Fix OBS Studio frame rate issues





Last Updated on 11/02/2020 by dboth

So in this age of COVID-19 and social distancing many organizations are turning to live-streaming as a means to reach their members. On that I volunteer for has asked me to set up live-streaming for them.

I purchased three Logitech C930-C webcams and installed OBS Studio on my primary workstation for testing and on my laptop for use during the actual sessions. After connecting the cameras I started OBS Studio and started playing around to begin my learning process. After getting things started, I noticed that the frame rate was quite slow; I figure around 5fps. All movement looked disconnected and any moving parts of the frames were quite blurry.

After a lot of searches I found nothing that really helped. This is not a problem with the camera itself, CPU or memory capacity, or any of the other suggestions I found. Some blogs suggested using MP4 as the default output but – leaving aside the warning messages on the OBS window explicitly stating that this is not a good idea – I found that it did not resolve the problem in any event.

After a lot of experimentation I discovered that the problem is the default camera setting for Video Format. In the camera properties window, change the Video Format from YUYV 4:2:2 to YV12. This resolves the problem and allows much higher frame rates. Do this for each camera device.