Having issues recording gameplay on Steam Deck using NJ300 capture card on OBS

[Mikoto86]

So I have my Steam Deck connected to my NJ300 capture card which is connected to my laptop as the recording device.(Using a dock as well so I can play on my TV)

I have an issue many times with the screen just completely freezing on OBS randomly. Sometimes when I can actually get it to work and I start recording, the preview feed of recording looks just fine but when I stop the recording and watch the video itself, the screen is frozen but I can still hear the audio just fine. Whenever I have the first issue of the screen just freezing completely, I always have to restart the Steam Deck and my laptop to even get a display again. I try removing video capture device, try deactivating it and reactivating and nothing works, I have to completely restart both systems. Does anyone happened to know how to fix this?

[Jugginator]

Have a look at your OBS logs, I'm guessing it's due to a lack of resources on the deck (even though you're using a capture card, the steam deck runs as hard as it can with most games, not leaving much room for encoding/decoding). May try limiting FPS to 30.

[Mikoto86]

I figured it out! The main issue seems to have been EAC mode. Once I deactivated that, the feed was coming in and I wasn't having the freeze issue that made me restart the systems. After that the issue that I was having was with recording because no matter what I kept changing the FPS to, the video would record very laggy and choppy. After messing around with all of the video settings and quality settings, it seems that none of those affected the recording. The only thing that I changed that actually made a difference and made the recording run smoothly, was going into "controls" option that's just below the studio mode option and setting the Common FPS Values to 20. Once I did that and tested the recording, the video ran smoothly and I no longer had any kind of lag or choppiness. I even set all of my video quality settings and FPS settings on the Steam Deck and in game back to what I had it before starting this whole process and it worked just fine. I never considered that one single setting was what made all the difference but that's all it was.

[Jugginator]

Nice, glad you sorted it out and thanks for responding with it. Yeah, EAC will add a bit of overhead

[Mikoto86]

Thanks! And turns out that even at 20 it gets a little choppy when in combat so I set it to 10 and then it was fine even when fighting zombies.