This can happen for several reasons including:
- A lot of people moving around on cam
- Flashing lights
- Picking up your cam and moving the view to show something in the room to your viewers
- Poor Wi-Fi or ethernet connection
- Poor cell phone connection (if using the C4 Broadcaster app or similar)
- Excessive background animations
- Incorrect OBS Studio configuration
- Older, outdated, or poor hardware (computer, camera, or web cam)
Why does it happen?
To make the video flow smoothly, only those pixels that change are transmitted with each frame. There is no reason to keep transmitting static pixels (those displaying the wall behind you for example), this keeps the amount of data being resent with each frame to a minimum and the video is smooth. For example, if you have multiple people moving around or a lot of flashing lights, then there are more changes, meaning more pixels need to be transmitted with each frame.
If you have an 8 Megapixel camera (8 million pixels) that runs at 30 frames per second, that works out to 240 million pixels per second that need to be transmitted to keep up with the movement. The result of this is a jerky video.
Two things to remember!
- When you are looking at your own video, this is displayed locally on your computer. So, it will run more smoothly for you than for those watching your broadcast elsewhere
- If you move your cam to give your viewers a “quick look” at something, they are unlikely to see what you are trying to show as your cam will start dropping frames as it struggles to keep up with the changes.
