OBS recordings - very jerky on playback

[Ynot]

This may be a settings thing that I've not yet found, but I used OBS yesterday at my wife's primary school - basically stuck each one of the gazillions of yr 1 and 2 kids on a table and filmed them from my HD web cam in front of green screen then super-imposed that onto a background of a looped Snowman flying (a-la Aled Jones etc).

 

Recorded using the OBS option, which recorded in the .mlk format.

 

Wasn't til I got back and looked at the files that I realised that they're all playing very jerkily - seems that the video element sort of pauses at times then catches up and then repeats.

These are only very short segments - max about a minute each, mostly around 20 to 30 secs. But it's rather annoying.

 

Anyone any ideas what could have caused this?

I doubt there's a fix (and no way can we repeat the exercise to re-film)...

[GaryNattrass]

Try adjusting the encoder settings in output for recording and I personally have found that on my mac using a hardware encoder helps and keep the bit rate for streaming and recording down too:

[timsabre]

I have 2 computers that play back exactly like that, and the actual recordings are fine, it is some problem with the codec used by OBS - possibly it used h265 or something which my computer can't decode fast enough.

Try re-encoding to mp4 using Handbrake or something ... you might find that it plays fine then.

 

[J Pearce]

Try playing them in VLC. If they play ok then re-encode them using VLC to H264 mp4.

[timsabre]

Mine won't play in VLC... but play fine on a different computer

 

[TomHoward]

Try adjusting the encoder settings in output for recording and I personally have found that on my mac using a hardware encoder helps and keep the bit rate for streaming and recording down too:

Apologies for the side-track but what hardware encoder on a Mac works with OBS? Is it separate hardware or is one of the graphics cards compatible?

[GaryNattrass]

I guess it uses the graphics card to do it as that what seems to happen on mine.

[Ynot]

I've concluded that the problem is (was) that the laptop just didn't have enough 'grunt' in the graphics card to render the green-screen live.

I'd already tried the files on my bigger home desktop and a couple of other machines in various players (incl VLC) and no change at all, so gotta suck it up and make best of what I got.

It's only for a primary school Xmas thing for the kids and they loved doing it anyway.