Originally Posted by: Hansi 
We started experiencing this issue within the last 2 weeks. Available upload speed is 75 Mpbs (fibre connection). We are streaming at 1080p 8 Mbps H264 Baseline profile to YouTube.
What I noticed is that the issue is much more pronounced when using Main or High profiles as I tried those and then was forced back to Baseline. We are running an Intel 7800x with an nVidia 1050 Ti on Windows 10. We updated from vMix 24 to vMix 28 less than 3 weeks back, so it definitely started after the update, however, I'm not sure how the version would play a role so am sceptical it's related. We've been using vMix for streaming for the last 3 or 4 years, and this is the first time we have seen this issue. Let me know if any further information is required. It's starting to drive me up the wall at this point.
Hansi,
interesting information. From what I understand, the higher the compression profile, the higher the stream bandwitdh (see
here for a good explanation).
What is your ping time to Youtube? Unfortunately I can only emphasize learnings from our tests:
If you get into
higher bitrates with
RTMP (around 8 Mbit/s) AND if you are
leaving the continent/ping times are too high, than you are asking for trouble.
If you use mobile networks than you can have the same issues because of the ping times/latency there.
Did you stream vom South Africa? If yes, and this
map of Google Datacenters is correct, than your stream was leaving the continent, was using RTMP and had a high bitrate. :-(
Reverting the H.264 setting to baseline might just brought you outside the critical range. A quick check with the Baseline/Main/High profile at a target rate of 8 Mbit/s showed slightly less bandwith with Baseline compared to Main and significant (around 1 Mbit/s) from Main to High. Test were not representative, just a first impression. Video material was the favourite "DJ in front of a seaside with lots of water, sky and drone shots". Lots of mishmash pictures for the compressor.
Did you do a cross test with OBS or Multistreamer? I would highly recommend this to find out if the problem is in the network or the application.
Thanks to all the people for doing the cross-tests with OBS. Both OBS and vMix AFAIK use FFMPEG or the GPUs encoder for H.264 encoding. After a bit of research in the "Advanced Setting" of OBS I get the impression, that OBS streaming uses
Constant Bitrate (CBR) as default. vMix however seems to use
variable bitrate as default. Depending on the network infrastructure you are on, not using CBR can create all sorts of problems when hitting the traffic shaping algorithms at the providers systems. This seems to be espacially true if you are connected to copper DSL, mobile networks or domestic fiber links. So, if OBS is fine and vMix is acting up, activate the CBR setting in the advanced H.264 dialog and give it a try.
In H.264 encoding the output bitrate is quite variable. So, if you are streaming the intro slide with no motion, you are at 500 kbit/s. If you cut to the crowd cheering at show start, you can peak at 10 Mbit/s. If the providers traffic shaper adjusted for (lets guess) 1,5 Mbit/s, it will take some time and frame drops to come up to speed again in the providers routers. If you are on RTMP, the TCP tries to catch up and will damage the transmission. Typically traffic shaping in networks means dropping packets. TCP tries to catch this up, but if there is not enough bandwith, it won't succeed and slow things down. Bad for video.. :-( If you are on SRT, this is UDP. Packets will be dropped, frames at the receiver will drop. However, the receiver will stay in sync. With RTMP, this will not work properly.
So for your next tests please check this:
- Ping time from your site to a.rtmp.youtube.com
- If you know the IP adress of a.rtmp.youtube.com, check its location with a GEO-IP service
- Do a cress-check with a speed-test server near the YouTube location, using LibreSpeed
- See how things work with CBR in vMix, in OBS and Multistreamer. Multistreamer gives you a lot of details, although it takes some training to read this correctly.
Please let us know about your findings. If the problems persist, we can do some more tests together.
Good luck,
Christian