- I looked back at over 1000 issues
that people have had with OBS Studio
and put together one simple video
covering all the different solutions.
You might think that your stream has no issues,
but trust me, trust me,
once you're done with this video,
the viewers of your stream
aren't going to have a single thing
to complain about, except maybe your gameplay.
It's not my fault you suck.
And the best bit, I learned that
there's a handful of settings in OBS Studio
that pretty much everyone, myself included,
is getting wrong.
(gentle upbeat music)
This video is sponsored by Epidemic Sound.
More on them later.
As always, I've put chapters down across the timeline,
if you want to skip ahead to a specific issue.
But we're going to get started
with the most common issue,
and that's dropping frames.
If you have viewers complaining
about your stream buffering,
the very first thing you should check
is if you are dropping any frames.
You can see this by looking
at the counter at the bottom
of the OBS Studio main window.
The term "Dropped frames" means that your connection
to Twitch or YouTube's servers isn't stable.
When this is the case, OBS Studio has to drop
some of the video frames to compensate,
and this can cause your stream to buffer
for viewers or even disconnect entirely.
Thankfully, there are a handful
of different solutions that you can use
to help you fix your dropped frames issue.
First thing's first, stop streaming over Wi-Fi.
Wireless connections are unstable by nature,
so switching to wired Ethernet
gives that stable connection
that streaming requires.
Plus it'll help you maintain
a more consistent ping in online games.
Secondly, use the TwitchTest tool
to perform a full bandwidth test
if you're streaming to Twitch.
This is a free, open-source tool
that allows you to easily measure
your upload speed, round trip time,
and connection stability to each Twitch server.
Simply enter your stream key,
set the duration to medium,
and uncheck all of the regions that you don't live in,
and then run the test, and once it's completed,
you want to look for the server
with the highest quality rating.
If there's a tie in quality,
you want to select the server
with the higher bandwidth,
and if there's a tie again,
you can select the server
with the lowest round trip time.
You can then manually select to stream
to that Twitch server in OBS
by going to Settings, Stream and Server.
Whilst you're in there,
you'll want to change your bitrate
in the Output tab to around
85% of the bandwidth result
that you got in the TwitchTest tool.
So for example, if you got a bandwidth result
of 6,000 kilobits per second,
85% of that is 5,100 kilobits per second,
which leaves you some headroom for any variance
and any other applications that need to send data.
The third solution that you can try
is to enable Dynamic Bitrate.
The OBS developers introduced a new feature
in version 24 called Dynamic Bitrate,
which detects when your internet connection
becomes limited and automatically reduces
your bitrate instead of dropping frames.
This results in temporary lower quality for viewers,
but it's a much, much better experience
than what they would see if you start to drop frames.
The clever thing is, once your internet recovers
from the congestion, OBS will automatically
raise that bitrate back up to whatever you set it to.
To enable Dynamic Bitrate,
head to Settings, Advanced and then Network,
and check the box next to the option
that says "Dynamically change bitrate to manage congestion."
The next category we have is Game Capture.
So this is actually any issues you have
specifically capturing the gameplay using OBS Studio.
Again, there's a few different solutions
that we can try here,
the first of which is to run OBS Studio as administrator.
There's a handful of games both new and old
that require OBS Studio to be run as administrator
in order to be captured properly.
Personally, I've experienced this
in the new "Call of Duty"
and games like "Valorant" or "Apex Legends."
I'd recommend now that most of you
just always launch OBS Studio in administrator mode.
Not only does it help with game capture issues
for certain games, but it also allows OBS
to reserve more GPU capacity
for its use and prevents your GPU
from being overloaded by a certain game.
Some games, most notably those
with strict anti-cheat requirements
do not allow OBS Studio to capture using Game Capture.
So when that's the case,
you should run the game in borderless full-screen mode
and use Window Capture in OBS instead.
Now a specific game capture issue
that you might be running into if you're using a laptop
is the black screen bug.
This happens because many modern laptops
now come with two separate GPUs,
a low-powered, integrated GPU
for everyday tasks like browsing the web,
and then a discrete GPU
from somebody like from NVIDIA or AMD
for more graphically intensive applications.
You can run into issues when Windows
assigns either OBS or the game that you're playing
to run from that low-powered integrated GPU.
So to fix this, instead you may need to specify
to Windows that OBS and any other games
use the more powerful discrete GPU.
To do this, simply close OBS
and open the Windows settings app.
