We are 8 days away from our next tournament in Delaware, the NO WPPR August Edition!!! We have 24-players signed to play in a 4-player match play format with a guaranteed 7 rounds of qualifying. For those of you that won’t be in attendance, we will be streaming this entire event along with the finals! For the qualifying rounds the stream will be isolated to Hot Wheels only and we are going to have that game featured in all 7 rounds of qualifying as well as the first round of the finals. Once we get down to our final 4 in the “A” division, we will then relocate the stream to follow the top 4 players! Special thanks to Delaware Pinball for providing the streaming gear!
Catch all the action on 8/15 starting at 10am for practice with the first round of qualifying starting at 11am!
Tried a “cheap” capture card but sadly was not impressed with the video quality I got out of it (see edit, it’s fine).
This one does jpg video compression (no raw output), which should save your USB bandwidth a bit.
edit:
OK, I may have spoken too soon. Looks like it was a little bit of user error on my part. I originally had my A6000 in a stills mode which was terrible quality, but changing it to movie mode made a huge difference in the HDMI output quality. This one is actually usable in my opinion. I’m going to try and make a sample video this weekend for it.
Also it looks like it will actually work off USB2.0 ports as well and since the device is doing the jpeg encoding it should work fine with my picam software. So, yay, but just like the camlink, only one per device since it chews up quite a bit of bus power and they all have the same serial but that’s OK.
Sweet. It totally works on the Raspberry Pi 3A+ with my CX405. So that means at least any Pi 3 series should be able to work. I need to update the picam software now in order to take advantage of it but that should be pretty quick and easy. Going to play around with audio input too and see about making a generic UVC camera type to support any of these kinds of cheaper options.
Edit:
Also seems to work on the PiZeroW with the CX405 so that’s pretty cool if you’re good with just a 2.4ghz network connection. For the money though I generally recommend the 3A+ over the ZeroW since it’s pretty close in price after buying all the adapters that are needed, but it works.
Karl-For the Mobile Rig parts list from 8020, is there any special ordering requirements, such as noting the counterbore locations or do they know this particular order package?
Although I am a newbie, I already feel myself wanting to stream less do to the hassle of moving around camera, mic stands, and cables. This and a wireless setup seems like the way to go long term. Also, wondering if you or someone else can post detailed pics of their mobile setup. Thanks.
Yes, most of the counterbores in the design should be for butt fasteners (7041) instead of anchor fasteners (7040) but the web shop interface won’t let you choose the 7041 machining service option — probably a bug on their end.
I noticed the current rig list for “Guillotine” calls for smaller 18" members. Is there any importance to this other than breaking down the components even further for travel or transport? Also are there any top and bottom plates for the connections? I don’t see that on the list.
It’s USB2.0 only but surprisingly is capable of 720p60 mjpeg, but only 1080p30 mjpeg. Quality is reasonably good for ~$20 so if you’re looking for a spare capture device on the cheap, it might be worth trying one of these out. Latency is a little bit more noticeable but within tolerable range I think.
Interesting to watch the gaming streamers drive for higher quality streams - check out alpha gaming on YouTube which is a gang of streamers who are trying to help new streamers out - yes slightly focused on gaming but there are a lot of useful tips on the channel including putting together a decent quality stream for not much money (and the opposite). Yes some of it is aimed at those brave enough to try and make a career out of streaming but even if that’s not your purpose (it isn’t for me) we should in my view try to drive a watchable quality level!
I also noted on Facebook that the number of people streaming in the pinball category had gone up massively - unfortunately the number of viewers has stayed pretty flat and if you factor in game launches and events/tournaments i suspect viewers or for sure viewed hours are actually down,
Jack streams in “just chatting“ category which I’m going to have a go at streaming in to see if I pick up more viewers. Although my streams get more YouTube views than live views.
I see a lot of pinball streams where the quality makes it unwatchable. (Including past streams of my own!) it’s a shame because often people are streaming an interesting game that you might not know much about.
In my view I thinK the base level for pinball streaming needs to include non-lagged 60fps playfield at 720p, sound that is not affected by latency and glare/reflection off the playfield and DMD. Adding light helps the quality of nearly every camera so worth checking out LED lights - in many cases spend $30 on a light will get you more benefit than spending $100s on a camera or capture card. And getting your microphone right so it’s not too quiet but not too peaky but also it isn’t picking up every movement you make as a thump. Lots of folks watch on mobile devices and headphones and these sounds are really off putting. On location I realise you don’t have control of a lot of these things.
Also pay attention to your PC and how loaded it is - both OBS and xsplit have signals that your PC is struggling usually when these happen your stream quality started to suffer before they alerted you.
Worth watching one of your own streams from twitch every week to check out how the viewer is seeing it. Often your own local recordings won’t show what twitch is doing to your broadcast. And also ask your viewers for feedback on how it sounds and looks.
Finally get some graphics onto your stream/twitch page about who you are and how to contact you or your schedule for streaming ( I’m very bad at a schedule owing to work/life!). Your broadcast doesn’t have to be designed by Rembrandt but something neat and legible goes along way. There are quite a few free themes on the Internet.
