I have been piecing together some gear while we are in stay at home mode. So far I have a logitech Brio, a razer kiyo, a bendy camera mount, and one mic stand. I have USB extension cords on the way along with some more camera mounts and a t-lighting bar.
I need another camera or two. Anybody want to move on from some webcams they aren’t using? As other have posted, they are going for crazy prices these days. I am also thinking about maybe one sony cx405/440. The camlinks are pretty expensive right now when you can find them in stock though.
I have a pretty decent desktop within range of my pinball machines (ryzen 3700, GTX 1080) and a pretty good laptop I can use too.
Very interested on the Raspbrry PI solution, I use a 2 C920 and a Brio.
I highly recommend upgrading to a Brio at least dor the Payfiled, that is night and day difference and still cheaper them a cam, capture card solution
Chuck and Ray, here is a clipped video of what I call “light setup” that I have at home, 1 C920, Elgato and Brio on the PF. When it is a DMD, I use another c920 or c922. C920 is better them C922 https://clips.twitch.tv/AliveHelplessDonutJebaited
That’s my setup. Although 3 pushes the USB power a bit (especially with a Brio) and can be flaky. I bought a powered hub to play with since I think that’ll solve it but haven’t verified that yet. I finally cleaned up my office again so I should be getting back to the project and I have something new to try and see if it helps OBS a bit where you can setup a pretend webcam locally from the feed. So I’m curious how that might work.
due to the increased interest in streaming, I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about my streaming equipment. I’ve made a little drawing for anyone interested in doing a wireless/camcorder set up:
Anyone try one of these on their backglass/cabinet/playfield glass?
I’m thinking of trying one or two out for a mobile setup. I think I can integrate them into my overhead rig or simply the setup a bit.
Also, I did some testing with a powered usb hub and the Pi’s yesterday and I think it makes a difference for supporting 3 cameras. I’m going to try it with the Pi 3A+ since it’s a bit cheaper and is basically the same as the 3B+. I also have a solution for adding remote audio too that I think works with OBS now but I have to play around a bit more with it to make sure the audio doesn’t get knocked out after switching games repeatedly. I’m going to work on putting together a new image for the latest Raspbian today.
With all the down time I have right now I decided to finally get a streaming rig setup at my shop. Looks like I picked the wrong time as I’m finding it hard to find the cameras and capture cards I’ll need as everyone is out of stock or price gouging. I ordered the parts for the rig that Karl & Phil have documented here (thanks guys!) as I was really impressed with that. I purchased a Sony Camcorder to use for the playfield. A buddy is hooking me up with a Logitech C615 that I can use for the player cam and looking to pickup a C922 for the DMD cam.
It seems a lot of people recommend the Elgate Cam Link USB device to bring the video feed from the camcorder into the computer. I’m not having much luck finding the non-4K version. It’s probably a long shot but does anyone have one they are not using and want to part with it? Or can anyone recommend another USB capture card that works just as well in that price range? FYI I’ll be connecting all of this to my laptop.
I would be fine with that as well. Problem is everybody is out of stock of both unless you want to buy one from China and wait 1-2 months. Or buy one in the states and pay 3x the price.
My C922 is meh (not unusable, but not impressive) at 60fps even though it’s supposed to be capable but much better at 30fps. Just an fyi, so maybe try both and see how each works for you if you get one.
Success at last! I got through a clean test of remote setup with the Raspberry Pi 4. My powered hub died on me but it worked yesterday so I need a new one to run 3 off one Pi, but for now I’ll just run a second device. I found a work around for my OBS audio issues too. It would have issues with timestamps on the audio and knock it out after a bit sometimes but now I’m using the gstreamer plugin to feed to the loopback audio device and using that as the desktop audio src which seems to not care about the timestamps.
How it’ll work on Windows I have no idea but it works on my Ubunbtu machine. So I’ll be able to mix game audio over the commentator mic now too.
Video is pretty smooth too at only 100ms latency over the Wifi.
I didn’t get around to making a new disc image yet but I’ll be working on that tonight and tomorrow.
What kind of cameras are you using? I don’t think a pi will have enough computing power to encode a full hdmi camcorder with a CamLink, but I imagine it can pass through usb cameras okay that already do some encoring. There’s also some HD60 capture devices that claim to do encoring already so I’m wondering if you could use those with a full camcorder and if the pi could handle it
I have a Brio on the playfield and a C920 on the backglass (and player cam when I use it). There’s not enough USB power for the Brio and 2x C920s though so the Pi has issues with the USB devices. I think it can barely push 3xC920s without a powered hub, but it can do two of either pretty well. The Brio is kind of a power hog.
I have a CX405 and older Camlink that work with the Pi4 (since it has USB 3.0), but the encoding is a bit trickier on it. It can do mjpeg pretty well but I haven’t tested it on the Pi4 yet, I’ll be trying that soon though. And the Pi does have a hardware encoder for h264 but it’s capped at 30fps. I’m using the onboard encoders for the Brio which does the mjpeg and the C920’s can do mjpeg or h264 (which I use the later). So the Pi really only does network transport for the RTSP stream with them. I do encode the audio as AAC to send it over the wifi though.
The Pi supports pretty much any UVC device but might require a bit of tweaking in the code to make it support it. Each camera has different supported features which makes things interesting.
If you’re going to use a Brio, you pretty much need the Pi4. For just C920 setups, the 3b+ or 3a+ would be fine, or older, but I don’t recommend it since those are limited to 2.4G networks.
So the Brio can give you encoded 1080p 60fps that the pi can route through rtmp? That’s pretty awesome if so. Also, you don’t need to do WiFi, simply using an Ethernet cable would be a huge upgrade to most setups since Ethernet cables are so easy to come by and are pretty thin and easy to work with.
