Streaming

Open Thread at the witching hour

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Alright, I’m feeling well enough to post again. Felt kinda bleh in one form or another but hopefully it’s all passed.

Been experimenting with video streaming with the Elgato HD60 Pro to Twitch. My first run with it the other day was a little strange when my stream kept randomly traveling at the speed of cocaine, but tonight it went a bit smoother. Think I need to bump up the bitrate though to make it look a little more crisp. Also did a local recording at the same time the stream took place, no problems.

I’ll also be looking into YouTube streaming soon. It requires a phone number but that’s ok, I’ll be obtaining a flip phone that’ll do the job among other things. Honestly I would prefer to do my public streaming on Twitch, but YouTube seems to have a better setup. They don’t require Adobe Flash, you can stream at 60fps if your bandwidth can handle it, Twitch requires you to be partnered to always get good bandwidth while YouTube will take whatever bitrate you throw at them and the list goes on… I really wish Amazon would pay more attention to the streaming market, they’ve owned twitch for awhile now and it would be really nice if they offered better competition with YouTube/Google.

The Elgato has arrived!

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I’ve been playing with my new capture card since yesterday, it came a few days early! I finally have it all dialed in.

Elgato

The software isn’t that difficult to use, if you’re familiar to OBS there will be some similarities. I think the bigger problem I had was figuring out what inputs to use since I have multiple options, mainly trying to get mumble chat into the recordings. I finally perfected it tonight. Now I can simultaneously stream and record footage at the same time. Works perfectly for what I want. I’ve been testing it with all kinds of games. From Skyrim to TF2 to Hard Reset Redux to Solus Project, it handles it all without stealing any of my framerate so I can record/broadcast and enjoy my game at the same time. It was never really bad with Skyrim, but sometimes with the other games OBS was a little more demanding. That and I always had to choose between streaming and recording. While I could do both it would make me lag considerably even on good hardware.

It was nice running a UE4 game and doing a capture without worrying about a performance decrease. I think when Obduction comes out I’ll be able to capture my finest moments of stupidity in glorious 1080p 60FPS for all to cry at. 😀

In pursuit of a streaming device

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I’ve been getting more interested in streaming lately. My main problem though is that I want to Stream at one setup while recording a master copy at the same time in a higher framerate, and I don’t want to have two instances of OBS running, especially if the game is really GPU intensive. So I’ve been entertaining the idea of getting some external device so that I can record/stream at the same time while throwing all of my CPU/GPU power towards gaming… Hooray!

So I’ve been looking at a bunch of devices from companies like Elgato, Hauupauge, Pyle, Matrox, etc. The Matrox Monarch HD looked pretty nice, but with that I could only stream one source at a time. So far the Elgato HD60 pro looks to be up my alley, and the reviews I’ve been reading about them seem quite promising. I’m thinking after I do some more research I may purchase one. Then people can see how horrible I am at all kinds of games, at 1080p 60FPS!

The Open Threadness Continues.

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Continued being productive today by finishing up the PDF and putting it up on their website, so that’s done and taken care of. I celebrated by streaming some Jazz Jackrabbit on Twitch, so for a small moment I had MSDOS and Windows 3.1 on there which felt kinda odd. 😛 Twitch streaming in the 90’s would have been weird, and painful…

I’ll have to double check my audio levels for the next time I stream. Yutram and I were pretty quiet when we spoke, me especially. The world needs to hear my obnoxious voice PROPERLY. Other than that it was a fun nostalgic time, even up to the point where I got fed up and quit. 😛 Of course, lots of games were like that for me back in the day.

I rarely finished a game but loved to play them, then take a break and play another, rinse and repeat. Probably why I have such a huge collection now with only a few completed titles. Meh, I know I’ve finished more than a handful of games, but my play style rarely involves me gluing myself to one game. Exceptions to the rule would probably be 2013 Tomb Raider, Portal 2, The Half Life 2 games, Bioshock Infinite and Stanley Parable. Those did a good job keeping me invested.

Ready to stream!

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After numerous experiments I think I’m finally ready to do some serious-ish streaming. Did some final experiments earlier with some friends watching once again. Even got FaceRig setup so people could see my… face? 😛 I will need a better camera for it though, the one I currently use is an old Sony Handycam that takes old digital tapes. You can tell it’s old because it still uses FireWire. 😛 Still a good camera though! But unfortunately I don’t use it anymore since it’s low res. I’ll probably get a 1080p Logitech of some kind so that I’ll have better face tracking and overall better clarity.

What is this fair use you speak of?

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You know YouTube’s copyright takedowns are bad when newly released games start to include the following option:

copyright

I never thought I’d see the day when a game (and possibly more to come) would basically kneel before Google and the music industry to prevent potential copyright takedowns to those who may choose to show off their gameplay. We have fair use laws and Google lets these bigger industries trample all over them day in and day out. Things like this won’t fix the problems, it’ll only feed them.

I want someone to create a website for generic music, and the music on the site would consist of copyrighted songs being played by other musicians backwards with different lyrics JUST to piss off the big bad music industry. Naturally they should start with Metallica’s songs, it would be such poetic justice. :v

Steam allows you to stream games now.

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Woke up to a bunch of people on my friends list talking about the new Steam Broadcasting feature that allows you to stream your gameplay. So I spent a good portion of the evening streaming various games. It seems to work with Direct X and OpenGL, but sadly no MSDOS.

This is currently in the steam client beta if anyone wants to check it out. To my knowledge it works on Windows 7 and 8. If you’re on Windows Vista it’s not available, and I’m not sure about Linux and Mac but they’re probably not supported either for this beta.

So, looks like I might have to look into doing some streaming for myself. 🙂 Then you can see how horrible I am. 😛

A cable has been cut

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For about a year now we have been thinking of doing something we never thought we would do, we cut our TV cable service and upgraded our internet connection to a business one. It wasn’t something to over think really considering we only watched TV for a handful of things, and really most if not everything we watch can be found online pretty easily. One thing that I do notice is that it’s much quieter in the living room now at night. I had to go out there and stream some Bioshock Infinite and Mortal Kombat just because I felt like it.

We also upgraded to business to strengthen our dedicated servers. We even have a static IP address now! Which means I can add my servers to my favorites on steam and not have them vanish every other month. If anyone is interested in checking out my servers feel free to look on the group page. Joining the group is optional but anyone can play on the servers (unless you’re an asshat). We currently have TF2, TF2 MvM, Gmod Sandbox, CS:GO, and L4D2. I’ll look into fixing the Serious Sam servers sometime in the near future, and also look into starting up Elevator Source again. Elevator Source will be the ultimate bandwidth test. Another thing I’ll look into is getting Replays working on MvM and regular TF2.