Need help with OBS (tried obs forums no luck :/)

[Gilgam3s1]

So kinda hoping i can get some help on here since obs forums have been lack luster at best.....i thought i had a fairly high end mid tier pc going...specs if they dont show up in the drop box are a radeon VII, ryzen3700x, castle 240ex aio, 470 hero wifi, and evga g3 750 gold.

 

when I was planing this build It was made with strwaming and recording in mind and when I was asking question I was told my new rig should be more then capable granted I havent tryed streaming yet but if these recording samples are any idication in rather frightened. 

 

Anyway the PROBLEM is I can play anygame just fine almost hit the full frame rate on my 144hrz monitor no prob but no mater what setting set up/encoder iv tried on games such as FF15 And Boarderlands 3 the playback or recording is dang near God awful, frame skips, choppy gross looking captures, however when I play games like metro redux and lastlight even the beta for the new ghost recon I was able to get vary favorable results. So I'm looking for any help to get this to work or maybe some sort of alturnatives. Thanks a bunch guys

[PradyEatPC -Prady Playz-]

What are your recording settings (bitrate, quality, presets, etc) and what file format are you using? You might have to wait for the file to be fully written. You might be able to try Streamlabs OBS, they also have a dedicated discord just for streamlabs obs (SLOBS) with support. I do not regret switching from obs to SLOBS. It even made my videos look better.

[dalekphalm]

To be clear, you're using OBS to capture the recordings?

 

Please list the settings you're using on OBS, specifically recording settings (stream settings if you're using them), and general video settings.

[mariushm]

OBS may have problems using AMF (equivalent of nvEnc) with Radeon 7 .. the hardware encoder is a big different than the one in Vega and Polaris cards, so there may be some bugs.

You can encode using your CPU alone, using x264 software encoder, but you must configure it right. Also, software encoding will use some CPU power... so when you configure the software encoder, you may wish to trade cpu cycles for more bandwidth ... ex instead of encoding at a "high quality" preset and compress is small bitrate like 10mbps, you may encode at "speed' preset but give the encoder 15 mbps to play with - the final quality would be about the same. There's also some options like disabling CABAC packing which reduce the cpu usage when encoding without quality loss, but result is your total bitrate is around 5-10% higher (it's like compressing the video with zip instead of rar/7zip before sending it)

 

So anyway... yeah... you're asking for help but you're not posting your configuration... at the very least, post some screenshots with every option you touched.

 

Also keep in mind that hadware encoders and pretty much all streaming platforms allow maximum 60 fps, so it may be a good idea to limit (cap) your games at 120fps, so that when encoding and streaming the video the software will consistently take every other frame and send it to viewers.

 

If you're pushing for 144 fps, the game may fluctuate between 100..144 fps and the encoder may have a hard time picking 60 frames to encode every second out of that fluctuating number of frames.

 

[Gilgam3s1]

20 hours ago, PradyEatPC -Prady Playz- said:

What are your recording settings (bitrate, quality, presets, etc) and what file format are you using? You might have to wait for the file to be fully written. You might be able to try Streamlabs OBS, they also have a dedicated discord just for streamlabs obs (SLOBS) with support. I do not regret switching from obs to SLOBS. It even made my videos look better.

In order

X264 also have tried h264/5 but am often met with encoding overload errors

30kbitrate IV tried going as high as 60k

Vbr rate control

Rescale set to 1080p

Buffer 5500

Crf=30

Cpu= slow 

Profile baseline

Tune zerolatency

 

On h264/5

Balanced

Vbr

Disabled prepare

Target rate used a range of 22k-60k 

Peak usual 2x target

Keyfram 2.0p

Veiwmode basic

 

Usually mp4 or mov formate

 

All this was done using recommended setup tutorials on YouTube but I can get it to work right with certain titles

[Gilgam3s1]

20 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

To be clear, you're using OBS to capture the recordings?

 

Please list the settings you're using on OBS, specifically recording settings (stream settings if you're using them), and general video settings.

