Streaming

Learning To Teleport

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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.

Who the hell is Shock Entertainment Pty?

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I received a couple copyright claims from last night’s stream… because of copyrighted ambience?

Hi Overlord Tomala,

A copyright owner using Content ID claimed some material in your video.

This is not a copyright strike. This claim does not affect your account status.

There are either ads running on your video, with the revenue going to the copyright owner, or the copyright owner is receiving stats about your video’s views.

  • Video title: Back to the Bawderlands… 2
  • Copyrighted content: Wurmwater Ambience
  • Claimed by: Shock Entertainment Pty

The second one was “Oasis Ambience” and claimed by the same company. Last night Yutram and I were playing some Borderlands 2 DLC, and there were two areas in it called The Oasis, and Wurmwater. Apparently streaming this DLC will earn you more than one copyright claim should you venture beyond the oasis. What’s strange about this is Shock Entertainment Pty doesn’t merit much of a result for me on search engines, other than a link to a video website in their name and a video by Angry Joe with Shock Entertainment Pty being in the description for the video under the list of copyright claims that were not resolved. They don’t even have a Wikipedia presence, something smells fishy. :morty:

This begs the question; why is an Australian website that primarily deals in video releases (if it’s even them) trying to claim copyright on ambience that game developers put in place in a game that I paid, and have every right to stream? How am I, a consumer, supposed to know ahead of time what I can and can’t stream based on ambient tracks? Music? I can understand them copyright claiming something if I’m using a song or something… but ambient tracks? This might make me consider ditching YouTube for streaming and going with Twitch, and maybe syndicate to Mixer. I don’t want to cut my streaming ties with YouTube, but if they want to lay claim to something that I can’t even control apart from completely removing the background audio then I’d rather just use YouTube for video releases only. As it is I get more traffic on Twitch than I do on YouTube, so it wouldn’t really be that big of a loss. I just wouldn’t want to part with the few people that have no reason to join other platforms like Twitch or Mixer… unless of course Twitch offered me the big bux. :trollface: Can’t be choosy in this economy.

I’m going to ponder this a bit more before coming to a final conclusion, but here’s what I’m thinking; I could either drop YouTube completely, or do it on a case by case basis. If one of my streams receives another copyright claim I will no longer stream that game on YouTube. Borderlands 2 is already on that list. Perhaps I’ll even generate a list of games not to stream on YouTube just to have as a reference. I’ll even give it a page all its own. This doesn’t really do much harm to me since I need 1,000 subscribers before I can even think about making a penny off YouTube (a number I doubt I’ll ever get to), but for those that do this is poses a problem. What if I did make money off that platform and I edited down my video as I usually end up doing, and I find that whatever background ambience playing in the background gets a copyright claim or a strike and now any revenue made on the video that I put my own time and work into will go to the copyright owners of background noise instead?

Well, now I’ll have something to watch for when I do finally get around to editing the video footage, :zorak: I’ll also look further into Shock Entertainment Pty to see if I can find out anything else, and I’ll write about my findings.

Dear Esther, I did another livestream

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This time my streaming went ALOT smoother, and not just because of the new stream deck. There was one problem when I started however… For some reason my recording drive disappeared from my list of drives. It turned out my IcyDock wasn’t working for whatever reason. I swapped it to another slot and it worked fine. I did get the dock working again after the stream, for some reason even though the light on the device was on it wasn’t doing anything. Pressing the power button on the dock a couple more times got it to work again.

But anyways the stream went alright. Tonight’s victim was Dear Esther: Landmark Edition; a first person walker where you listen to narration… so basically a serious version of The Stanley Parable. I haven’t played Dear Esther in years, and felt the need to revisit it (that and Yutram suggested it last night and the idea stuck in my head ever since). It was probably the most boring let’s play I’ve ever done, but I somehow managed to have fun with it anyways. If you’re interested in watching it you can find my vid here. It’s a little over an hour if you have that kind of time to kill, and much like the Freedom Planet stream I will be working on a video highlighting the best moments… if there were any.

OBS Recording woes

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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.

SHINY BUTTONS!!!

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One of the things on my personal streaming wishlist has been an Elgato Streamdeck; a device with programmable LCD buttons that allows you to execute whatever you want with the press of a button AND giving it an icon of its own which can be helpful if you forget what your binds are. One of the nice things about these is the abillity to use it with your favorite software, you can use it with Elgato’s own capture software (assuming you own one of their capture devices) or you can use them with XSplit, OBS, etc.

They recently released a miniature version of their regular stream deck, with the difference being that it only comes with six buttons and it’ll cost only $100… or you could spend about another $40 to obtain all of the other buttons. Of course if you don’t want ALL OF THE BUTTONS and are living on the cheap I could see this as a tantalizing option.

Of course, I keep telling myself that I need to stream more before investing in such a device. :v:

Looking into the streaming scene again

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One of the many things I read about Ryzen CPU’s is their ability to stream AND leave you with plenty of resources for your game or anything else you could think of. On my old Xeon Skyrim never looked good enough to me unless I wanted a higher quality setting, which caused my framerates to dip periodically. With my Ryzen 7 I only used about 19% to 23% even while recording via the GPU at the same time. I guess this means I’ll have to look into doing livestreams at some point. 😛 No facecam though.

I’m compiling a list of games I want to publicly embarrass myself with, and so far I have these:

  1. Broforce
  2. Skyrim
  3. Saints Row Series
  4. Doom/Quake/Wolfenstein Series
  5. Shadow Warrior Series
  6. Serious Sam Series
  7. Hard Reset
  8. Windows 3.11 For Workgroups

If anyone has a suggestion feel free to add it to my list via the comments.

Evening Open Thread

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I’ve been experimenting with restream.io, a service that allows you to stream to multiple places if you so choose. I did a test earlier with Twitch and YouTube gaming. Other than YouTube hiccuping everything seemed to run ok. I felt inspired after finding out Twitch is now completely HTML5, meaning my friends who don’t use Flash can watch me stream there. But I want to stream to YouTube as well, so hopefully this will work for me. Already seems so, though a longer stress test may prove useful in the future.

I hope I can find some time to do some stuff, time has not been on my side lately. I’ve mostly been dealing with the holiday rush day after day after day after day… and it’s been old since before Halloween. I think I’m at a point in my life where I dread Christmas before it even starts, which seems to be August now. If they push back the holiday sales any further it will literally be Christmas in fucking July. I wonder how much longer it’ll take before we become a 24/7 Christmas preparation country.

The streamening is nigh

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Apart from some technical difficulties between YouTube and OBS with LOTS of teeth gritting trying to get the damn thing to run tonight I completed another test run, this time with Skyrim. We tested audio levels between my microphone, mumble chat and the game. I think I’m about ready to do a public event of some kind. 😀 I wanted to do Obduction, but with it’s bugs and the memory leak issue I don’t think I’d be a happy camper, unless I stream it from my laptop to my desktop THEN to YouTube… Ugh.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to livestream Skyrim or not, since my playstyle might bore people… I’m overpowered, but then again my selection of mods might keep it interesting. What I’d REALLY love to livestream is some team based stuff, like the Lara Croft games, Broforce, etc.

OBS-Studio is becoming more and more awesome the more I play with it.

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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.