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Tactically Inept

Streaming Tech


Malaphax

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Alright as some of you have caught on, recently I've been streaming just about anytime I play games. Currently I'm using Open Broadcaster Software, and have found a few really nice ways of implementing it. I stream at 720p 60fps with 3000kbps upload. I have rewatched some of my streams and have been pleasantly surprised at the quality. Keep in mind that it's downscaling all of this from 2560x1440 and for planetside I don't always have 60fps because of ultra settings.

 

I still need to fix a few things regarding the stream, most notably my microphone is currently about 1' from my mouse and my clicking (in league of legends especially) is really severe. I would like to clean this up, but it will most likely involve moving my microphone and even then I don't know if I can eliminate it completely. Often I see streamers using headsets mostly so they can cut out background noise, but I am not interested in a solution like that. I also need to find out a bit more about overlays and if I should even bother with one. kuhla has also been setting up a cool bit of code so that we might have a small alert button for when someone is streaming on the channel. I've leave it up to him when he decides to implement that. I'll see about streaming some other games I have, and in the future streaming any singleplayer games I run through.

 

Here's the stream link:

 

http://www.twitch.tv/tacinept

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kuhla has also been setting up a cool bit of code so that we might have a small alert button for when someone is streaming on the channel. I've leave it up to him when he decides to implement that.

 

I worked on this a bit last night. I have the code ready to go but to implement it into the IPB template is giving me a bit of trouble. Some of you may have noticed last night when I tested code. I will keep working on it today but if the forum doesn't load for a second, wait 5 seconds and hit refresh. I immediately test the code so if it fails completely I undo the changes right away to bring the forum back online.

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  • 4 months later...
  • 4 weeks later...
  • 8 months later...
  • 1 year later...
  • 2 weeks later...

tried streaming today with the new youtube

 

https://gaming.youtube.com/channel/UCi_6trZI45TSBnT0WIHED-w#tab=1

 

looks like streamed content defaulted to be recorded so you can view them later. havent mess with a bunch of stuff and i kept the setting defaulted to optional btn.

 

Over the last two days malaphax and I have been testing youtube streaming as well. If anyone forgot, tacinept has a youtube channel. I've been looking into adding a second "streaming now/live" button like twitch but so far I have not quite figured out how. The youtube api documentation has not be particularly helpful and I'm seeing stuff about needing to go through some kind of registration to access the streaming api.... I dunno... still researching.... but I would like to implement one.

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I also tried streaming the past few nights on youtube.

https://gaming.youtube.com/channel/UCgvkQtr5rCBK3Ix6wwhv1PA#tab=1

Here's a stream of the first 45 minutes for MGSV: https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=LiyRH086Z9Y

 

I personally streamed this at 720p, 60fps, 9000kbps from OBS. I've noticed that youtube doesn't handle non-standard resolutions very well. Since I have a 1440p monitor and OBS only has resolution options based on multiples of your base resolution that leaves me with 720p or 1440p as options (I don't believe youtube support 1440p for streaming).

 

I'm rather happy with how the phantom pain looked. I might try something harder to stream like Batman Arkham Knight sometime this weekend, just to see what that looks like (I'm expecting muddy).

 

I'll leave the fancy API stuff to kuhla.

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Over the last two days malaphax and I have been testing youtube streaming as well. If anyone forgot, tacinept has a youtube channel. I've been looking into adding a second "streaming now/live" button like twitch but so far I have not quite figured out how. The youtube api documentation has not be particularly helpful and I'm seeing stuff about needing to go through some kind of registration to access the streaming api.... I dunno... still researching.... but I would like to implement one.

 

 

I have the live indicator/button for youtube streaming working. Just like with the twitch button, I'll document what I did to get it working and post it up in case anyone else finds it useful. A lot of it is similar to the twitch button but there are some unique prerequisites.

 

Until I get that written up, I'm going to check some things related to layout so warning: over the course of the next week you may see some screwy stuff happen to the layout, mainly across that top bar. Just ignore it for now. If the whole page looks completely broken, give it 2-3 minutes and refresh (I'm probably reverting something on my end).

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  • 3 weeks later...

One thing I've noticed and haven't particularly appreciated is that when a channel has the HTML5 controls enabled, it defaults to medium quality. Normally when I open up a twitch stream with flash controls it remembers my last settings of source quality. Although I admit once you change the quality to HTML5 it remembers the selected quality level until I close my browser/delete cookies.

 

I do think that HTML5 should allow twitch to increase the bitrate for their streamers, but Twitch operates on a very different level than youtube, and specifically targets partnered content much more aggressively, so some of these features may not trickle down to an average streamer.

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  • 1 year later...

I'm thinking about streaming a little bit again for several reasons.

