I’ve been getting my laptop setup to be a streaming computer for my desktop. The last time I experimented with OBS over the network I used NDI integration, which had its ups and downs. I do hear that NDI 5 is a lot better, but I haven’t tested it yet. Instead I’ve been playing with Teleport, which is pretty easy to use compared to what I remember with NDI a few years ago. All you have to do is install the plugin to your streaming computer and the computer you intend to use for video capture. It’s also worth mentioning, and kinda obvious that you should also use a wired connection. It did take a little bit of trial and error, but I did get audio and video to stream perfectly to the laptop!
I haven’t done any actual streaming, but I did do a test recording of Horizon Zero Dawn without any hiccups. Now I just need to find the time to stream!… and to figure out what would be fun to stream… someday.
It’s been a productive weekend! Thanks to Shotcut I’ve been getting my video releases in order, lots of gameplay footage to release between now and November! Made a few thumbnails for said videos in Krita, and I’ve even been upping my OBS game for future vids!
Installed a few plugins to try, there was one I even noticed that’s bundled with the current OBS that allows you to capture individual audio streams from different programs. Handy if you want to have your game audio and voice chat audio on separate tracks! Another plugin I found on the OBS Forums makes green screening a hell of a lot easier, and I even downloaded a status bar to mess with. I’ll need to rebuild a few scenes before I consider streaming again, but one of these weekends I’d like to make it happen!
I ran some tests with AMID EVIL last night, they released the new Black Labrynth Campaign. I figured it would be perfect for my testing needs. Didn’t overload the encoder once, and no lag whatsoever on audio or graphics. Thanks to the new audio plugin I now use 5 different audio channels for one game recording, and they consist of:
Game Audio
Voice Chat Audio
Microphone Audio
Music Channel (Only for Livestreaming)
Downmix (All Channels Mixed Together)
All of it done without the need of third party programs like voicemeeter! That means I can do this under both Windows AND Linux! Now if Creative would fucking support their sound cards under Linux I’d spend 99% of my time there on Desktop!
Tonight I sat down and played a long overdue session of Borderlands 2. I wanted to do a recording as I do with a lot of things that I play, and as per tradition the encoder in OBS was overloaded, even on settings I usually use. Out of curiosity I decided to use the same settings under the Linux version, and while I’m happy to say that it worked perfectly out of the box with only a slightly lower framerate, the client itself seems to have become a time capsule of sorts of early adventures in Linux porting. I copied my Windows save over to the Linux side and found that my shield and certain weapons were missing, items that happened to be in the Commander Lilith DLC which they never ported outside of Windows (along with some other DLC packs).
Our content is in another castle
I did some further investigation and found that Aspyr is working on an update for the Linux and Mac clients, but until then if I want to play the Linux version it has to be with other Linux and Mac users on a much more ancient build of the game. I have to confess; finding that out after getting a successful recording under Linux was kind of a kick in the crotch to me. I have all of this power and capability now, squandered by missing content, alas… At least they’re working on it though, maybe if we’re lucky they’ll update the graphics a bit? (For the record D3D9 = DirectX 9 and OpenGL is OpenGL)
D3D9OpenGLD3D9OpenGL
It isn’t a dealbreaker or anything, but if Valve can get their games running under Linux with little to no visual sacrifice, then Randy Bitchford should be able to part with some of his Bitchford Bucks to pay for a better Linux experience (though I do like the ad free experience in the old version. :v ). That said, I was reading the Linux requirements and found that AMD and Intel GPU’s aren’t officially supported (Fuck NVidia). I wonder what an NVidia GPU under Linux would look like? Perhaps something for a future project on my gaming laptop.
Meanwhile, back in Windows; I researched that a bit as well and found some interesting tips that seem to get rid of the encoding problem, at least for my setup. Disabling Ambient Occlusion and switching from borderless window to fullscreen seemed to do the trick. I’m not sure why, but switching from borderless to fullscreen increased my framerate (the opposite if what I would expect), and disabling AO made the encoder overload error go away, at least for local recordings. The true test will be recording and livestreaming it at the same time. If I can do that then my soul will be at peace… until NVidia fucks it up again.
If you’re looking to make some tweaks to your install, no matter what OS platform you’re on I highly recommend the PC Gaming Wiki. They’ve helped me fix up a couple of games thanks to their community provided tips and tricks!
I’ve been plagued with a weird problem in OBS as of late, and I even thought I had it nailed down today… but during a livestream I decided to do tonight OBS decided to go tits up. It’s been doing this thing lately where it won’t stop recording, and I have to terminate the process via task manager. In most cases it corrupts my video making it impossible to watch. I’m thinking that I should probably switch from mp4 to mkv as I’ve read that file extension has a better chance of survival. After all Shotcut can read mkv files so it’s not like I have to remux my recording for proper import.
But tonight while recording and streaming it just decided to come to a screeching halt, and when I tried to stop and start it decided to hang; resulting in me terminating the process and restarting my stream… annoying. Reading around online doesn’t seem to give me much info. One of the tricks someone recommended was running OBS in administrative mode but so far that seems to do fuckall. Now I’m going to experiment using the h.264 codec for recording instead of h.265 to see if that makes any difference. I haven’t had as much time to record gameplay lately, and it’s bad enough that I keep losing data because of these random hangs.