Yeah at the moment just using it to record and settings IV tried or were told to try are

X264 also have tried h264/5 but am often met with encoding overload errors

30kbitrate IV tried going as high as 60k

Vbr rate control

Rescale set to 1080p

Buffer 5500

Crf=30

Cpu= slow 

Profile baseline

Tune zerolatency

 

On h264/5

Balanced

Vbr

Disabled prepare

Target rate used a range of 22k-60k 

Peak usual 2x target

Keyfram 2.0p

Veiwmode basic

 

Video settings are 

Base1440p

Output1080p

Downgrade lancross 32 samples

Common for value of 60

 

Usually mp4 or mov format

[Gilgam3s1]

19 hours ago, mariushm said:

OBS may have problems using AMF (equivalent of nvEnc) with Radeon 7 .. the hardware encoder is a big different than the one in Vega and Polaris cards, so there may be some bugs.

You can encode using your CPU alone, using x264 software encoder, but you must configure it right. Also, software encoding will use some CPU power... so when you configure the software encoder, you may wish to trade cpu cycles for more bandwidth ... ex instead of encoding at a "high quality" preset and compress is small bitrate like 10mbps, you may encode at "speed' preset but give the encoder 15 mbps to play with - the final quality would be about the same. There's also some options like disabling CABAC packing which reduce the cpu usage when encoding without quality loss, but result is your total bitrate is around 5-10% higher (it's like compressing the video with zip instead of rar/7zip before sending it)

 

So anyway... yeah... you're asking for help but you're not posting your configuration... at the very least, post some screenshots with every option you touched.

 

Also keep in mind that hadware encoders and pretty much all streaming platforms allow maximum 60 fps, so it may be a good idea to limit (cap) your games at 120fps, so that when encoding and streaming the video the software will consistently take every other frame and send it to viewers.

 

If you're pushing for 144 fps, the game may fluctuate between 100..144 fps and the encoder may have a hard time picking 60 frames to encode every second out of that fluctuating number of frames.

 

X264 also have tried h264/5 but am often met with encoding overload errors

30kbitrate IV tried going as high as 60k

Vbr rate control

Rescale set to 1080p

Buffer 5500

Crf=30

Cpu= slow 

Profile baseline

Tune zerolatency

 

On h264/5

Balanced

Vbr

Disabled prepare

Target rate used a range of 22k-60k 

Peak usual 2x target

Keyfram 2.0p

Veiwmode basic

 

Video settings are 

Base1440p

Output1080p

Downgrade lancross 32 samples

Common for value of 60

 

This is what IV done/ tried via YouTube tutorials and recomendations. With metro and anything else all captures are perfect with h265 it's ff15 and boarderlands that are giv8ng me a lot of flac

[Gilgam3s1]

It appears I may have solved the issue.....it seems like when my fps isnt capped at a constant fps obs has trouble picking frame I capped fps to 60 and now all recording settings appear to be working perfectly... dont know why 

[PradyEatPC -Prady Playz-]

1 hour ago, Gilgam3s1 said:

It appears I may have solved the issue.....it seems like when my fps isnt capped at a constant fps obs has trouble picking frame I capped fps to 60 and now all recording settings appear to be working perfectly... dont know why 

Was just about to ask if you capped it, i had the same problem before. Have fun! Also, do you have a channel or something?

[dalekphalm]

One other suggestion is maybe switch the container over to MKV since it’s far more flexible. But that’s not a requirement and shouldn’t change any performance. 

[Gilgam3s1]

1 hour ago, PradyEatPC -Prady Playz- said:

Was just about to ask if you capped it, i had the same problem before. Have fun! Also, do you have a channel or something?

Its all a work in progress but I hope to have a channel and a stream in the near future but if I can get some content paper a head of time I won't have to struggle for uploads

[mariushm]

The settings chosen are somewhat bad ... it would take me probably an hour or two of typing or recording myself on a video explaining all those settings and why they're bad.

