Twitch/livestream setups.

Heads Up: The Elgato Cam Link (USB 3.0 HDMI Capture Device) is on sale today for $99.99 at Amazon. Great device for adding a camcorder to a laptop.

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Thank you for posting this. The only other oneā€™s Iā€™ve seen were $150 or $300 and were huge. Iā€™m hoping the price will continue to come down.

On an unrelated note, we just finished the commentary on our A-Division finals. This is the first time we have attempted commentary on any of our league streams.

That deal was just for black friday/cyber monday. Price is back up to $130 (at least on amazon) I picked one up and havenā€™t used it much but it seems to work good with w10. But I havenā€™t used any of the other capture devices.

I noticed that it went back up, but typically these deals are cyclical. I can keep an eye on it and Iā€™ll grab one when the price goes back down. Right now Iā€™m running a C922X but am having the blur issues others are having at 1080p/60fps. It works fine, but itā€™s just not the quality I was hoping for and I donā€™t think thereā€™s anything that can be done about it.

I really like how @kdeangeloā€™s setup is right now. The TNA stream looked great and should be regarded as the gold standard.

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Agreed. Need a hd cam and capture device to do the playfield right.

C922 is great for player and dmd though.

Itā€™ll be a couple weeks before I have one on hand to test out (and itā€™ll be up to somebody else to play with in the context of pinball), but this seems like a deal folks here might be interested in:

Manual focus 1080p30 camera that outputs an H.265 RTSP stream over Ethernet for $32 shipped.

I just ordered a couple, but was too cheap to shell out for DHL.

Hi Everyone
,
Iā€™ve made a pretty important discovery that I wanted to share. I know the main theme as of late are inexpensive rigs, which is awesome, but I need to switch gears on you. For the last 1.5 years or so, Iā€™ve been on a quest to build a rig for tournaments that can cover multiple tables at once, and stream for extended periods of time without issues.

I was attracted to the X99 chipset because there were generally more cores and more PCIe lanes. Started with a 14 core Xeon running at 2.3, and there were always hiccups. Freezes, stutters etc. I thought it might be the motherboard, so I tried a different one. No change. I thought the issue might be my processors low clock speed. Got a much faster i7 with less cores. Nchange. Different capture card? Tried it, same issue in some form or another. An external USB capture card that works flawlessly on my laptop has problems on this technically superior desktop rig.

I finally learned the issue is not with any of the above, but the entire X99 chipset in general. Here are some interesting items that point to this conclusion.

  1. Funny German guy who also tried different card, boards, etc. Video diary playlist over the course of two years of him trying to solve the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuZN4Yy8d_c&list=PL4G4YvB2E5U-_-qltn0IvTxUf8qlLwFrf

  2. Vmix forum post from their admin acknowledging that the X99 chipset has problems. (Vmix is pro level software and what PAPA TV has been using as of late) https://forums.vmix.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=8456

  3. Avermedia admitting to me on Twitter that their latest PCIe card has issues with X99. https://twitter.com/AVerMediaGZ/status/935458048880996352

  4. Magewell issuing a recall on their capture cards due to issues with X99. (horizontal tearing is one of the issues I have with my Avermedias) http://www.magewell.com/3927.html

Iā€™m rather frustrated with the stupid amount of time and money Iā€™ve spent trying to solve this only to discover the problem was a very broad one, and a solution most likely does not exist. Magewell infers they have fixed the issue, but Iā€™m hesitant to spend more money only to find out thatā€™s not the case. (If anyone has a magewell pro hdmi and willing and willing to loan temporarily for testing purposes, Iā€™d be most appreciative!)

If youā€™re planning on building a desktop rig, stay away from the X99 chipset altogether!

tl;dr: X99 chipset has issues with video capture. Avoid!

Iā€™ve been running a ASRock X99 Taichi board for the last few months, including on the Heads-Up vegas stream, and thankfully havenā€™t run into any issues myself yet that Iā€™ve noticed. Running 2 Magewell Quad HDMI cards, will have to check the version numbers. Crossing my fingers.

