Troubleshooting
Beam writes warnings and error messages to the OBS log, so the first step when troubleshooting any issues with Beam should always be to check the logs. You can view them live from OBS by navigating to Help -> Log Files -> View Current Log:
Do that on both the sender and the receiver OBS. A new window appears that shows the current OBS log. Now repeat whatever step you were running into an issue with Beam and check both log windows for any hints what might be going wrong. If you cannot solve it yourself and want to ask for support somewhere, make sure to include the information you were able to gather by looking at the logs.
If your receiver does not show the sender in the list of available feeds, first of all make sure that the sender is active. If the source is an output the top most "Enable Beam Sender Output" option needs to be enabled first, by default it is disabled:
Likewise, if the sender is a filter make sure the "Enable Beam Sender Filter" option is checked, should be enabled by default though:
Also make sure that the source of the filter is producing video or audio frames, as the Beam sender will go into standby mode if it isn't, to save resources.
After you activated the sender you need to close and reopen any source properties for the sender to appear on the list of available feeds.
If the sender still is not shown connectivity might be blocked by a firewall. To find out whether that is the case, temporarily disable the firewall on the sender side, if it still doesn't work also on the receiver side. If disabling the firewalls solves your issue, please check the manual/documentation for the firewall software you are using to find out how you can allow Beam to communicate through it.
If it still doesn't work even with firewalls disabled (e.g. some switches don't support UDP Multicast, or it might be blocked if one or both of the involved computers is on Wifi) please resort to using manual connection mode.
- Make sure that the sender is enabled, see above for details.
- Make sure you are using the same version of the Beam plugin on both sender and receiver side, different Beam versions are never guaranteed to work with each other.
- If using a filter, make sure that the source of the filter is producing video or audio frames, as the Beam sender will go into standby mode if it isn't, to save resources.
- As mentioned in the introduction, check the OBS logs. You might be using an incompatible combination of color formats and compression, log messages will tell you about that.
This happens if either your network is unstable (Wifi?) or your network doesn't have enough bandwidth, e.g. when trying to send a raw 1080p feed over a standard 1G network.
For unstable networks try to configure a frame buffer on the receiver side. As a rule of thumb a buffer between 1000 and 2000 ms would be sensible choices, but note that the higher you set it, the more system memory this will consume, since frames are kept as raw data in memory. If you only get occasional small glitches a buffer of 500 ms or lower might also be sufficient.
If the bandwidth is insufficient, pick a lower resolution/FPS setting or a different compression algorithm, read more on that here.