Home › Guides › Why your stream drops frames (and how to find the real cause)
Dropped frames mean your encoder produced video the network could not deliver in time. The fix depends entirely on where the bottleneck sits, and guessing wastes whole streams.
Dropped frames are a network symptom. Lagged frames mean the graphics pipeline could not keep up, and skipped frames point at the encoder itself. Your broadcast software reports the three separately, so read them before changing any setting — they lead to opposite fixes.
Run a speed test to the ingest region you actually stream to, not the nearest one. Sustained upload matters far more than peak, and a bitrate that sits close to your ceiling will fail the moment anything else on the network wakes up. Leave real headroom.
A single congested ingest endpoint can drop frames no local change will fix. Switching to another server in the same region, then watching whether the pattern follows you, isolates it in one stream.
Lowering bitrate hides the symptom and costs you image quality. Do it after the path and the encoder are ruled out, and change one variable at a time so you learn which one mattered.
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