For example I'll start with just the rescaling stuff you're using.

 

A streaming profile is completely different than a recording profile.

For streaming you are constrained by the maximum bitrate the service allows you - you'll have to squeeze as much quality into that amount of data as possible

 

Rescaling :

* for recording, try NOT to use it. Record at 1440p to disk. Later, you can edit the videos and crop to 1080p or resample them at the final rendering step, or upload them to Youtube or wherever you want as 1440p.

* for streaming, ideally resample exactly by half, from 2560x1440 to 1280x720. If you don't think 720p is enough for streaming, then Bicubic will be enough.

 

Any rescale / resize will introduce image artifacts which will reduce compression efficiency.

Either don't rescale, or reduce by exactly half because reducing by half will not introduce rescaling artefacts.

You can see in OBS three rescaling algorithms :

* Bilinear (fastest, but blurry if scaling)

* Bicubic (16 samples)

* Lanczos (32 samples)

 

Lanczos uses more CPU or GPU power to resample an image than Bicubic and Linear uses the least amount of processing power but it's only recommended to be used when you're resizing to exact ratios like 50% , 25%... if the ratio is a floating point (ex 1440 / 1080 = 1.333 you can't use Bilinear ... but 1440 / 720 = 2 so you can use it)

A lot of bicubic rescalers also have "shortcuts" which reduce the complexity of the rescale if you scale by round numbers (ex you divide by 2 or resize 2x in each direction so often you're able to use Bicubic with minimal performance loss.

 

In general, it's pointless to use Lanczos over Bicubic because the tiny amount of quality it preserves over Bicubic is not worth the extra processing time spent resampling - you can take this processing time and shift it over to the actual h264 encoding, giving the codec more cpu time to retain more quality.

 

I can understand wanting to stream at Full HD and maybe you think your stream will be better in Full HD but the reality is a lot of your viewers will have difficulty streaming at the bitrates you'd normally use for 1080p 60fps (around 10-15 mbps).

Also, services like Twitch will only allow up to around 6 mbps so if you respect their rules, you will retain more quality in 720p and more viewers will be able to watch your stream at quality: source instead of choosing the re-compressed streams Twitch or Youtube produces.

 

 

Some other comments The tune option zerolatency conflicts with CPU=slow and profile: baseline conflicts with high bitrates and cpu slow

 

Baseline profile does not allow CABAC encoding, which is basically free on hardware encoders and reduces bitrate by around 5-15% (if I remember correctly), so especially if you stream to Twitch which limits you to 6 mbps, enabling CABAC can give the equivalent of an extra 0.5-1mbps of quality to work with. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding#Feature_support_in_particular_profiles

 

zerolatency tune also disables lookahead and bframes, which can be useful to compress with higher quality. With bframes, the viewer would have to download a few frames before decoding because several frames would be needed to rebuild single frames so this option is useful for webcam / conference broadcasts to be as responsive as possible, but you don't need this "responsiveness" because Twitch and Youtube have a few seconds of delay anyway so it doesn't matter that much.

 

cpu slow if used on x264 software encoder will use too much resources with minimal benefits, the veryfast or faster profiles are usually enough quality wise 

 

As you can see below veryfast has a decent 10 lookahead frames and 1 reference frame which is enough for games... you don't need 50 lookahead frames an 5 reference frames (as the slow profile configures)

For recording to disk, you can even use superfast with the fastdecode tune (to not use cabac encoding) combined with something like CRF 8-10 (which is basically near lossless quality) - for 1440p you'll get something like 60-200 mbps bitrate in most games (~10-20 MB/s or around 1 GB per minute of recording to disk)

 

x264_help.txt

 

 

[Gilgam3s1]

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

The settings chosen are somewhat bad ... it would take me probably an hour or two of typing or recording myself on a video explaining all those settings and why they're bad.

For example I'll start with just the rescaling stuff you're using.

 

A streaming profile is completely different than a recording profile.

