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First time user: Questions about CPU load and dropped frames
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espenlg  
#1 Posted : Thursday, June 25, 2015 2:07:44 PM(UTC)
espenlg

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Hello there,

After using Wirecast for a while I wanted to try vMix and downloaded it today. It was installed on a completely fresh Windows 7 SP1 Enterprise 64-bit.

My hardware is:

Dell Precision M4800 laptop with Quadcore 2,8Ghz Intel CPU (with HD Graphics 4600), 16GB memory and NVIDIA® Quadro® K1100M w/2GB GDDR5 graphics card.
For capturing I have a Black Magic Design Intensity Shuttle USB3.
I tried this with a Canon XA25 (trough HDMI) with a 1080i resolution.

So far so good. I started up vMix and added the Intensity as a camera and configured a stream to Arkena (our streaming hosting partner) as tried 720P 1,5mbit quality.

When I start streaming it is working pretty well but the stream button is flashing orange/red. When I check task manager it uses around 90-95% CPU where FFMPEG is using a big part of it. The status window is telling me something about a buffer being full so it's dropping frames. I tried increasing threads to 8 and 16 without any luck.

So my question is - should it have worked better? Wirecast (v4) and FMLE have worked fine with the same hardware setup but vMix appeals to me in many ways so I would really like to figure this out.

Feel free to ask any questions at all to help me tune it correctly.

Thank you!
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jip  
#2 Posted : Thursday, June 25, 2015 3:24:00 PM(UTC)
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Have you tried FMLE with vMix instead of FFMPEG streaming? What is the CPU status in that case?

Can you make sure that you are not actually using the integrated Intel 4600 GPU, but the more suitable NVIDIA one?
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espenlg on 6/25/2015(UTC)
espenlg  
#3 Posted : Thursday, June 25, 2015 3:29:03 PM(UTC)
espenlg

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jip wrote:
Have you tried FMLE with vMix instead of FFMPEG streaming? What is the CPU status in that case?
Can you make sure that you are not actually using the integrated Intel 4600 GPU, but the more suitable NVIDIA one?


Good questions - I have not tried FMLE but I can do that tomorrow when I'm back at work. I can post an update here with the results.

I'm not sure what graphics card I'm using I must admit. I could not choose the nvidia card in vMix, and I tried to google it to figure out how it works and from what I can tell the integrated card is being used for the LCD monitor while the nvidia card is for external monitors (and when needed for heavy use?). I'll try to do some more research on that as well.
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IceStream  
#4 Posted : Thursday, June 25, 2015 5:36:15 PM(UTC)
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@ espenlg

The Task Manager will give you a reading of the overall CPU usage (good practice to get into) and the CPU reading in vMix gives the related percentage that vMix is using.
Typically, vMix is GPU intensive, hence the preference for and external card to offload the stress on the CPU, whereas streaming is CPU intensive and usually FFMPEG has shown itself to be less demanding than FMLE, so there may be a setting somewhere that needs to be adjusted. If there is a lot of 'encoding' going on, then yes, your CPU usage will spike and you might want to investigate that.
Personally, I usually use FMLE outside of the vMix Streaming module (I can make more adjustments there and I am more comfortable with that) and I have very little experience with FFMPEG, so I cannot say which is better, just a personal preference.


Ice
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espenlg on 6/25/2015(UTC)
ask  
#5 Posted : Thursday, June 25, 2015 8:06:27 PM(UTC)
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The advice is also to disable the onboard GPU.
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espenlg on 6/27/2015(UTC)
espenlg  
#6 Posted : Saturday, June 27, 2015 4:40:52 AM(UTC)
espenlg

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Good news! I'm not sure how, but after upgrading to SP1 it had to to 150 more upgrades and now - after two days doing Windows upgrades I tried vMix again and now it runs very smooth. CPU load around 10% in Task Manager (including FFMPEG) while streaming. Great!
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Speegs  
#7 Posted : Saturday, June 27, 2015 6:58:58 AM(UTC)
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IceStream wrote:
@ espenlg
Typically, vMix is GPU intensive, hence the preference for and external card to offload the stress on the CPU, whereas streaming is CPU intensive and usually FFMPEG has shown itself to be less demanding than FMLE, so there may be a setting somewhere that needs to be adjusted. If there is a lot of 'encoding' going on, then yes, your CPU usage will spike and you might want to investigate that.
Ice


My Observations:

FMLE = Better for low latency
FMLE = MP3 audio codec if you want that
FMLE = Definitely been tested for longer with VMix, by more people. It used to be the only option
FMLE = Lowest Latency I have ever achieved 0.3 - 0.4s (ON LAN only Streaming)

FFMPEG = Better for lower cpu usage
FFMPEG = AAC codec built in without the need for a plugin, but no MP3
FFMPEG = Lowest Latency I have ever achieved 1.24s - 1.52s (ON LAN only Streaming - CBR)

Best of all.. Stream with external box, moving that way now to try and lower latency further.

* Using Vmix to control the encoder, latency settings might be lower if using command line tricks I have not tested or master.
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espenlg on 6/27/2015(UTC)
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