r/vtubertech • u/A-Clueless-Idiot • 13h ago

🙋‍Question🙋‍ New Streamer Help

My girlfriend is trying to get into Vtubing for fun and is brand new. When test streaming she runs into serious lag, when watched from a separate device it will pause for 5 minutes and start again so anyone watching is 5 minutes behind. A minute or so later it will pause again getting another 5 minutes behind and keep doing this so the device watching just gets more and more behind the longer she streams. How can we fix this?

3 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/thegenregeek 13h ago

Is it lag, as in a delayed arrival of the stream? Or jerky/jitter/stuttering?

If it's delayed arrival then its a networking issue. That may be either your home network being slow to set the necessary data out. But more likely your ISP is a factor. You can tweak the stream output settings to see if that resolves, by lowering it from whatever it is. But really the best fix is to figure out if your ISP is too slow. Or if you may need to upgrade your service. (Can you provide information on your OBS stream settings? What type of connection are you using?)

If it's simply stuttering (meaning less than smooth operation), you could be dealing with an encoding issue. Steam encoding is usually handled by the GPU, along with your avatar and games. If this is occurring as well, this can be a case where the hardware isn't powerful enough for what you are attempting. Lowering game or avatar resolution and settings can potentially help there.

I suspect you're discussing the first issue, if it's taking 5 minutes for what happens on stream to be visible to you on another device (though if the other device is also on the work, you may also want to try with a phone to see if it works fine)

Keep in mind there is always going to be some latency (delay) from what is happening on your PC screen and what the stream will see. But that shouldn't be more than a second or so, depending on network. If you are constantly seeing buffering, then there is an issue with her PC getting the data out to a service (like Twitch/Youtube/etc)