Twitch/livestream setups.

54 upload? If so then you should be fine no matter what. For 720p I usually stream at 3000kbps but then I’m a Twitch partner so I don’t have to worry about what viewers’ internet can handle as my videos get reencoded to 3 different quality options. I guess I would probably recommend 2000kbps for something where most of the screen is fairly static, like a pinball stream.

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Hello again. Glad to see a lot of new setups going on. That Sanctum setup with the zip cords is amazing. I’ll have to check out those active usb extension cords.

As for settings, and bus management I have a few words of advice. If you are buying a laptop, the most important thing is whether or not it has integrated graphics or a dedicated graphics card. Even though the mobile graphics cards are crippled compared to their bigger brother, unloading encoding/cams/h264 to the gpu relieves a lot of CPU for the rest of the stream.

Per Dead_Flip’s advice, I recommend using a powered USB hub and have seen USB bus bandwidth improve. Something that will relieve CPU as well is having the less important cams at a lower resolutions. I have the playfield cam at 720p, and the rest are at 488p or lower.

As for bandwidth out, you can go down to as little as 1800kpbs, but optimal for the steam and your mobile viewers is around 2200kbps. If you want it crystal clear, push out 720p at 2800kbps. Anything above 720p 30fps if overkill.

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Ok give me some tips on setup/hardware for commentating. Have some people lined up to commentate our state championship Saturday. We have a spare snowball mic. Headphones? How can we import the challonge.com live bracket into the stream?

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The Challonge bracket can be implemented by simply having it up in a web browser and doing a window capture of that browser window.

For commentating, that’s a sticky situation… It depends. How close is the commentating setup going to be to the machines? If you are using Snowballs for both the machine and commentating, you might have overlap/echo issues.

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USB mic headphone sets work well in X split? Better solution for commentators?

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If you’re using multiple mics there’s no good solution apart from using a mixer, or at least none I’ve found. The problem with USB anything for audio is there will always be a delay, and multiple usb mics will never sync up properly. Best to stick to a single USB mic. The Yeti (Snowball’s bigger cousin) has worked fine for me for commentary with 2-3 people and no headphones, snowball should be fine.

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I think there has been some reverb sort of sound coming from our streams when it’s loud. Not sure what it is. Will non USB mic’s/headsets work fine too? 1/8" phono Jack?

Listen to this video

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Hmm. It’s cutting out the link… (http://youtu.be/POZkgq9-wUM)

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At the next VRPA tournament we are hosting I would like to set up a video broadcast. Plans are to hook up three USB webcams per game. Total of 7 pins will initially be set up. The 3 USB feeds per game will go into a 3-1 powered USB hub. The 7 powered USB hubs will then go into a 8-1 USB port switcher. Software will be X-Split. All cameras will be the same Logitech model.

Does anyone see any technical issues with this setup?

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I could see xsplit having an issue with 21 identical cameras running through 8 hubs into a single USB port. Won’t know what’s what.

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I’m trying to get a stream put together with a friend. We have some gear but, after doing some research I’m not exactly sure what route is the best for our needs. Sorry ahead of time for noob questions. We know nothing about twitch except what I’ve learned(maybe) in the last few days.

We have:
A nice AKG condenser with omni and bidirectional patterns etc.
Mic stands
1 ball mount to adapt the mic clip thread to 1/4"
Decent laptop 8g 2.5ghz AMD quadcore USB 3.0 etc
Panasonic HC-V110 1080p (Might be the same guts as HC-V250)
I believe a max of 10Mb up from our regular location(6Mb confirmed over wi-fi)
I’ve never used OBS or Xsplit but, was thinking we would use OBS since its free.

I guess it comes down to we need more cameras and whether or not it will be worth it in the end to buy an external capture device in order to use the HC-V110 or buy C920’s. From what I understand, unless you’re a twitch partner you need to throttle your upload bw because users aren’t able to change the stream quality to accommodate a lower bw connection and wouldn’t be able to watch the stream without buffering issues. I don’t imagine this would be an problem unless a user was watching over mobile data maybe? I was thinking if we have to stream at lower resolutions due to this, plus the added complexity and additional hw needed for the HC-V110, it might not be worth it.

The other question I had was regarding the C920 vs other lesser webcams for the purposes of non-PF cams. Seems like quite a few people mentioned using three C920 in the thread above and I was wondering why. Is there a cheaper cam you would suggest using in situations where highest quality isn’t necessary? Is the C920 the go to because other cams lack disabling of auto-focus, 1/4" tripod mount, maybe something else I’m missing?

We’re looking forward to getting started. We’ve got a good mix of EM,SS and DMD at our main location, access to other collectors games and possibly on location streaming at Pinballz arcade and other locations in town.

