Hey Guys,
I haven’t checked in here in a while. I thought I would give my two cents about the two new 60fps USB cams, the Razor Stargazer, and the Logitech c922. Which one is the winner? Both have faults.
Razor Stargazer: The razor stargazer is a USB3 720p 60fps RealSense camera. It supports uncompressed YUY2 720p 60fps, as well as lower resolutions and fps. As a playfield camera is performs rather well, but tends to drop frames when low lighting occurs (blackouts with flashers). Adding an auxiliary PF light helps. I recently added this one, per Buffalo’s recommendation https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BZE2HBE/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1 . If you plan on doing anything other than pinball streaming with this camera, if you have a 6th gen or new i5/i7, you can use it’s built in RealSense tech to have a virtual green screen with any background (with faults).
Logitech c922: This is the “upgrade” to the c920 workhorse that got me into streaming. The camera does support 60fps, but at a cost. To get above 30fps on this camera you have to set the resolution to 720p. Once set at 720p - 40fps, 48fps, and 60fps is available. The major flaw with this camera is if you go past 720p 40fpps (IE 48fps, 60fps), the cam looses A LOT of clarity. You can combat this by increasing sharpness, and by adding a PF light, but it still is not really acceptable in my book. If you lower the resolution to 40fps, the clarity is regained, and you get a pretty fluid ball movement. The camera at 720p only offers MJPEG as its encoding out. This I believe is because the device is only USB2. YUY2 is available at 480/488p, but this is only at 30fps, as I mentioned above you have to go 720p to unlock faster than 30fps. So what’s good about the c922? It’s low light performance is a lot better. Especially at 30/40fps. Is it worth upgrading from the c920 if you only plan to do 30fps? Probably not.
In conclusion: Which camera is better for the PF? I currently use the Stargazer as my PF at 540p 60fps. I use the c922 at 720p 40fps for the player cam, and a c920 at 240p for the DMD. If I could go back in time I would probably just go with a Sony HDR-CX405 with a simple USB3/USB-C dongle for the PF, and use c920s for everything else. I think we will more USB3 cams come forth that have better performance than both of these cams. We just have to wait for the industry to catch up.
I also forgot to talk about encodering going out. If your CPU can handle it, use x264. If not, you can unload the encoding of the stream to Quick Sync/NVENC if your hardware supports it. Doing so will result in no CPU spike, but stream quality bitrate needs to be a lot higher to compensate.
Same observations about C922 here. Couldn’t use 60fps for streaming at all, but lowering the frame rate to 40fps corrected the focusing issues and then the quality was pretty good.
Some side by side comparison between C920@30fps and C922@40fps can be seen in our K15 Open qualifying stream coverage uploaded to YouTube. The playfield cam on Kiss is C920 and the cam on TWD is C922:
I’ll post more details of our current stream setup later.
I don’t usually follow this thread, but big props to Ollie for that game of TWD. I particularly liked the huge shots during Barn Mode, and bringing in that 2nd Blood Bath during the grace period of Prison MB. Nice job!
I was pretty happy with that entry after finishing the previous one with 7M score.
It’s funny to watch all the bricked multiplied mode shots and all the luck I’m having during the run (the Blood Bath grace period add a ball after a bricked target shot and a super lucky bounce around 4:07 being the most ridiculous example). Somehow that is a big part why I love TWD. And I don’t even try to explain the 19.5M + 21M barn shots, since I’d probably get something wrong explaining that. Someone else want to elaborate what happens there?
I can try to explain the 19.5 and 21m Barn shots, but there does appear to be something not quite right. So you hit a 5.5m Barn shot. The next one should be 6m but it appears to somehow go to 6.5. You then hit the ramp and came down through the inlaneX which was apparently at 3X. The ball traveled around the playfield without hitting a switch. Then trap on the left, post pass to the right and hit the Barn shot for 6.5 x 3 = 19.5M. But wait! Apparently the inlane X applies for some short length of time, rather than just for one switch closure, because you did a quick backhand of the Barn shot and it was still multiplied from your inlaneX, so 7 X 3 = 21M.
Well, that’s good to know. So when I miss my orbit so badly that I hit the ramp instead I get a reward. I like it! Thanks for the reply. For all you streamers, sorry for the thread jack.