I had worse luck, as Iā€™ve said here before I believe, with the Ryzen chipset. Never was able to run a single successful stream with that setup.

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I missed you saying that Ryzen went south on you. Glad to know that. Also thanks for confirming that those Magewell quads are working for you. Thatā€™s one Iā€™ve been looking at. What CPU are using if you donā€™t mind me asking? My current CPU is an i7-6800k. My current motherboard is an MSI X99 Xpower Titanium.

Also, have you tried plugging in one of your C127s into your X99 setup? Curious to see if you experience what I have been. Mostly for me itā€™s an FPS stutter, but there is also horizontal tearing, and from time to time there is serious flicker like the German guy I shared. Itā€™s not consistent though. I had a successful stream almost a year ago, and for the life of me canā€™t figure out why it didnā€™t have issues then.
Here is a sample of that stream. Went for over 12 hours straight, no issues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmDXfAEpQII

This setup had 3 C127s, and a USB. 1 had a 60fps switch (playfield cams) and then the other two had 30fps cams. (crowd and score cam switch) I now have the stutter issue consistently with just one C127 doing 60fps. My GC550 which is USB doesnā€™t stutter but does have slight horizontal tearing. The fps stutter is not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but considering the time and effort Iā€™ve put into this, I find it very annoying. Here is a link that goes to a portion where the fps stutter is very apparent in the ball motion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAjpjnOL16M&t=1089s
Perfect ball motion is what I seek.

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Tell me about it. Haha

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i7-6800k like you.

I did notice some odd tearing occasionally with the c127s, almost looks like a glitch. I have one still in the system and in Vegas I was using two of them I believe for the player/room cameras.

When slo-mo replays are the norm we will all want 240 fps cams or better!

I bought a Sony CX440 cam off eBay and it seems to work the same as the CX405. The only difference in the cameras that I can tell is the cx440 has 8GB of internal storage. Iā€™ve been using it with the elgato cam link. My tests have gone pretty smooth. I tried with xsplit and obs at 720p60. Quality seems similar. xsplit looks slightly better but it might have just been more light that day or something. My DMD cam is a logitech c922 and the player cam is a b910. Both those I believe were set at ā€œdefaultā€ resolution. I know the OBS stream was 3500kbps not sure about the xsplit stream.

OBS
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/208454430

Xsplit
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/208138260

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@mizary

your Xsplit stream was also 3500. Iā€™ve mainly always used Xsplit. I tested OBS once and didnā€™t like it. The image seemed to have a ā€œhazeā€ to it. This was almost a year ago. I know Xsplit allows you choose between CPU or GPU in respect to what is processing the video.

The CX440 is pretty much the same camera specification wise. The only other difference besides the one you already mentioned is that it has the Bionz X image processor, where the CX405 has the regular Bionz. No clue how much of a difference there is between the two.

Iā€™ve added a cx405 to my setup. Iā€™ve also got a camlink capture device. I cannot get the camera to come up in OBS. I can select the camlink from the video source, but nothing comes up after I do that.

Are there specific settings I need to make sure I have on the Sony cam to get this to work?

I have the camera powered via the power adapter included, and also I have the stock mini HDMI to HDMI plugged into the camera and the other end plugged into the camlink usb capture device.

Any help appreciated. Thanks!

Check in the El Gato Game Capture HD software to see if it works there. That will tend to give you a better error message when something is wrong. My guess is that the Cam Link is plugged into a USB 2.0 port instead of a USB 3.0 port. It requires a USB 3.0 port. Try different USB ports on your PC.

That was it! Thank you.

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those using Mac - what are you using as HDMI capture device? Fed up running bootcamp on the Mac and either apple or MS hosing the device drives. Im using OBS but my HDMI from aver media doesnā€™t support Mac OS so I need to get a couple of new HDMI capture devices, looking for one that does 1080p/60. Ideally compact.

Cheers,
Neil.

Whoops

got direct stream DMD working on MMR and AFMR.

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