- 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. If you've reached this point in the video, you clearly care about the quality and production of your live stream, and I want to reward you by giving you an exclusive offer. I've teamed up with Epidemic Sound to bring you a great
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