I’d love to hear from folks who have improved the quality of their streaming of pinball - what did you do how did you do it and feedback on my streams is welcome (yes I’m rubbish at pinball lol) - it’s a gift after all!
One final thing I’d note - if you are semi serious about streaming buying low end gear is likely going to waste money as you realise that you want to get to a specific level/consistency - so buying those USB webcams rather than a HDMI setup might not be the right thing.
Harris has been around for years, I’m glad people are starting to notice his content more and more this year.
Your suspicions on viewer trends is correct. Sullygnome and Twitchtracker can be used to find all kinds of data over a few years time span. While I won’t get into the gory details, the data shows a stalled out trend for pinball as a whole when it comes to streaming on Twitch. To put this in perspective, I’m a partnered Twitch streamer and I’m actively trying to negotiate with Twitch to be able to stream pinball on other platforms, which I’m not holding my breath on. The long term viewer demographics on Twitch DO NOT match with the majority of pinball demographics. I’m a firm believer that if someone is trying to grow their content or even live stream, the crowd is on YouTube. If you’re a pure hobbyist that doesn’t care about community growth, then Twitch is a great option.
To give more perspective on this, around 65-70% of 36-45 year old internet users will use YouTube. While it’s not the exact same age, it’s generally the same, Twitch had a reported 17% of users between the ages of 35 to 44.
The harsh reality of pinball on Twitch is the discoverability is near zero. It’ll be even worse when people play pinball outside of the pinball channel. Organic discovery can be done to a point depending on many variables, but in all reality you have to have an outside source really pushing people to your content. Great examples are Stern pushing Dead Flip on a weekly basis, TPN pushing their content. The problem that is occurring, even with Stern pushing this, it’s still stalling out.
Statistically speaking, Dead Flip sits at an average of 4.4 new followers per hour for 2020. I don’t say this to be negative, but I point out this stat for the reality of what is happening for everyone else that isn’t advertised by the biggest pinball company. Unless other streamers get advertised on Stern’s Facebook page or get the boost of debuting products, majority of everyone else will be 3 or below. An example of considerable growth is Harris himself at an average of 142 new follows per hour, exponential growth is Timthetatman at 900+ per hour. These are obviously outliers, but it gives an idea of what happens for the top people in other categories.
At the end of the day though, it’s up to everyone else to decide how they like to do their content, but I’d also urge anyone considering streaming or that is at the very beginning of streaming to consider all options that give them the best chance to have fun and experience success.
I have no interest in growing my stream audience, and am not focused on helping grow pinball at all. Almost everyone who chats with me on my streams are either people I know personally IRL, in online pinball communities, or other pinball streamers. This gives me enough reason to keep streaming versus just playing myself offline.
I rarely watch pinball streams outside of competition broadcasts. My viewership has decreased because when I did watch, it was when I was home alone, which no longer happens. Often, this was also when I would stream, so I would stream, then raid someone and watch them.
I like more pinball streaming, but if I randomly flip through Pinball on twitch, often the streams just are not up to what I want to watch. I need 60fps playfield. I need someone talking. I prefer someone talking about what they are doing, what their strategy is, but just chatting about whatever is enough, but it cannot be silence. Many streams do not satisfy these desires after a couple minutes of watching and I move on. I also tend to settle on streams of people I know IRL.
And I probably wouldn’t have sunk so much money into my gear as I have if I wasn’t so focused on making tournament streams as good as possible. That’s what I enjoy streaming the most.
@mpt3k and I did a walk-through of the cx405 vs. a Sony A6000 (side-by-side video comparison) AND we did a similar analysis with data pulled from SullyGnome on a stream Sunday night (8/16/2020) with results that were fairly in-line with what you mentioned!
We looked at follower growth, top streamers, and general averages of Pinball as a Twitch category and then compared those to HOTS (Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA that sits around the 100 mark on ranked Twitch categories). And if your reasons for streaming pinball include popularity/monetary, you should probably stream ANY other game as your chances for success increase.
Note: We’re planning to do a follow-up data analysis comparing similar values from a few other gaming categories and comparing average follower growth across all of them. I’m guessing at this point (because I like to let actual data/results drive my opinion), but I think we’ll see with a simple linear regression an upward trend of follower growth based on the popularity of a game/category.
To echo @gammagoat and @chuckwurt’s sentiments… stream pinball for reasons that aren’t popularity/monetary and you can be ridiculously successful!
Lastly, I’m not sure the upgrade to the A6000 was worth it. It was REALLY tough to see a difference between the cameras playing TMNT. We made it a bit of a game to try and tell the difference so don’t skip to the end if you want to play along.
PS: LIGHTING is still the single most inexpensive and impactful way to increase the quality of any playfield camera for a stream IMHO My 6th playfield LED light will be here Thursday.
I’ve been using the auto Bit rate setting on OBS and it has really helped the consistency of my streams. My internet can tend to be all over the place and get me some dropped frames from time to time.
What this setting does is you set your target bit rate like you normally do, then turn this on. If you start dropping below that rate, it auto adjusts the bit rate to keep the stream smooth. Then when the internet becomes better it ramps back up to your target bit rate.
It’s under settings and advanced. Scroll all the way down almost. It’s a check box.
My 6th playfield LED light will be here Thursday.