Performance Issues with BoinxTV And mimoLive Beta

BoinxTV
#1

Knowing that mimoLive is still beta, I’ll focus on BoinxTV for now with my performance issues, but I’m having the same issues with mimoLive.

For hardware, I’ve just invested in a new Mac Pro. It’s the base model with the exception that the Intel Xeon processor has been upgraded to the 6-core model. I have 2 Blackmagic Intensity 4K PCI-E cards installed into a Thunderbolt 2 PCI-E chassis. I’m currently trying to capture 1 1080p 59.94 source and 1 720p 59.94 source, but would prefer to capture both sources at 1080p. However, the performance is already dreadful with only 1 1080p source.

I’m piping the sources into a 720p 30 fps document. I have 2 lower thirds layers, 1 presenter layer and both HDMI sources in a placer layer.

BoinxTV is the only program running, or if I switch to mimoLive, then it’s the only program running on this brand new Mac Pro. However, the framerate I’m getting is dreadful. The lower thirds animate choppy when activating and deactivating the lower thirds layers. I’m not recording to disk or streaming to the Internet. The program is just sitting there running, and I activate and de-activate layers as if I was working in a regular live workflow. It’s choppy, the framerate of the video is terrible, the indicator at the top of Boinx is showing that I’m dropping tons of frames, and the ‘MEM’ indicator is showing up in red often with messages of high vram usage.

On an older less powerful “cheese grater” Mac Pro running on Mountain Lion, I didn’t really have trouble with a very similar all 720p workflow. I’m looking for ideas of what I may need to do to improve performance. My activity monitor shows almost non-existant CPU usage, and system memory usage doesn’t seem to be an issue either. I’m not terribly familiar with any methods of trying to identify the load on the GPUs or on the vram other than via the messages BoinxTV itself provides. I’m not running other apps because I want to isolate the issue. BoinxTV runs terribly, and crashes often. mimoLive doesn’t run much better. It runs slightly smoother and crashes less than BoinxTV, but still crashes too often to be useful.

If anyone has suggestions, or needs me to provide useful data in order to help, I’d be happy to provide any data I can. This just seems so odd because I’ve been using BoinxTV for years, and haven’t had any of these types of stability/framerate issues on other/older Macs. I haven’t really had to troubleshoot BoinxTV much over the years because it’s been so solid.

BoinxTV 1.9.13
mimoLive 2.0b18
Blackmagic Desktop Video 10.5.4
MacOSX El Capitan

#2

I think that El capitan is the issue…
You should try yosemite

#3

@JMVBMW I’ve thought about doing that. If other options don’t pan out, I definitely see myself trying that option. Thanks for the suggestion.

#4

@JMVBMW I am terrible sorry that the performance is dropping dramatically on your machine. We also run tests on Mac Pro and we were able to connect four 1080 sources with no issues. Currently we concentrate our men power on mimoLive so I would like to ask you to a process sample with it: Run mimoLive with all your hardware set up and your desired layers, start “Activity Monitor” by Apple, select mimoLive in the list of applications and click the “Sample Process” menu item from the action menu at the top of the Activity Monitor window. After a while you should get a long text in a report window. Please copy this Text and send it via email to me. Hopefully this will show what the issues is here.

#5

@Achim, thanks for your reply. Just note that it’s me having the issue not JMVBMW. I won’t be back in the office until Tuesday to do that troubleshooting, but once I’m back in there, I’ll get you the info you’re looking for.

In regards to concentrating manpower on mimoLive, I get that you guys are moving forward to what will be the new BoinxTV with a new name. But are you still supporting BoinxTV 1.x, and if so, for how long? mimoLive is still in beta, and I’m not in a huge hurry to jump ship from my current workflow in other places where I have BoinxTV to a beta product just because the new thing is out.

#6

@Achim, I messaged you directly with the process sample. I hope that’s what you were looking for from me.

#7

Thanks for the process sample! Can you please check the console output with the same setup and send me the console log when the performance drops? It looks like there could be dramatically logging going on.

#8

@Achim, I messaged you directly with the console log.

#9

If there’s anyone who’s checking this post because they’re having similar issues, here’s where things are at. The process sample and the console logs have not yielded any useful information to troubleshoot the issue. We’re troubleshooting mimoLive at the request of the Boinx staff instead of BoinxTV.

The problem I’ve been focused on, because it’s the one that’s impacting my workflow the most is the issue I’m having with lower thirds in mimoLive killing my framerate. If I activate the lower thirds layer, framerate dips to around 10fps, deactivate the layer, and framerate goes back up. I can do any mix of layers I want to with great framerates, but if I activate a lower thirds layer, framerate dips hardcore.

