OBS recording freezes on a single frame for most of session, but only for certain games

[8pr]

Howdy! We've suddenly developed a puzzling issue with OBS recordings. What happens is this: for the first couple seconds, the game is a single frozen frame, but our mouse movements can be seen. After that, the recording will remain frozen on that single frame for almost the entirety of the video, with no mouse movements visible. Finally, for the last several seconds, the video returns to normal.

Testing this has proved rather confusing. We cannot reproduce the issue at all in testing, and we've tried:

• recording short sessions (~several seconds)
• recording longer sessions (~several minutes)
• recording various different games
• tabbing in and out of the window and clicking around in other applications
• recording with and without audio
• starting up the various applications in our recording setup in different orders.
• retracing our steps to see if we changed any settings in the past week or so

Yet despite the fact that we couldn't reproduce this problem even once in testing, it has popped up consistently in real recording sessions. In fact, it has destroyed 6 of our last 7 recording sessions. Puzzlingly, one game (Dwarf Fortress) seemed to record totally fine, no problems at all. But everything else we recorded failed. The only pattern we found is, all the games that failed were RenPy games, and Dwarf Fortress is not. So... maybe it's somehow related to that?

Attached is the log of our most recent failed session, dated April 20 - there appear to be several of our test sessions from tonight in there too. Additionally, I've attached logs for the failed recording sessions, dated April 17, 16, 14, and 12.The April 16 log is particularly interesting, as it contains bother the successful Dwarf Fortress session and the failed RenPy game session. Though I don't know much about how to read these logs, I've noticed that the failed recording sessions all show a warning about audio buffering and the audio lagging by a ridiculous amount- but that warning appears on both the failed and successful sessions. (I can also provide the video for any of these sessions if helpful.)

Any clue what might be going on here? We're pretty stumped!

EDIT: Ah, and in case it's useful to know:
* System is not a laptop
* OS is Windows 10 Pro 22H2
* Graphics card is a GeForce RTX 2060 Super
* Capture mode was Game Capture
* Sessions were approx. 1.5hr in length

 

[8pr]

A further update: we ran two test sessions today, letting one of the same games that failed before run for approximately the length of a usual session. (I think we screwed up the sound on the first run, but the second one exactly matched our usual recording setup AFAIK.) Despite this... both runs succeeded without any issues!

I did notice that neither of these successful runs shows the maximum audio buffering warning- so maybe, somehow, it really is that? But I don't think anything has changed about our audio setup between these sessions, and I can't find any other obvious difference in the logs

 

[8pr]

Update #2: a little bit of progress!

1. We found our way to the Log Analyzer, and corrected the issues that were found, other than the `Max Audio Buffering` warning, which we are unsure of the cause of.
2. After that, we tried another test session, and this time, we managed to deliberately recreate the error! On the one hand, that's unfortunate, because the log analyzer fixes didn't help. On the other hand, it's neat that we finally managed to set it off on purpose. (The log is attached.) One thing we realized we did differently is, we hit `Alt+Tab` a few times to check our audio recorder. We did try that in the previous short testing sessions, to no avail, but we didn't try it in our longer testing sessions. So maybe it's some combination of "recording session is long enough + `Alt+Tab` is hit"?
3. We discovered a couple other folks in recent forum history that seem to have had similar problems, such as this thread here, or here, or here, or here. Sadly, none of them seemed to be solved!

We're pretty stumped- we're not sure what else we should check at this point. Anybody got any ideas?

 

[8pr]

One more update: we did a bunch more testing, tried changing various settings, and eventually hit a point where no warnings at all were visible in the Log Analyzer (not even the max audio buffering one), and several test sessions were successful. We then attempted another recording session... and once again, the problem occurred and the session was ruined. Attached is the log- the log analyzer finds no problems whatsoever, yet the exact same problem happened as all the other times.

 

[Harold]

You're using window capture instead of game capture. That's likely why.