My OBS goes to "Be Right Back" Even Though My Bandwidth Seems Good

There are a few closely related scenarios to the above one, that all relate to the difference in LRT bandwidth (the bandwidth of your unit to LiveU's cloud), and the actual video bandwidth (from LiveU's cloud to your next step, sometimes a cloud service running OBS or a similar tool). 

These can include:

• Video never arriving at your destination despite the unit sending good bandwidth
• Poor video quality or very low bit rate video arriving at your destination despite the unit sending good bandwidth
• OBS frequently going to the "be right back" message despite the unit sending good bandwidth
• Video showing as black on the unit's video preview screen 

Common Causes of the Above Scenarios

A very common cause of the above scenario is the video input to the unit being bad - for example either all black, not there at all, or having no embedded audio. 

This is extra challenging since sometimes you may have a good cable plugged in from camera to unit, and the camera may otherwise appear to be working fine - but one of the above scenarios is still occurring.

How To Diagnose

There are two good ways to diagnose if this overall issue is occurring to you:

1. If the video preview screen on the unit shows black, solid green or other bad video
2. If the tool you are streaming to shows very low bandwidth while the unit or Solo Portal shows high bandwidth

Here is an example of the incoming video bit rate in the Psynaps service as one example:

In the above example the bit rate looks good - 4450 kbps.  However, if this bit rate reads any number from 0 to 300, while your unit or the Solo Portal reports several thousand kbps, you are probably experiencing the issue of bad video input. 

Causes and Fixes

The above scenarios can be caused by the camera being off, being in the wrong mode, or the cable from camera to unit being bad.  These are obvious and common causes.

But there are some more subtle causes as well:

1. Camera not outputting audio due to settings or what microphones are plugged into the camera
2. Camera accidentally entering "PC Mode" due to a bad power cable or bad battery

For #1, this occurs often with dSLR cameras that don't by default output audio. It can sometimes take special settings or accessories on a dSLR to output audio.  This can also happen when using the HDMI output of a laptop, since there are many options from a computer on audio output, like surround sound or DTS encoding. 

How the Power Cable Can Cause This

Perhaps the most surprising way this can be caused is by the USB power cord some users use from a battery to the camera.  If that cable, or the battery and USB port itself, is making bad contact or flickering back and forth, some cameras like the Sony AS300 will accidentally go into "PC Mode", and in this mode stop outputting video over HDMI.

In this state you will be able to see that the preview screen on your unit shows black.  Try removing the power cable and running from camera battery as a test.  If the issue stops occurring, you may need a new power cable or even new battery to permanently resolve it.