Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Brooke on April 09, 2016, 07:01:20 PM
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I want to broadcast the upcoming Scenario.
So, this weekend, I tried it out one of the biggest game-streaming sites -- Twitch.
It turns out you don't need much in the way of computer hardware for this to work well.
I am running AH3 beta on default settings and getting 55-60 fps on a 1-2 year old $500 Dell computer (i5-2400 CPU) with a $130 GeForce GTX 750 Ti.
Surprisingly (to me, anyway), broadcasting the game on Twitch at 720p and 30 fps (using the free OBS Studio broadcasting software) didn't give me *any* reduction in frame rate.
I had a friend of mine watch the stream as I made it, and he said it looked great. Sgtwolf (who plays AH) also by chance happened to be on Twitch, saw some of it, and said it looked fine.
I was amazed. The software is doing on-the-fly compression of full-screen video. You can use it to create a movie file, too (in addition to streaming it to Twitch or Youtube's game-streaming), and it doesn't even seem to slow anything down.
This is by far the easiest way to make videos as well, in my opinion.
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By the way, the upcoming scenario starting June is:
(http://electraforge.com/brooke/flightsims/scenarios/201606_BattleOfTheDnieper/banner3.png)
One of the biggest battles of WWII.
109's, 190's, La-5's, Yaks, P-39's, Tu-2's, Il-2's, Ju 88's, and (if you run out of your 3 lives in aircraft) unlimited lives in Panzer IV H's and T-34/76's for a massive tank battle (Kursk style).
This is a battle where most of the top German and Soviet aces fought.
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I tried it out a few months back. I was looking for something to record video that had smaller output size than the FRAPS I had been using. OBS worked out fine. Video isn't as sharp as FRAPS, but they're a fraction of the size. Set up twitch thinking the extra workload would be a killer. I hardly notice it's running and the feed is consistent on cable.
Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk
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If you want to try Twitch of Youtube game streaming, here is how you do it.
-------------- Create a Twitch account ----------------
Go to:
https://www.twitch.tv/
Create an account.
In the Settings for your account, go into the "Channels & Videos" tab and make sure "Automatically archive my broadcasts" is selected (so that your streams are saved on Twitch for a while). That way, after you stream, you can keep the video of it on their site for a while, edit it, etc. if you want. Very handy!
Open your Dashboard. Click on "Stream Key" tab. Click on "Show key". Copy that stream key (as you will need to paste it below). Click on the "live" tab. Type a name into the title of your broadcast you are soon to start (such as "My test AH broadcast" or whatever). Click on "Not playing" and select "Playing" instead. Click the "update" button -- you are now ready to start streaming to Twitch with OBS.
------------- To get OBS up and going -------------------
Download OBS Studio (not the older OBS Classic):
https://obsproject.com/
Install it.
Run the 64-bit version (or 32-bit as appropriate for your system).
In File->settings->Stream, select the streaming service you want to use (such as Twitch). Select the server closest to you. Paste in your stream key.
In the "Scenes" box on lower left, add a scene called whatever you want.
In the "Sources" box in the middle, add a "Game capture" and name it anything you want.
Put your mouse pointer into the preview-screen section (which is probably blank currently), and right click. Scroll down to "Transform" and select "Fit to screen". This way, your AH session will (after OBS rescales it to 720p) be fit to the final format correctly. (This is the only confusing part of OBS, as it allows you to put your game stream into only part of the screen if you want, and it's a little finicky on that setting.) If you have problems later with it looking like OBS is making a video of only a portion of your AH full-screen graphics -- this is the likely cause.
------------------- Start AH --------------
Start up Aces High.
In OBS, click "start recording" or "start streaming" (whatever you want to do).
Go into your full-screen Aces High, and away you go.
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If you want to check streaming, go to twitch.tv and go into the Dashboard for your account. There is a window there that shows what you are broadcasting. Press "alt-tab" to get out of AH full screen and take a look at what is showing in that Twitch Dashboard video preview.
If you want to make a video and see if it looks OK, that's a good test, too. By default, OBS makes flv files, which you can play with the free VLC media player available here ( https://www.videolan.org/vlc/ ). Press the "start recording" button in OBS, and you are creating a movie file on the fly. Go back into AH full screen, fly around a bit, then stop recording and play the video in the VLC player to see how it looks.
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Drano, I agree: I am *amazed* that OBS creates videos (good ones) and high-quality streaming on the fly without any noticeable change to playing Aces High.
