I was putting together a mobile kit to allow for live streaming and recording at different locations. I have a Canon Vixia GX10 (4K camcorder) with clean HDMI output and an HP Spectre x360 Convertible with 4k 13" screen, i7-1065G7 CPU, 16 GB memory, Iris Plus graphics and 512 GB NVMe SSD.

I thought my laptop was powerful enough to run vMix and meet my needs. My initial work went well, but was mostly streaming recorded video or using the built in web cam.

I got the Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus as it was an inexpensive solution that seemed to meet my needs with the bonus of 4K HDMI pass-through that seemed perfect for my plans to live stream a class while recording it and being able to monitor the recording on a big 4K big screen tv.

I was sorely disappointed when trying to use the set up as I kept getting serious stutter in the video, dropped frames and a basically unusable stream.

I tried a variety of setting in vMix for the capture, but had no luck. I also changed the laptop settings to run in performance mode while on battery, and also tried with it plugged in, but that provided only a little help.

I was beginning to think I needed a new external capture card, but then I used the setup to participate in a vMix Call session. When I was a caller, it worked great. If I was the host, not at all. That told me it wasn't insufficient hardware. It also worked great using the laptop's camera app to record.

I noticed the same behavior when I attached a 4K action camera that had an option to act as a web cam with a USB connection. However, the built-in web cam (720p) worked fine.

I poured over the forum posts looking for every optimization tip and trying them all to no avail. I finally saw a suggestion to change the default video format to MJPG when adding the camera as an input. That did the trick!

I am making this post so that anyone who searches for solutions to stuttering video, glitchy video, dropped frames on camera capture will be able to first try changing the video format to MJPG as a simple fix.

It seems like this should also be in the knowledge base to provide a quick solution.

I have not yet played with other video formats to see if they also work, but what determines which format the default setting uses? For HD and 4K cameras, is MJPG always the best option if capture stutters and drops frames? Please share the pros and cons of the different video formats offered.

Thanks!