Then navigate to System, Display
and selection Graphical Settings.
Select either Classic App or Desktop App
and then click Browse,
and navigate and find your OBS Studio install.
By default this is in C:\Program Files\obs-studio\bin\64bit
and then obs64.exe.
Once selected, click Options under the OBS Studio entry,
and if you're using OBS for Game or Window Capture,
you'll want to set this
to the high performance mode and click Save.
Sometimes issues with your stream
occur because your GPU becomes overloaded,
since both OBS and the game that you're playing
both require GPU resources.
Now, OBS uses GPU resources
to actually render a scene
by adding in all of those overlays,
cameras, browser sources,
all to be composited together.
The first tip is recycled from the previous point,
and that is to run OBS Studio as an administrator,
as this allows OBS to actually request
and reserve some GPU resource from Windows.
The second thing to try is to actually limit
the frame rate in the game that you're playing.
If you leave your frame rate completely uncapped in-game,
you're demanding a lot of work from your GPU
and not leaving many resources for OBS.
Simply capping your frame rate
to your monitor's refresh rate can make a big difference.
And the final thing that you can try
is to build some simpler scenes in OBS.
Every single source and scene that you add in OBS
will require some resource,
even the sources that aren't currently visible.
This is because OBS wants to make sure
that all the transitions between scenes
and different sources happen smoothly.
So if you are still running into GPU overload issues,
reducing the complexity
or the number of sources and scenes
in your collection can make a big difference.
Three specific things to look out
for are filters on video and audio sources,
some of which are very resource heavy.
Browser sources, as each separate browser source
requires some additional resource.
So if you can try and combine
as many browser sources as possible,
that will also help to reduce the complexity.
This is why I really like the StreamElements
overlay approach where you can make one browser source
contain all of your different alerts,
event list, tip jars, et cetera,
and then just add that one browser source into OBS,
rather than one browser source for each different function.
Or finally, you can use Scene Collections in OBS.
That's a great way to separate out
the different types of scene that you use
in the different streams that you do.
This helps reduce the overall complexity,
as OBS will have fewer scenes
and sources to assign resources to.
If you're having issues
with the actual encoding of your stream,
well that's because encoding video for streaming
is a very intensive process,
and requires some pretty decent hardware to do it well.
There are four main settings in OBS Studio
that you can change that do heavily impact
what's actually being done when streaming.
These are the encoder choice, the bitrate,
the resolution and the frame rate.
By far the simplest way to check
that your settings are within the capabilities
of both your computer and your internet connection
is to run the auto-configuration wizard in OBS.
This will run a short test
and output some recommended settings
for your encoder, bitrate,
resolution, and frame rate for you.
Some audio devices that you use
might not send proper timestamps,
which can lead to various different issues,
such as audio desync.
Try disabling the device timestamps in OBS
by clicking the gear icon next to your audio source,
select Properties, and then uncheck Use Device Timestamps.
If you need to delay your audio sources
for them to be in sync,
you can open up the Advanced Audio Properties
and adjust the Sync Offset in milliseconds.
If instead you need to delay your video sources
for things to be in sync,
then you can add a Video Delay filter.
If the video source you need to delay
is a Window, Game or Display Capture,
then you can instead add a Render Delay Filter
and adjust as necessary.
If after all of this,
you're still unfortunately running into issues,
there are two really amazing tools
that I think you should use,
one built by OBS and one built by Twitch.
OBS has something called the Log Analyzer,
which allows you to review OBS log files
for common issues and problems,
and then also provide some solutions
of how to solve them.
A log file is generated by OBS every single time
you run the program, so after a problematic stream,
if you go to Help, Log Files
and then Upload Last Log File,
then you can actually click on the URL
to view it in OBS' Log Analyzer.
This will then hopefully highlight
any problems and provide some suggestions
of how you can solve those problems.
The second tool by Twitch
is called Twitch Inspector.
Now, this allows you to actually view
some key metrics from any of your previous streams
to Twitch to actually analyze
the health of the broadcast,
and troubleshoot any issues that have occurred.
Once you log in, you'll see a list
of all the different streams from the last 28 days,
regardless of which device you streamed from,
so from consoles, mobile phones, or from your PC.
And it'll highlight actually the number
of unstable events that have been detected.
So if you have a high number of these events,
you could be experiencing some issues,
and it's worth diving in to the actual stream
and seeing where these issues occurred.
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Thanks as always for watching the video,
and I'll catch you in the next one.
Peace.