If this continues to persist I’ll consult the gurus over at the OBS forums. I think I have an account there from years ago. I do also have my laptop setup to receive my desktop stream if push comes to shove, but I prefer to leave that for Vulkan and DX12 based titles rather than be the ultimate solution. In most of my cases my desktop is more than powerful to handle games like Skyrim and Okami while both streaming and recording from the same system at the same time.
Last year I acquired a PS3 for $10; this included two controllers and their cables, two HDMI cables, and a copy of GTA4 I’ll never use. I figured for that kind of money it would be worth grabbing it to play games that never quite made it to any other platform, plus it’s a first generation PS3 capable of playing games going back to the PS2 and PS1. I tend to stick to emulators still, like with Klonoa for example, but you never know… it could come in handy.
After getting my hands on it I was interested in the idea of possibly streaming gameplay on the rare chance something like that could happen. But upon researching I found that could be problematic as the console has HDCP encryption preventing you from streaming or recording to an external device unless you record via composite. Unfortunately I have an Elgato HD60 Pro which only supports HDMI, and I was not going to invest in yet another capture device, especially since I don’t really use it much anymore thanks to AMD’s AVC Encoder in OBS Studio.
But I didn’t give up! I found out through continued research that using an HDMI splitter would do the trick just fine (as seen above), but not all HDMI splitters will do the job. I picked up this model on Amazon, and that bypasses the HDCP encryption perfectly. So all you really need to get it to work with your HD60 Pro is one HDMI splitter and three HDMI cables. One to go from the PS3 to the splitter, one to go from the splitter to your monitor/TV, and one to go to from the splitter to your capture card. Definitely much cheaper than getting another unit all together.
Plus, as you can see I’ve already got a game lined up. :v:
I’ve spent most of the day playing Aragami and experimenting with OBS Studio trying to fix a problem I’ve been having for the last couple of GPU driver updates. For whatever reason I can’t stream and record locally at the same time. Well, I can… But both the stream and local recording lag the fuck out. I don’t get it either, before the ReLive update everything worked fine when I went to stream and record at the same time. But then even rolling back didn’t fix the problem, same with rolling back OBS Studio. This sucks because if I want to stream something I won’t have a local copy for potential highlights.
I did play a bit with AMD ReLive, sadly that doesn’t allow me to simultaneously stream and record. Recording is actually quite good, while streaming seems to suck no matter which setting. I also don’t care for the interface, why does everything have to be tiles and buttons? OBS Studio gives you all these sliders and options, and it looks more organized. Not filled with a bunch of friggin tiles. I hope AMD improves their GUI design, because if they want to incorporate game capture (which is a really good idea and does run well on the local recording side) they need a cleaner design.
Played around more with OBS-Studio today. I’m getting myself familiar with scenes and playing with the new source types I never saw in classic. That way when I stream to Twitch or YouTube I can be fabulous. Now all I need to focus on is balancing audio which I’ll have to play by ear (no pun intended). I figure I might as well get a polish on things so that when I finally do have time to do a livestream I’ll be somewhat ready.
As far as Streaming goes I’ll probably be mainly streaming to YouTube until Twitch gets their shite together. Since my friends are giving up on Adobe Flash it would make sense to use a streaming service that accommodates those who want to give up that nasty trash.
Of course now I’ll have to ponder what my first public live stream should be.
I thought it was excellent timing that I had a day off on the release of Obduction. I’ve really enjoyed the game so far, so much to explore and take in. It’s like Myst without linking books, and in space. It was really difficult to pull me away from it, thankfully the memory leak in the game ate my system RAM and my VRAM.
Yeah, the release has been a little buggy for people. I count myself among the luckier ones too. I’m really glad that I don’t game on a mac. Hopefully Cyan releases some updates though, from the performance standpoint I can only say it’s “playable” at best, and that’s on a 6 core 12 thread Xeon processor and one of the best GPU’s out there. There have been some other tips and tricks I haven’t done yet to improve performance (one being deleting your save and starting over), so I’ll try that next time I play the game.
I tried recording some clips with my the Elgato software but I’m still running into little annoyances with video/audio latency. So I’ve switched over to OBS Multiplatform earlier tonight and tested that. I still need to refine it but I can already tell it runs much better, the desync issues aren’t there and if they are they are not as apparent. And unlike old OBS I can actually use my AMD codec! Meaning I can record from the capture card, use that codec and save CPU/GPU usage. And the nice thing about OBS? It looks like that will let me stream and record at the same time much like Elgato’s Game Capture HD, which I didn’t know since up until this point I’ve been using classic OBS.
With all of this stuff I can honestly say I’m never bored. 😛
I’ve been tinkering with old DOS games and finally found a way to record them under OBS without crashing DOSBox or recording a blank screen. I’ve been tweaking some .conf files to make the games play more to my liking. Now I can fully retire FRAPS, although to be fair I haven’t really used it since a friend on Steam showed me OBS. I kept FRAPS installed in case I ever felt like recording DOS games. I guess that won’t be an issue anymore. 😛 I’ve stress tested Commander Keen and Jazz Jackrabbit and it recorded quite nicely.
In case you haven’t heard of OBS it’s a capture/streaming program. However unlike FRAPS you can install additional plugins and it’s fully Open Source. Also unlike FRAPS it’s also Linux/Mac Friendly. You can check it out here.