New the the streaming game and starting off with a Logitech c922. I am using it with xSplit. It is glitching on me pretty bad. Wondering if anyone else is using one and if there are some specific settings I should be looking at using. I have tried turning off all of the Auto Logitech settings and have gotten it a little better, but it still does it very sporadically. I don’t think it is laptop hardware (newer i7 CPU, 16GB RAM.) Stream is here if you want to see what I am talking about. https://www.twitch.tv/comopinball/videos/all
I don’t think the issue is a “glitch” with XSplit. Even though you have a nice CPU and enough ram, the issue could potentially be a bottleneck with the USB. That’s a potential cause of the flickering. I’d go into control panel and look at how many USB controllers you have, and then try put each camera on a different one.
Besides that, what are your actual settings in Xsplit? Besides the flickering, your playfield cam looks way off. You’re broadcasting at 30 fps, but it could be that your cameras are capturing at a different rate? That can make things look weird.
Your broadcast resolution is also low. It’s 960x540, and the bit rate is like 1100. That’s pretty low end. Are you doing that on purpose because of a limited upstream?
Lastly, can you share what kind of video card your laptop has? Xsplit requires a certain level of performance in that aspect to run correctly.
Just using one USB camera at the moment, the other is the integrated web cam on my laptop. As far as the bcast resolution goes, no I was not doing that on purpose. I think I have things working better now after tweaking resolutions and frame rates. I also converted to OBS and have been having much better luck so far. Thanks for the suggestions!
Jumping in to ask for help. I’m trying to get a smooth shot of the playfield and the ball always seems to lag. I am running a C920, using OBS on an iMac and have Webcam settings installed.
I am increasing my internet speed and am hard wired to my computer so I at least feel like I should be able to get everything out of this set up as I can. I have 3 cams total but my main goal is to have the playfield cam as smooth as possible.
If you want to check out my recent GB play to give you an idea I go by Richmondpinball on Twitch. If you want to contact me directly as to not muddle up this thread I can be reached at richmondpinball@gmail.com
your stream rate is fine. The lag you are talking about is most likely due to that camera not pulling a full 30 fps. This could be simply due to a setting in OBS (I use xsplit so can’t really help you there) or could be a bottleneck with your USB. I’m a PC person so I’m not sure how this relates to Mac, but I have found that too many USB cameras on the same USB controller can cause issues. On a PC, you can go into device manager to see how many USB controllers you have, and which USB ports are assigned to which ones. If you have 2 controllers, I’d try to isolate the playfield one and have the other two cameras share one.
If you can confirm that the camera is capturing at 30 fps, I would test it with one camera on the playfield and see how that comes out. I watched part of your latest video, and it was most obvious when you opened up the glass and showed the broken rubber. Your hand movement was very choppy. It’s as if that camera is only putting out 15 fps or so.
You may also want to try playing with the resolution for each camera you are using. I believe their default is 1920x1080. If it is a USB bandwidth issue, taking down the score cam to 1280x720 or even 720x480 could solve your issue.
I wanted to check if my internet is sufficient to start streaming along with the computer I plan to use. I apologize if some of this information is not needed.
Internet is 300 down and 20 up
Computer is PC running windows 7 professional
Intel core i5-3320M CPU @2.60ghz
16.0 RAM
HD space is like 164 gigs if that matters.
Just wanted to make sure this is good before I buy the equipment.
That all looks pretty good or at least meets the minimum standard. I think your processor is going to be the limiting factor. It’s a dual core Ivy Bridge, which is almost outdated. For a stable stream, I think you’ll find that you’ll be limited to 720p @ 30 fps. Even at that level, you might find it difficult to stream for extended time periods. You’re definitely going to have to set your encoding compression on the lower end.
I take it you are using USB cameras? You might find running more than two cameras will prove difficult. I’m basing this assumption on the limitations of the chipset associated with that processor. Considering the fact that your processor only supports 1 PCIe lane, I doubt you’ll have more than 2 USB controllers.
Another consideration that you did not mention is the GPU. The software needed to run a stream will have a minimum requirement in that regard.
If you do consider upgrading your PC, you should know that clock speed doesn’t really matter. For streaming it’s all about how many cores your processor has. They do make i5s with 4 cores, and you can find some i7s with 6 or 8 cores. The more cores a processor has, the easier it can encode the video you are streaming.
