Three kinds of lost frame. Only one is your internet.
Everyone sees the red dot and blames the connection. OBS is more specific than that, and the number you want is not the one on the status bar.
Your stream stutters. You check the status bar, see dropped frames, and go shopping for a better uplink.
Half the time the uplink was fine.
OBS tracks three separate failures. They sit in different places and they have different fixes. Open Stats from the View menu and read all three.
Dropped frames
These are network. OBS encoded the frame, queued it, and could not push it to the server. So it threw the frame away.
Causes: not enough upload, a congested path, a bad route to that ingest. This is the only counter that means what people assume.
Skipped frames due to encoding lag
Your encoder fell behind. The frame arrived and there was no capacity to compress it in time.
On x264 this means the CPU ran out. Drop the preset from medium toward veryfast. Each step down costs quality and buys headroom. On a GPU encoder it means the encode engine is saturated, often because something else is using it. Recording and streaming at once on one card will do it.
Frames missed due to rendering lag
The compositor never finished the frame. Your GPU could not build the scene at the frame rate you asked for.
This one has nothing to do with encoding or network. It is scene load. Too many sources, too many filters, a browser source running an animation, a game with the GPU pinned at 100%.
Dropped is the pipe. Skipped is the encoder. Missed is the GPU drawing the picture. Fix the one that is counting.
What to check in what order
| Counter | Blame | First move |
|---|---|---|
| Dropped | Network | Lower bitrate 20%. If it stops, the pipe was the limit. |
| Skipped | Encoder | Faster preset, or move encoding to a GPU that is not also rendering a game. |
| Missed | Render | Cut sources. Kill browser sources. Cap the game frame rate. |
The trap
All three can run at once. A saturated GPU misses render frames, which starves the encoder, which then falls behind. You fix the network and nothing changes.
Watch the counters for a full session, not a minute. The failure that matters shows up under load, and load arrives when the stream gets busy.
Sources
The Rig Wire reports on streaming technology from public documentation, source repositories and vendor releases. We did not bench-test what is described here. When we have tested something, we say so.