For streaming you are constrained by the maximum bitrate the service allows you - you'll have to squeeze as much quality into that amount of data as possible

 

Rescaling :

* for recording, try NOT to use it. Record at 1440p to disk. Later, you can edit the videos and crop to 1080p or resample them at the final rendering step, or upload them to Youtube or wherever you want as 1440p.

* for streaming, ideally resample exactly by half, from 2560x1440 to 1280x720. If you don't think 720p is enough for streaming, then Bicubic will be enough.

 

Any rescale / resize will introduce image artifacts which will reduce compression efficiency.

Either don't rescale, or reduce by exactly half because reducing by half will not introduce rescaling artefacts.

You can see in OBS three rescaling algorithms :

* Bilinear (fastest, but blurry if scaling)

* Bicubic (16 samples)

* Lanczos (32 samples)

 

Lanczos uses more CPU or GPU power to resample an image than Bicubic and Linear uses the least amount of processing power but it's only recommended to be used when you're resizing to exact ratios like 50% , 25%... if the ratio is a floating point (ex 1440 / 1080 = 1.333 you can't use Bilinear ... but 1440 / 720 = 2 so you can use it)

A lot of bicubic rescalers also have "shortcuts" which reduce the complexity of the rescale if you scale by round numbers (ex you divide by 2 or resize 2x in each direction so often you're able to use Bicubic with minimal performance loss.

 

In general, it's pointless to use Lanczos over Bicubic because the tiny amount of quality it preserves over Bicubic is not worth the extra processing time spent resampling - you can take this processing time and shift it over to the actual h264 encoding, giving the codec more cpu time to retain more quality.

 

I can understand wanting to stream at Full HD and maybe you think your stream will be better in Full HD but the reality is a lot of your viewers will have difficulty streaming at the bitrates you'd normally use for 1080p 60fps (around 10-15 mbps).

Also, services like Twitch will only allow up to around 6 mbps so if you respect their rules, you will retain more quality in 720p and more viewers will be able to watch your stream at quality: source instead of choosing the re-compressed streams Twitch or Youtube produces.

 

 

Some other comments The tune option zerolatency conflicts with CPU=slow and profile: baseline conflicts with high bitrates and cpu slow

 

Baseline profile does not allow CABAC encoding, which is basically free on hardware encoders and reduces bitrate by around 5-15% (if I remember correctly), so especially if you stream to Twitch which limits you to 6 mbps, enabling CABAC can give the equivalent of an extra 0.5-1mbps of quality to work with. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding#Feature_support_in_particular_profiles

 

zerolatency tune also disables lookahead and bframes, which can be useful to compress with higher quality. With bframes, the viewer would have to download a few frames before decoding because several frames would be needed to rebuild single frames so this option is useful for webcam / conference broadcasts to be as responsive as possible, but you don't need this "responsiveness" because Twitch and Youtube have a few seconds of delay anyway so it doesn't matter that much.

 

cpu slow if used on x264 software encoder will use too much resources with minimal benefits, the veryfast or faster profiles are usually enough quality wise 

 

As you can see below veryfast has a decent 10 lookahead frames and 1 reference frame which is enough for games... you don't need 50 lookahead frames an 5 reference frames (as the slow profile configures)

For recording to disk, you can even use superfast with the fastdecode tune (to not use cabac encoding) combined with something like CRF 8-10 (which is basically near lossless quality) - for 1440p you'll get something like 60-200 mbps bitrate in most games (~10-20 MB/s or around 1 GB per minute of recording to disk)

 

x264_help.txt 28.51 kB · 0 downloads

 

 

As an update by locking the frame rate iv solved capture issue with the laggining/skipping frames and as far as I can tell I can still set to anybit rate id likeThe only setting I sort of understand is h265. And with it working now id imagine that would be  easiest to go with.

 

But as for settings what would you suggest? And if possible id much rather atleast stream in 1080 as IV been told it can be done even when running at 1440p