Disconnect while streaming

Make sure your broadcasting computer is broadcasting live video reliably. If your own computer or network connection is having a hard time getting video to the internet then viewers will be stuck in a buffering state. Reduce the bitrate, resolution and/or framerate in your broadcasting software on broadcasting device if needed.

Take note of any dropped frames and investigate what’s causing those drops. Is it your local CPU or GPU? Is it your local network? Or is it the Owncast server dropping them due to hardware usage?

If, for example, your GPU on your broadcasting computer is maxed out then it can’t keep up rendering frames. If you’re using OBS, one way to determine this is look at the “Stats” in the application and see if you’re experiencing any “Rendering Lag”.

1. Make sure you have a supported version of ffmpeg on your Owncast server. Download ffmpeg 4.1.5 or above.
2. Look at your owncast logs in the console or your admin. There may be specific error messages to tell you what you can do next.
3. Take a look at transcoder.log for detailed logging that you can provide when asking for help if you don’t see anything in the Owncast logs.
4. Make sure your copy of ffmpeg was not installed via Snap packages, as the sandboxing of Snap distributed software isn’t compatible in this case. If you see the error Error: unable to open display in transcoder.log, this might be your problem.