Like you, I have used FRAPS in the past, but I can't do much of it because of how gigantic the files are in no time -- like a few minutes of game play resulting in a 50 GB file (or something like that), which you then need to get resampled and formatted down to something reasonable (a time-consuming pain in the neck).
OBS is a *breeze* to work with in comparison to what I used to go through.
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I forgot to mention this, but you do need about 3 Mbits/sec bandwidth on your upload to broadcast at the default output video bitrate of 2500.
For a lot of people these days, 3 Mbps upload is a trivial amount. My $40/month basic Fios account gives me about 10 times that, for example.
Anyway, you can test your upload stats here:
http://www.speedtest.net/
If you don't have 3 Mbps upload, you can still stream, but you need to reduce the output bitrate to 80% of your upload bandwidth. So, 2 Mbps should have an output video bitrate of 2000 x 0.8 = 1600. You can set that in OBS in file->settings->output.
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And here's the result of streaming:
https://www.twitch.tv/brooke314/v/59649558?t=05m01s
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Good way to attract "spiez" too.
If you want to record better videos nothing beats the Elgato, unless you want to spend a LOT more money and get into SDI cards. Elgato also supports streaming directly and records at up to 1080p60 if your soul purpose is YouTube postings. I do this by echoing a mirror of my screen to a second computer that writes directly to SSD.
If you are prepared to spend into the thousands for a second system to support higher recording speeds you might be able to hit 2160p60, or 2160p59.97 ideally. I can do this, but my Internet upload speed is insufficient even to upload 4k to YouTube and there is no 4k streaming (although YouTube is headed in that direction).
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Good way to attract "spiez" too.
There is that. I'm eager for Scenarios to get some publicity. Hmm. . . . what to do . . . Go for it and hope there is no spying? Don't go for it an miss out on trying a publicity angle? Try to turn off the streaming just when I'm giving out critical info? Hmm . . .
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I can't answer that. I had planned on making AH videos for YouTube myself, but when I asked about it I was told they wanted to keep things under wraps. As far as I know that embargo has not been removed, so I have been working other games.
Otherwise, I think publicity would be well in hand.
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I can't answer that. I had planned on making AH videos for YouTube myself, but when I asked about it I was told they wanted to keep things under wraps. As far as I know that embargo has not been removed, so I have been working other games.
Otherwise, I think publicity would be well in hand.
Oh, we asked people to keep videos to a minimum when we were in Alpha as the graphics were constantly being changed, but things have stabilized now. Go ahead and make all the AH3 videos you like. Please assert they are from AHIII. Might even include the actual version in the lower right corner of the video, when possible.
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Thank you, Skuzzy.
Brooke, is the upcoming scenario a Beat test event, or still AHII?
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Thank you, Skuzzy.
Brooke, is the upcoming scenario a Beat test event, or still AHII?
If AH3 isn't out prior to June, we probably will run it in AH2, but there is a chance we'd try for AH3 beta if that is possible depending on details.
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Brooke - Thanks for the information share about Twitch TV. I followed your instructions and had my own streamed video complete in about an hour.
There is much to learn ahead but getting a huge head start from you is a gift. Thanks again.
:salute
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Thanks, Brooke. Sorry for the hijack. I'll have our XO look into the scenario.
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You'll need a CPU with some serious horse power, capture card or standalone streaming box if you want to stream above 720p @ 30fps I found out. :aok
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Thanks, Brooke. Sorry for the hijack. I'll have our XO look into the scenario.
No problem at all -- I am always glad when people bring up scenarios.
I really hope that you can play in it.
Here's more information and a link to registration:
http://ahevents.org/events/scenarios/current-or-next-scenario.html
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Brooke - Thanks for the information share about Twitch TV. I followed your instructions and had my own streamed video complete in about an hour.
There is much to learn ahead but getting a huge head start from you is a gift. Thanks again.
:salute
You are very welcome.
And a big <S> to you if you stream AH! :aok
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I boosted file->settings->output video bitrate to 3300 (from 2500). Looks better, and I still get no AH frame-rate reduction.
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I'm a frequent volunteer troubleshooter on the OBS forums, so if you guys have trouble using OBS, post your log file here (and on the OBS forums) or ping me on either forums and I'll try to help you out. https://obsproject.com/forum/members/boildown.2086/#postings
For most games you really want an i5 or i7 (desktop, not mobile) to stream well. Obviously there's little data yet on how well AH3 (or AH2 for that matter) plays with OBS & x264 live encoding. But generally speaking, AH2 should work very well because it only uses a couple threads, leaving most of the CPU available for OBS to use (assuming you've got at least an i5).
