OBS Recording woes

I’ve been plagued with a weird problem in OBS as of late, and I even thought I had it nailed down today… but during a livestream I decided to do tonight OBS decided to go tits up. It’s been doing this thing lately where it won’t stop recording, and I have to terminate the process via task manager. In most cases it corrupts my video making it impossible to watch. I’m thinking that I should probably switch from mp4 to mkv as I’ve read that file extension has a better chance of survival. After all Shotcut can read mkv files so it’s not like I have to remux my recording for proper import.

But tonight while recording and streaming it just decided to come to a screeching halt, and when I tried to stop and start it decided to hang; resulting in me terminating the process and restarting my stream… annoying. Reading around online doesn’t seem to give me much info. One of the tricks someone recommended was running OBS in administrative mode but so far that seems to do fuckall. Now I’m going to experiment using the h.264 codec for recording instead of h.265 to see if that makes any difference. I haven’t had as much time to record gameplay lately, and it’s bad enough that I keep losing data because of these random hangs.

If this continues to persist I’ll consult the gurus over at the OBS forums. I think I have an account there from years ago. I do also have my laptop setup to receive my desktop stream if push comes to shove, but I prefer to leave that for Vulkan and DX12 based titles rather than be the ultimate solution. In most of my cases my desktop is more than powerful to handle games like Skyrim and Okami while both streaming and recording from the same system at the same time.