In regards to general stability issues, it looks like beta 21 fixed a lot in regards to overall stability of mimoLive. Unfortunately, it did not resolve my lower thirds issues.

Achim from Boinx is currently working with me to help figure out what’s going on with with the lower thirds performance issues and a few other things. If there’s people having the same issues as me and want me to post updates in the thread, say something and I’ll keep posting updates. Otherwise, I’ll just let this thread lie.

#10

Please keep us posted on this performance debug. I have the same BTV/ML decision to make for an event early next month. I have upgraded to El Capitan since my last event, too.

#11

@mimolive@deansuhr.us, I’m in the same boat as you as I absolutely must have a stable workflow for an event in April. I’ve got all kinds of smaller projects that I’d like to be using this rig for between now and then, but I’m gonna be in a really bad place with my employer if this workflow isn’t stable by April. So far, mimoLive is far more stable on this rig than BoinxTV, but mimoLive still isn’t good yet.

I’m currently testing utilizing 2.0b22.

The lower thirds framerate issue is still an issue for me.

It was thought that the issue may be the frosted glass effect, but later it was discovered that it makes no difference. Lower thirds are a problem regardless of what effects are applied to them.

If I attempt to start a live stream, the program crashes immediately.

I can setup the live stream, and put in all the streaming information in, but as soon as I click the stream button, mimoLive crashes. However, no crash reporting dialogue shows up, and there is no crash report in the console. It acts as if I hit the quit button, or killed the process.

If I add a movie source (.mov, .m4v, etc.) in a placer, and make it live, then it does not retain audio/video sync during playback.

Over time, the audio falls behind the video, and continues to get further out of sync the longer it plays.

I’m still working with the Boinx staff trying to get resolutions to these problems, and they’ve been very helpful and responsive. However, the results just aren’t coming yet. mimoLive does crash less now in most situations with the newer betas. However, that doesn’t do me a whole lot of good when I can make it crash on demand when attempting any live streaming, which is the primary purpose of this rig.

#12

I’ve moved on to 2.0b23.

Lower thirds isn’t fixed, but after working with the staff a lot they believe they have found where the issue stems from. Before, we had nothing to work with, but now they’ve narrowed it down to a couple possibilities. So, not fixed, but much closer to fixed.

Live streaming works, but only if I set the h.264 profile to auto. I’m testing with ustream and DaCast(Akamai). DaCast streaming looks like a glorified slideshow, and ustream starts out at about 20fps and then degrades down to a glorified slideshow over time. The audio is fine in both, but the video is no good. These are both supposed to be 29.97fps 720p streams at 2500Kbps.

Both streaming services work consistently fine if I use OBS to stream instead of mimoLive. So, I think the staff still has some work to do on the streaming side of things. I’d be curious to know how mimoLive is working with other streaming services though. There’s a bunch of others out there.

I have not seen mimoLive crash while trying to stream since moving to 2.0b23. Actually, mimoLive hasn’t crashed at all since going to 2.0b23. It’s a small sample size so far, but no crashing yet.

They definitely made movie sources better in 2.0b23 but it’s not quite perfect yet. It would be good enough if I had to play a 5-10 minute video somewhere in my broadcast though.

#13

I’m testing on 2.0b25.

The release notes stated that they fixed my lower thirds issue. I’ve only gotten to test once, but it appears to be true. I’m testing again today, and am hopeful that the results will be good today too.

I sent in some data to the staff in regards to my streaming issues. Still waiting on a followup from them as to whether it gave them any useful information or not.

mimoLive still seems to be stable. No crashing in my workflow that I recall since 2.0b23. I’m getting close to having a production capable workflow now. Once the streaming issues can be worked out. I don’t have much left in the way of bugs that would need fixed for my workflow to work properly.

#14

My last test was on 2.0b29.

I did my first mimoLive production event instead of BoinxTV. The negatives were that I could not reliably stream to Ustream or DaCast using mimoLive. So, I instead had to work around that by utlizing Soundflower and OBS to capture the output of mimoLive and stream via OBS. That worked better, but it was a nightmare trying to get A/V sync. Also, mimoLive crashed 5 minutes into the event. Thankfully, the recovery was quick.

Obviously mimoLive has a new version now and has come out of beta since I did that event. However, I still think it was premature to take it out of beta. There still seems to be too much instability and buggy features to call it a stable retail release, but that’s not up to me, so I’m not going to worry too much about it.

I’ll be testing the retail release in the next day or so, hopefully the streaming and overall stability has gotten and will get better soon, as the mimoLive developers have been very quick to fix any issue I’ve brought to their attention with the only exception really being the streaming.

So, my only real current issue is the streaming. There’s some other glitches, but nothing that I would see actually impacting my workflow.