Streaming Software Rant / Recommendations

RopeDrink

Hey folks,

This is part rant, part review, part recommendation-request. I'd be curious to hear about your experiences or suggestions regarding these softwares. I've been recording, streaming and uploading to YouTube for donkeys years, yet after recently dabbling on Twitch with other streaming software (and getting a craving for all the trimmings, like alerts, events, chatboxes, overlays and other shenanigans), I'm afraid the alternatives have left me with nothing but frustration.

-- I'm currently using Mrillis Action! - which records and streams flawlessly with no noticeable in-game impact (unless going absolutely bonkers with resolutions and bitrates). Unfortunately, this program will disconnect and reconnect to the site in question after streaming for long periods, which isn't bad when dealing with raw gameplay streams but would be awful if I setup webcam/engagement streams.

-- I've got a lifetime liscence with XSplit but every time I test it, it causes massive in-game performance loss and records/uploads at extremely choppy FPS with a noticeable dive in quality no matter what settings are used (relaxed or intensive).

-- Streamlabs OBS doesn't incur in-game performance issues but the FPS and quality infrequently spike, making it all seem very sporadic. It's not the worst alternative I've tried, but I'm looking for stability.

-- Shadowplay (as an NVidea-carded gaming PC) has desktop recording FORCE ON. This is a massive no-no as it'll capture anything and everything > overlays, tabbing out, other applications etc. Also has practically no functionality whatsoever.

It seems to me that Action! is the best bet, yet it is only just starting to adopt various features that I'd love to get working properly, such as overlays so that I can manage things in-stream until I get a second monitor, better alert/event handling (which is pretty barebones at the moment), and various other things. I'll be grabbing a greenscreen for myself for Crimbo and already have a relatively OK webcam and USB microphone - it's just a shame that almost every streaming software I've tried thus far has let me down in one way or another.

So, any suggestions? Are you using something different, or maybe you're using the same one(s) but in a different way? Trust me, I've dabbled with resolutions, bitrates, codecs, the works, as well as sticking to recommended settings for each site, so it's something more complicated.

Meanwhile, I can stream to YouTube @ 12000bitrate @ 1080p with 60FPS absolutely flawlessly with Action, so I'm struggling to figure out why the most popular/used softwares give me hassle no matter how high or low I set them.

Doctor DooM

OBS. No Streamlabs. Problem solved I've probably streamed a couple thousand live events and only had issues at one or two. A lot of these add on sets bring their own problems. Xsplit is, as you said, a resource hog.

Actually if you really really want to do it properly, and absolutely eliminate lag or frame drops, the answer is not software. You need to use a second comp to stream from.

TheChrisD

RopeDrink wrote: »

OBS (Standard) - Records & Streams very choppily, usually with no in-game impact.

Did you have the OBS stats window open while testing? Or what about log files? One or the other will indicate what the source of the choppy footage is: frames skipped from encoding lag, or frames dropped from rendering lag.

And if it's neither of those, then we need to start looking into what your PC setup is, GPU in particular.

TheChrisD

RopeDrink wrote: »

The testing I did today in Streamlabs gave the "Skipped Frames" warning, but I suspect that's because I was forced to try fullscreen (instead of borderless), and tabbing out in FFXIV @ Fullscreen for any reason causes the game to hang momentarily. This improved by swapping it to old NVEC, but the result was still choppy. Action, however, doesn't struggle regardless of the windowed mode (nor tabbing out), but like the others, the new NVEC codec seems to cause a few issues.

Without logs, I can't say for certain, but this is sounding almost entirely like an overloaded GPU with limited spare resources for compositing and encoding the stream.

RopeDrink wrote: »

I have a feeling it has something to do with the 'window selection' process in Xsplit/OBS, because it tends to act up when selecting FFXIV as the capture application. I don't recall having as much issue with certain other games, but that's more of a problem than a relief.

Some basic Googling is showing you're not the first to have issues with FF14 in OBS. Which capture method are you using - display/window/game?

RopeDrink wrote: »

Famous last words, but... I can't see it being my machine. It's pretty beastly, tonnes of free space, multiple dedicated drives for recordings and programs, and via Action I can record 1440p @ ultimate settings with absolutely no drawback at all, even when it's recording files of countless gigabytes in size, so streaming at a quarter of that really shouldn't be causing me so much grief in the most tweakable streaming software going. I've even tried removing or reducing overlays and features, also testing with Streamlabs to create a one-in-all online widget rather than adding multiple widgets, but nothing improves it.

No offense, but like... my machine is similar, and the issue is always GPU utilisation.

TheChrisD

RopeDrink wrote: »

As for GPU, again, if one is working flawlessly at 1080p 12000br and another is chopping like crazy even on 720p @ 30FPS with literally half that bitrate then I'm not inclined to believe it's the GPU. The other even has individual overlays (about 4) and I've even streamed at 1440p pretty stable with those bitrates.

If Action works very similar to how ShadowPlay itself does, then there's probably minimal extra work being done that needs GPU resources to re-encode the scene before it is being sent to the stream. This is different to OBS which from my experience generally needs about 10-15% GPU spare to encode properly, especially if the preview is active and even moreso if you are in studio mode.
And I know this first-hand, for instance there's some scenes when playing Forza Horizon where the game's GPU usage jumps from it's normal 60% to near-maxed, and suddenly OBS becomes a 15-20FPS mess until the game's GPU usage normalises. So until you say for certain that FF14 is not using 95%+ of your GPU resources while streaming, I can't rule it out as a potential cause.

RopeDrink wrote: »

The more I look at it, the more I'm suspecting the window/game select. There are times where it sometimes even fails to pick up games at all when trying to capture this way.

Dependent on the game though. Some games actively resist direct capture; like Horizon, or even stuff like Destiny 2.

RopeDrink wrote: »

It'd just be nice to monitor/interact with chat without having to tab, which is why I wanted to give XSplit a good attempt.

Can you rest your phone on a stand near your monitor or something, so you can have chat up and viewable while playing? The YT live dashboard is not great on mobile, but Twitch's mobile app dashboard does okay and shows the important stuff.