HD60 Pro

Late Night Open Thread

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Twas a long work day. Came home and I was too tired to play anything with puzzles so laid off of Obduction for the time being, which seems to be a fine choice since Cyan has uploaded some hotfixes to hopefully improve the game. Though at this point I don’t know what’s more entertaining, the game itself or the people who are getting pissy trying to run the game on inferior hardware? Some of the people at the Cyan forums who are complaining that they won’t fund another project after backing a game that won’t run on their old hardware are really out of touch. You had 3 years to come up with something to run the game, and you choose to run the game on your toaster mac and act all surprised when it doesn’t work. Amazing! It’s almost like Apple markets outdated hardware at ungodly prices to make people believe it’s still relevant… oh wait.

I have fine tuned my OBS Multiplatform setup, have the Elgato running through it rendering with the codec for my GPU. When I go to start Obduction with a new save I should be ready, assuming the memory leaks are dealt with by the time I pick it up again. In the meantime I tested with Skyrim of course, and the CPU barely moved. Framerate was literally the same recording or not, and I don’t have to worry about audio latency. I see OBS Multi has an option too for streaming and doing a local copy (with more advanced features than Elgato’s setup), so I’ll have to test that when I find time to livestream.

What I’ve learned about the Elgato HD60 Pro

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elgato2

The Elgato HD60 Pro has been a bit of a learning curve. One of the reasons I haven’t been posting lately is due to my desire to get the best stream/recording combo up and running, and believe me when I say there have been some bugs that needed a good thwarting.

One issue I ran into prevented me from recording if I had flashback mode disabled. At first I thought it had to do with how I had the Elgato plugged into my GPU, when the entire time it was actually my audio.

xfi

I have a Creative XFi sound card with a ton of plugin options, and I noticed the software seemed a bit confused when it came to establishing which port was ok and what wasn’t. So I disabled everything but what I intended to use and all of a sudden the program started to let me record.

However my worries weren’t laid to rest as I encountered yet another bug was discovered while recording. The audio would have frequent skips throughout the final mp4 as though there was a buffering problem. After more intense experimentation I found a solution, record the game audio separately from the video. This gives me three different files:

  • The Mp4 file
  • Commentary Audio (if needed)
  • Game Audio

For some reason recording separately vs mixed streams outputs a better quality result. Which I’m ok with since I can just compile the footage in premiere anyway as well as tweak each audio file to my liking if needed.

However…

After about 18 to 20 minutes in the video will suddenly have video/audio latency issues that cannot be fixed. So what I have to do is record in increments of about 15 minutes to play it safe, which honestly isn’t that big of a deal to me. In FRAPS and even in OBS I’ve always stopped and started to make shorter files as an old habit. If I have to continue this practice I don’t see a reason to rage.

Now onto streaming. Twitch has been rather fickle, but that’s before I even bought the card. YouTube on the other hand has been really seamless, whatever I throw at it will stick. I streamed Dead Island while recording a local copy with zero framerate loss. The only problem I had was when I went to stop and start recording the game capture HD program didn’t want to behave, but that seemed to be related to Dead Island from what I can tell, as I tried to interact with other applications on my 2nd monitor and it outright refused until I brought up my task manager (revealing an adorable Stewie Kitten on live stream to my audience of 1).

I think I finally have it figured out enough to get started on proper recording again. If things continue to go smoothly I’ll do a YouTube video review of the hardware and address on the issues I’ve had to lick, on the chance that someone might be in a similar position with audio issues.