Troubleshooting

OBS will not connect

"Failed to connect to server" usually means freezes is not running, or is not listening where OBS is looking.

• Confirm freezes says waiting for obs along the bottom. If it says not running, press start
• Confirm the server field in OBS is exactly rtmp://127.0.0.1:1935/live, including the /live
• Check nothing else has taken port 1935. Other relays and some capture tools bind it too

Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 1935 -State Listen

If that returns a process that is not freezes, stop it and try again.

The platform rejects the stream

The stream key is wrong, or it belongs to a different ingest than the one selected. Re-paste it in the panel and confirm the ingest matches the one your platform gave you.

Note that keys are not interchangeable between platforms, and some platforms rotate them after a ban or a password change.

The stream drops when the delay is high

This is a buffer underrun and it is the most common real failure.

If OBS stalls, drops frames badly, or you tab into something that starves it, the write head stops moving while the read head keeps going. Eventually the read head catches up and there is nothing left to send.

freezes handles this by giving delay back rather than letting the connection go quiet. It would rather show viewers something closer to live than have the platform time out the stream and end your broadcast. The panel reports it when this happens.

If it happens repeatedly, the encoder is the problem, not the buffer. Lower the bitrate or the resolution until OBS can keep up.

Stutter or a visible seam at every cut

Almost always the keyframe interval.

Set it explicitly to 2 seconds and turn b-frames off, as described in OBS setup. On Auto, the encoder may go many seconds between keyframes, and every delay change has to wait for one.

Audio drifts out of sync after a change

Report it. Audio and video are cut at the same point in the buffer, so sustained drift after a seek is a timestamp rewriting bug rather than expected behaviour. Include your encoder, bitrate, keyframe interval and the delay values you moved between.

Memory use climbs while streaming

Expected, up to a point. freezes keeps a rolling history so a delay can be taken by rewinding into it, and that history grows for the first ten minutes of a stream before settling. At 6000 kbps ten minutes is roughly 450 MB.

It stops there. Past the budget the oldest material is dropped, and everything is released when the stream ends. If it keeps climbing well beyond that, open an issue.

Getting help

Open an issue at github.com/dancer/freezes/issues with your OBS encoder settings, the platform, and what the panel reported at the time.