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I’m an absolute idiot when it comes to this stuff. I bought 3 C920s, 3 USB cables and use OBS. I bought some super cheap handle bar mounts for the cameras and made a stand out of PVC pipes. OBS is stupidly simple to use, my biggest issue is synching sound.

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I showed some streams that users have uploaded to youtube to a group of friends. I knew the cameras involved with each stream and asked them which video they thought had the best quality. The videos were bro do you even pinball (c920s), Karl’s latest woz video (assuming hc-v250 and the rig described above) and PAPA’s last circuit finals( Not sure the particular model but they are a higher grade panasonic prosumer model I believe). They all thought Karl’s video looked the best so I guess we are going with the capture card route. Only problem now is which one. I think I’ve narrowed it down to the avermedia GL710 usb2.0 or the avermedia CV710 usb3.0. Any suggestions as to which one would be better for our needs? I heard the CV710 might only take advantage of the 3.0 bus speed with certain chipsets so 3.0 might mean nothing in this comparison. All the options are driving me crazy!

This also brought up the question, why does the quality of PAPA’s stream seem less than Karl’s when PAPA’s cameras are higher quality hw? They all thought that PAPA’s stream was the lowest quality of the three. What gives?

video links for reference

PAPA

KARL

BRO

The stream I posted a pic of was pretty low quality as Twitch was having a difficult time with freezing up. I am not currently hard wired so I drop my upload rate to avoid clipping. The C920s give a great pic at $63

What powered hubs are you guys using? I figured any would do but, I started reading some reviews of cheaper hubs and found some scary comments. Some people mentioned the hub frying flash drives and peripherals plugged in. Others mentioned the hub not supplying enough power spread across all ports because the device PS is under rated to the point the ac adapter adapter became to hot to touch. I guess not all usb hubs are created equally. WTStandardization?!?

I ended up going with the following. Just wanted to share what I felt was the minimum needed to use a laptop with a HDMI camcorder after my research, minus 1x C920 unless you have a guy on the couch. Unfortunately, this is all theoretical until we have everything up and running. I will post our twitch results if everything works out.

3x C920 (Players, Scores, Guy on the couch cam)
1x Avermedia GL-310 LGP-lite for the HC-V110 PF cam (The CV710 can’t use 3.0 unless you have intel, renesas, and some other manufacture controller. Decided to get the GL-310 because its cheaper than the LGP and the LGP has features we wouldn’t use)
1x Vantec UGT-AH700U3 USB HUB (JD’s hub of choice just happened to be available at newegg.com. I’m thoroughly convinced that no matter what hub you buy you are rolling the dice on build quality)

Still going to need misc cables, mounts, powerstrips etc but, I think we have our bases covered. Looking forward to getting all this stuff in the mail! Thanks for the advice and help in this thread and to the people I bugged in PM for advice!

We were trying something 1/7th as complex as what you proposed and couldn’t get it to work. We had 3x Logitech 920s on a powered hub at the pinball end of a 50’ Active USB 2.0 cable. We’re using Win10, OBS, and a modern tower PC with a decent graphics card (sorry don’t have the specs here - but a proven configuration for streaming).

We could get things working when the webcams were attached directly to the PC, but getting all 3 cameras connected on the far side of a single cable/hub became incredible unreliable. Cameras just wouldn’t initialize or attach properly. You’d reboot, and something wouldn’t come up right without having to move cameras to different ports. The diagnostics available with detailed USB analyzers weren’t giving us any insight to the nature of the problem. It was sufficiently unreliable we’ve given up and are switching HDMI capture cards despite the cable management pains that individual HDMI runs will cause.

For us it didn’t look like we had bumped into theoretical limits of USB 2.0 bandwidth, but you need to do the math to figure if USB 2.0 can even carry 21 streams. Webcams all reserve a chunk of the USB bandwidth when initialized (whether the source is being broadcast or not) plus the baseline USB protocol consumes a chunk of the bandwidth for control messaging as well. In theory, the 920c seemed nice since it does on-board H.264 compression which could theoretically reduce the bandwidth requirements but we never got there.

I’d suggest starting small, and only expanding when you get it to work. Good luck!

Sorry to say this, but this will definitely not work! See my replys above in this thread what I tried (with quite an amount of time and every hardware available (active USB cables, hubs, etc. - all USB stuff I could get from amazon and send back after I tried) and what I achieved - I believe my setup is the maximum you can achieve with USB cams (regarding the number of cams).
If you somehow manage to get it up und running, please share your knowledge and experience here.

Fort Awesome stream?

Fort awesome and beyond hopefully.

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