I do run into stuttering video and audio, my USB wirecless mouse has problems (pointer jumps uncontrollably) and it seems that my wallpaper on the computer get's lost and turns to blank color. The problems occur after some time. I had runs without trouble for about an hour. Directly after booting everything seems fine. It's not a heat issue, CPU cores and the inside of the machine keep quite cool. CPU and GPU usage are at 30-something percent at maximum.

I had a wheelchair basketball tournament last week, where I ran into troubles and tried to use only one preview monitor (I had one for the commentator and one with Multiview for me) or none at all, I switched projects from 1080p50 to 1080p25 and streamed different matches in different resolutions down to 720p50. Didn't help at all.



I use an X-Keys controller and the shortcuts point to 36 predefined blank inputs, which I fill via MultiView (mostly 10 to 15 are really used in streaming situations). I use up to five cameras and capture these via SDI (Blackmagic Decklink Duo 2) or NDI|HX (Newtek Connect Spark or my Panasonic AW UE70) or HDMI (Blackmagic Intensity). On previous systems I worked with 4K HDMI inputs without problems, the new machine was only tested with inputs in 1080p50 or 1080p60. For the basketball games I used different graphics as overlays (PNG) and inserted some MP4 video files in 1080p with interviews. The whole setup is nothing that would get my older PC setup with QuadCore CPU and 1070 graphics to its limits.

Regards
Seb

The last 18 months I've been trying to build a new power system. I started with a build based on X99, but as we all know by now, that turned out to be a dead end. A year ago I instead begun building on Z170, waiting for the X299. But, I ran into a number of issues and gave up for a while. Not until August last year I had time for another try with the Z170.

In sum, I've run into a set of strange issues and tried everything Martin have suggested on the way. Including most recently to buy a 1070 instead of my 980 TI. I understand it's difficult given the abundance of different motherboards, graphics and capture cards and associated drivers/versions.

One main problem has been stuttering when Fullscreen is enabled. The stuttering is visible in vMix and external monitors, but typically not in the recording/stream. Sometimes it appears immediately, at other times after a while. Really low render time and CPU usage, as well as no dropped frames reported.

One thing I suspect is that my problems are related to my choice of Asus as a brand. Simply because few other vMix users reports similar issues as those that I face.

About a week ago I landed with a few tweaks that seems to result in a pretty stable Asus Z170 system. Too early to tell, and I have not had the time to isolate which fixes are essential. But so far things seems to be smooth.

These are the important settings I have made, the last is Asus specific:

- Making sure all external monitor (main+2) resolutions and refresh rates (1920x1080 50 Hz) matches my production setting (1920x1080, 50p)

- Making sure ONLY Nvidia's Graphics driver and PhysX system are installed

- Disabled Windows' Game DVR

. Bios tweaks
Safe Defaults (no overclocking)
Advanced\CPU - Configuration\CPU - Power Management Control
Intel Speedstep disabled
CPU C-states disabled
CFG Lock disabled
Intel Speedshift disabled

- Nvidia Power Management mode: Prefer Maximum Performance

- Settings/Performance FlipEx Fullscreen Enabled and Previews NOT Enabled

- Ctrl-Alt-Del, Task Manager, Start-up tab: SS2UILauncer.exe Disabled


A few notes. I have not tested if FlipEx can be enabled for Previews when all of above is set, but last time I tried it resulted in stuttering. The last one (disabling Sonic Studio) is definitely a must, seemed to fix a lot of issues.

Hopes this helps someone else.

Thanks Richard, I took some advices from you and hope it will help. Unfortunately I am running streams in PAL framerates (25p 50p) and my monitor is only capable of 60p. And my addititional monitor is 4K...

I can't change that, because my machine is "All in one" in this case:
http://www.ariesys.com.tw/workstation/ARP690.htm

Regards
Seb

Does the problem occur with only one monitor plugged in set to 60hz?
Mixing and matching monitors may cause problems, especially since some older 4K monitors will connect at 25hz or 30hz causing a conflict with the main monitor.

I had issues too with a system that was way underperforming and i tried EVERYTHING. New drivers, 1070 instead of 960, different master framerates, fresh presets... the works. Nothing seemed to help and the worst of all was that i couldn't really reproduce the issues on command.

I FINALLY figured out what went wrong by installing Prime95 and HWMonitor. I ran Prime and kept an eye on the values in HWMonitor. Turns out our stock cooler wasn't up to the task of keeping the CPU from overheating. So our CPU would eventually heat up to almost 100 degrees, after which thermal throttling kicked in, decapitating our system. It went from 4ghz on each core to 1ghz and boom, up went the render times.

The annoying thing was that this would sometimes happen sooner that later, which made it very hard to discover, but it was most apparent during the actuel events, when it would be way hotter in the venue and the system would have been operating longer than during testing and troubleshooting. I would stresstest your system to the max and check performance thoroughly.

After your suggestion I was stressing the CPU with CPU-Z and measure core temperature. Nearly every 15 minutes performance was absolutely going down. So that's not good news, but I think, that's the problem. My vMix streams started well and performance went down after an undefined while...

Thanks for pointing that out. I thought, I tested quite well in advance. Seems to be not the case...

Regards
Seb

Ok, I do not remember if I had this problem with every problematic stream, but "vmixndihelper.exe" chrashed regularly on my new system. Sometimes sooner or later while streaming. Can that be a problem that occurs because the system has two NICs? Can the crash of vmixndihelper.exe be a cause for my troubles?

I found this thread regarding NDi Helper and wonder how I can replicate the behaviour and how to avoid it from crashing:
https://forums.vmix.com/...aspx?g=posts&t=11726

Sorry that I didn't come up with that earlier in the discussion...

Regards
Seb

how are you bringing your cameras in? ip?? are the cameras coming in fine without glitching in the thumbnail? is the camera input glitching, large blocky grey - that's usually to do with the graphics card, although ip would be packet loss causing the same result (and therefore graphics card/ram working overtime).
or is it on the output only? (which would mean I'd imagine you have the cameras hdmi/sdi in and unaffected by any ip issue) the fact that this slowly gets worse sounds like your ram filling up if this problem occurs the same while offline. If this problem seems to kick in when you're online/live/streaming then again it's the ram/memory buffer filling up but it's probably because of packet loss on your network (bandwith doesn't matter if there's packet loss)

**I just re-read and saw your camera set up isnt ip but I thought I'd leave the ip camera bit in so it might help understand it**

Seb, if you installed Realtek's audio driver it is very likely Sonic Studio was installed too. Check/disable at Start-Up.

On your laptops, that worked fine, any extra display devices used for Fullscreens attached?

Hi,

thanks all for trying to help. Reinstallation seemed to do the trick. I tried the same setup in my office, which I used at the catastrophic event (2 x SDI, 2 x NDI inputs) with the same vMix preset. Cameras are filming psychedelic animations and switching in a Playlist. Spotify delivers "The Prodigy" through the ESI audio interface for some solid audio check. ;)

After some tests in the morning I tried to test how far I can go: the setup went from 1080p25 to 1080p50, recording is MKV with MJPEG, streaming is set to 6 MBit/s with slow preset and high profile (with hardware encoder), Instant Replay for all inputs is running... Everything seems to work fine even with the additional 4K Multiview screen and the 1080p Fullscreen Output. CPU is still under 50%, GPU usage in Task Manager under 30%.

That was what I was expecting from that kind of machine. Of course now I do not know what caused the troubles I had, but if everything will work from here on, I don't care.

I've got some pictures from the setup. I liked that somehow... :D

The cams filming the notebook screen:



My streaming beast All-in-One:



The external screens: