png': No such file or directory
18:27:48.880: gs_image_file_init_internal: Failed to load file '/Users/jrh/Desktop/Show/CoolORFunnyVideos/Val_Ad2.png'
18:27:48.880: [image_source: 'Item04_Img'] failed to load texture '/Users/jrh/Desktop/Show/CoolORFunnyVideos/Val_Ad2.png'


18:27:52.835: Failed to open file '/Users/jrh/Desktop/Show/CoolORFunnyVideos/Val_Ad1.png': No such file or directory
18:27:52.835: gs_image_file_init_internal: Failed to load file '/Users/jrh/Desktop/Show/CoolORFunnyVideos/Val_Ad1.png'
18:27:52.835: [image_source: 'Item03_Img'] failed to load texture '/Users/jrh/Desktop/Show/CoolORFunnyVideos/Val_Ad1.png'

Again, not sure it's related to the crash, but your logfile also shows significant GPU overload:

18:47:54.091: Output 'adv_stream': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 14082 (39.9%)
19:03:17.955: Output 'adv_stream': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 6505 (42.7%)

Wiki - GPU Overload Issues | OBS

This page has moved to https://obsproject.com/kb/encoding-performance-troubleshooting.

obsproject.com

And significant lag due to a dropped internet connection, or a connection not fast enough to sustain your selected bitrate, such that the majority of your frames are dropping:

18:49:25.235: Output 'adv_stream': Number of dropped frames due to insufficient bandwidth/connection stalls: 1826 (77.1%)

Wiki - Dropped Frames And General Connection Issues | OBS

* [Dropped frames](#dropped-frames) * [Possible causes of dropped frames](#possible-causes-of-dropped-frames) * [Solutions](#solutions) * Network-related * [Dynamic …

obsproject.com

Not really possible to address the causes of the crash without a crash log.

 

[Tangential]

I appreciate the feedback. That was a very old NDI plugin binary that somehow survived a removal and reinstall of OBS.

Thanks for the info on the missing images. I didn't realize that they impacted things as long as they were not active. That's a major piece of info for me. I also noticed that I somehow had not checked the Unload Image box on that image. Does that make any difference?

My workflow for this weekly show is to go thru the set of item scenes (Item1-ItemN) and use either the image or the vlc source (as appropriate to the content). Whichever one I am not using I disable, but I also remove the prior content en masse from the prior week before starting. Looks like I'll need to rethink my approach.

I have a lot of (mostly) very small scenes in this collection because we discuss 20-30 news items/videos/images per show. I bring a lot of my web page content in from another mac already because I can't find a good way to scroll thru content like a web page we are discussing. Also live displaying webpages at runtime adds overhead, network use, uncontrolled ads, etc. Now I capture the entire webpage ahead of time as a single large static png and open it on the second mac in preview. Preview lets me navigate/zoom nicely. Then the second mac's screen comes in as an HDMI video capture (blackmagic) source. It doesn't make for seamless transitions, so I've tried to keep all of the videos and regular images local in OBS. I could theoretically move all of that content to the second mac (and also capture its audio) but it makes it very hard to smoothly switch between different content. I'll see if I can script a way to reset and disable all of the images and VLC sources in these scenes to point to generic files before I start setting up each week's show. Not sure if lua or automator is the way to go for that.

I will also say I am mainly a mac and linux guy but I've been using this approach for several years on a W10 PC (with similar ram/cpu/gpu) with a lot less issues. I guess some of this I am running into is just a difference in how OBS behaves on mac vs windows.

 

[Narcogen]

OBS performs noticeably less well, even on the same hardware, as on Windows. Part of the issue with that is how far behind Apple in particular, but Microsoft as well, have allowed their OpenGL implementations to fall behind. The ability to use that API on MacOS, Windows and Linux is at least in part why the cross-platform Open Broadcaster exists (OBS "classic" was Win-only). OBS on Windows already defaults to Direct3D instead and Apple has deprecated OpenGL in favor of Metal.

 

[Tangential]

OBS performs noticeably less well, even on the same hardware, as on Windows.

How does the performance compare on Linux? I could easily dual boot the mac to linux. IDK if the BlackMagic mini would work, but I would think that my USB encoders would.

 

[Narcogen]

I don't run OBS in Linux often enough to compare. It's another one of those "if you absolutely have to be able to do this, you can, but not everything will work and some things will be harder than others" situation, it's just that it's not necessarily the same things.