And oh yeah, if you want to build a dedicated streaming PC on the relatively-cheap, I highly recommend this guide / reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/47bzdc/budget_friendly_secondary_streaming_pc_guide . I've done it myself and its pretty awesome.
If you only want to capture to your hard drive (like FRAPS but using a modern codec) and you have an Nvidia GTX 6xx series or later, I recommend using the NVEnc encoding option in OBS. This utilizes a separate chip on the graphics card for encoding so it won't impact your CPU or GPU usage. The chip is lightweight as far as encoding quality per bit goes, but you just use a high bitrate and the quality is no different than x264. This isn't a good option for streaming to Twitch, because Twitch's limit of 3500kbps isn't enough to make NVEnc encoded video look any good.
Quicksync encoding works similar to NVEnc, but its somewhat higher quality per bit, but at a non-negligible CPU cost. If you have a Haswell or later Intel CPU, its acceptable even for streaming, as Intel improves Quicksync slightly in each generation. Sandy and Ivy Bridge Quicksync is really only good for saving to hard drive though.
Check out the OBS guides on their web site and forums. 99% of all problems posted on the OBS help forums could have been self-solved by reading the guides and sticky posts.
Also you have a choice between OBS Classic and OBS Studio. OBS Classic has more features and has been out longer, but only runs on Windows (Vista and above) and is no longer in active development. OBS Studio also runs on Linux and Macs, is under active development, but isn't feature complete with OBS Classic yet (though it has a few features now that OBS Classic never received). I personally still use OBS Classic because a plugin I use for my capture card hasn't been written for OBS Studio yet.
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OBS Studio is excellent! :aok
Super easy to get going -- all the defaults worked just fine -- and no discernible effect on my AH3 beta frame rate while streaming.
Here is what it looks like at a 3000 bitrate (changed from default of 2500 bitrate just for a little extra quality):
https://www.twitch.tv/brooke314/v/59805302
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I want to broadcast the upcoming Scenario.
Good idea but how do you plan to handle stream-sniping (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stream+sniping)? I was thinking of streaming it myself, on a delay, but even OBS's max of 15 minutes of delay could operationally compromise my side in an scenario. So I thought about maybe recording to disk and streaming it after it was over... maybe after all of the segments are over.
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Good idea but how do you plan to handle stream-sniping (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stream+sniping)? I was thinking of streaming it myself, on a delay, but even OBS's max of 15 minutes of delay could operationally compromise my side in an scenario. So I thought about maybe recording to disk and streaming it after it was over... maybe after all of the segments are over.
Yep, good point. It is the topic of much discussion here:
http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,378775.0.html
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I will definitely record during events.
We must not lead our brothers into temptation.
Having fun with this.
:salute
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We must not lead our brothers into temptation.
But . . . but . . . that's what I'm trying my hardest to do! :D
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Yeah during events I'll record but generally not stream. Loose lips and all that.
Sent from my XT1585 using Tapatalk
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I can't answer that. I had planned on making AH videos for YouTube myself, but when I asked about it I was told they wanted to keep things under wraps. As far as I know that embargo has not been removed, so I have been working other games.
Otherwise, I think publicity would be well in hand.
Wait what!? There was an embargo!?
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But . . . but . . . that's what I'm trying my hardest to do! :D
:aok
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I was just checking out the latest version of OBS Studio in preparation for recording videos of the upcoming Scenario (which will be GLORIOUS! :aok ).
It works great.
At 30 frames/sec, 3000 bitrate, 720p resolution -- looks quite good -- AH video takes up only about 1.5 GB of disk space per hour. I can record a whole 3.5 hour scenario in about 5 Gig of disk space. Nice!
Still no slow down of AH or any noticeable impact on anything with OBS recording to disk turned on.
Also, tying start and stop recording to the scroll lock key means I can turn on and off recording and have a light on my keyboard that let's me know if I'm recording or not.
I'm very impressed with OBS Studio! :aok
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It works great.
At 30 frames/sec, 3000 bitrate, 720p resolution -- looks quite good -- AH video takes up only about 1.5 GB of disk space per hour. I can record a whole 3.5 hour scenario in about 5 Gig of disk space. Nice!
Post your OBS log, maybe I can help you tweak it... I know it worked well but I might see something in the statistics or setup that can help you later.