  • Twitch has finally bumped their maximum bitrate from 3500kbps to 6000kpbs - This should allow for 1080p streaming or very high quality 720p streaming
  • More streaming options are becoming available, Youtube, Beam (xbox/microsoft), Facebook (lol)
  • My increased bandwidth allows for all sorts of hijinks

I'm not making any promises but I might try a few test streams on twitch/youtube and see how they work out. The reason why I mention beam is because microsoft seems to be actively trying for the lowest delay possible on streaming platforms. I don't generally interact/chat on twitch streams but I know there's between 2-10 seconds of delay. Microsoft has their own fork of OBS called Tachyon FTL which focuses specifically on the lowest delay possible when streaming. I'm just glad to see some solid competition (at least from a technical level) but realistically it will most likely end up like youtube gaming and go severely underused compared to twitch.

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  • Twitch has finally bumped their maximum bitrate from 3500kbps to 6000kpbs - This should allow for 1080p streaming or very high quality 720p streaming

 

A part of me wonders if this makes NVENC more viable again. NVENC looks kind of ass at 3500 bitrate but fine at higher bitrates (for local recording) which is why x264 is still the best (at 3500) but it crushes CPUs so I'm wondering.....

 

EDIT: Where did you read this news? Can't find it.

 

EDIT 2: Ok I see it "Recommended bitrate range - 3-6 megabits per second" https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1253460-broadcast-requirements

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  • 1 month later...

Microsoft is renaming their Beam service (twitch competitor) to Mixer.  I'm looking over some of their features and the only one that stands out is multi-streaming on a single channel, which is kind of interesting for co-op style games.

https://majornelson.com/2017/05/25/introducing-mixer/?linkId=100000000425097

Sidenote: They also mention a feature called crowd play, where the audience can vote on certain player choices (in Telltale RPG games for example).  I expect we'll be seeing much more of this in the future.  Amazon/Twitch picked up several developers and are going to push heavily for streaming integration on some of these games.  One example I watched recently was Immortal Redneck - which allows stream viewers to vote on various buffs/debuffs to assign to the player. 

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  • 2 years later...

I'm resurrecting this topic from the dead because... we have 3 people streaming on our shared twitch channel and I consider myself a quality whore.

This dude seems to really know his shit and provides solid advice for how to use OBS in a long set of masterclass videos.  I plan on skimming through some of them in the future.  For now the tl;dr version is that due to Nvidia's recent updates to NVENC and updates to OBS, unless you can manage "fast" or better on x264 encoding, you should stick with NVENC.  This applies even more so to the 2000 series cards.

He also makes recommendations regarding using multiple audio sources at different bitrates, especially if you plan on doing local recording as well as streaming.
Speaking of local recording, he suggests that instead of using CBR or VBR settings that you should use CQP (constant quality presets) instead.

While I don't plan on going full professional youtuber/streamer, I'm very interested in upping my game once I get a new PC built.  I'd ideally like to do some streaming and local recording, so I could grab random highlights and put them on youtube at higher quality.

 

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2 hours ago, Malaphax said:

.......unless you can manage "fast" or better on x264 encoding........

On my slightly overclocked Ryzen 1700x this is what I use 24/7 without any issues so I imagine it will be just as easy for you with your new PC.

I will watch the video later but I think the quality of my streaming is decent: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/441120633

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Current bitrate is still 6000kbps on twitch.  I believe their network supports higher, but since we have an unaffiliated channel with no transcodes (no quality options) they prefer you make the stream "accessible" for people with shitty internet.  Some people even recommend dropping that to 4500kbps or lower to attract the largest audience but I think that's just nonsensical.  I've heard rumors you can bump this all the way up to something like 8000kbps but try that on a few test streams first. 
Here's twitch's own recommended settings: https://stream.twitch.tv/encoding/

Youtube streaming doesn't seem to have limits lol, they even talk about streaming at 4k60 if you have the connection for it - you can see that here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702?hl=en

As a note, twitch is also picky about resolutions, they only accept 16:9, anything outside of that and they letterbox your shit.  Youtube doesn't really care they'll natively stream 21:9 or other weird stuff. 

Man, I'm mildly tempted to try something stupid on youtube streaming just because I have the bandwidth for that crap lol...

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  • 9 months later...
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  • 7 months later...

github - https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/tags

Quote

* Added the ability to use a separate audio track for the VOD when using Twitch [Jim]
  - If using Simple output mode, enable "Enable Advanced Encoder Settings", and enable "Twitch VOD Track (Uses Track 2)". Twitch VOD output will then be on audio track 2
  - If using Advanced output mode in the Streaming tab, enable "Twitch VOD Track" and select the track you'd like to use for it

wat

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