Reminder that my current setup has all USB cameras and I plan to umbilical to the PC or mount a laptop to the rig. So while a 4 port encoding card sounds like what I would do in the future I don’t believe it would help me any now. I’m pretty sure even the 3050 is way overpowered and it’s mostly CPU. I think these days a new toaster with a thunderbolt port could probably do the trick… (but again, I’m looking for some min specs).
Man, I haven’t ever bought a mobo with only 2 RAM slots, but yes, this one only has 2…
Thanks everyone for the help. Yeah, I figured the same and asked the question and the answer was lacking any real information…
I ended up buying this, but I will hand it over to the ex that needed a new mid tier gaming puter (mostly just for WoW…). I found a laptop that seems to be better for about the same price that I ended getting for myself: https://www.newegg.com/obsidian-black-acer-nitro-5-an515-58-56ch-gaming/p/N82E16834360248?Item=N82E16834360248
Either way there’s a decent return policy so hopefully I’ll get to test this out soon!
so it should arrive by Friday - I plan to do my usual clock sync test (looping the same video through all ports and looking for issues) but if there are any other tests you want me to do let me know,
Amazon has a great deal on the Razer Kiyo Pro for $60 for those looking for something better than a c920 for a similar price. Heck I’d even say it’s better than a Brio too. It can send H264 across the usb too to save on some bandwidth.
Edit: If you wouldn’t mind, do at least one color test. Split the PF camera with one feed into the ACASIS and one into the Magewell without any filters etc.
So I got it working on an old MacBook Pro intel - it’s a game changer for sure assuming it’s ok with a more modern Mac/PC. Because it runs a kernel module you need to turn ultra secure mode off then you need to approve the kernel module loading and then it approving the use and connection of it.
I tested quickly with 2 1080p sources then also plugged in stern lvds which it also works with. I was going to record it but that Mac had no hardware encoding and the lag on the recording was nuts.
Will try on Apple silicon tonight and also hopefully PC - you have to email for the PC drivers for some reason!
So I made it work on my M1 MacBook Pro! Wow! Mac is back for streaming in my view! The hardware encoding on apple silicon is just outstanding.
So I quickly intercepted my wireless rig with some cables and also used the LVDS port with the convertor - this has a VESA resolution rather than an HDMi one OBS picks it up as 720p which is smaller than the output from the pinball machine but if you change it to 1080p in settings you get the whole screen.
So I screwed up and forgot to set the output to 4K and change the canvas but will do that this week so the video recording is 720p.
So this was a bozo test but I’m convinced this is a good solution I’ll do more of an harder test over the weekend (I’m considering taking it to pinball republic this weekend as we have some big tournaments going on). I’m waiting for the windows drivers still but my CPU on Mac was no more than 10%!
Thanks for this Neil! Yeah, CPU utilization is nada on my 1080p60 TB3 recorder interface I have on my Apple Silicon (Black Magic 3G Recorder) hence I want to explore 2160p60 options out there for TB3/TB4. Intel Macs suck for these workloads and I wouldn’t bother.
I definitely want to see the 12h+ duty on these devices and thanks again! I look forward to the litmus test.
I am new to this whole pinball streaming in that I have only done what I consider two real streams since building my rig just a couple months ago. One yesterday and one a week ago, both in excess of an hour. I had been experimenting and tweaking quite a bit to get decent qualty and a reasonable price.
However, my experience with my Macbook Pro M2 has been outstanding. I have a CX405 for the playfield going into an off brand CamLink and then also have direct capture using either a direct HDMI feel from my JJP and Spooky Machines or the LVDS to HDMI solutions from geekworm and then to another generic CamLink capture card. I still only have a USB cam for player.
I have all three of those going into a USB 3.0 hub, along with my mic. That then goes into a single TB port on my Mac. I was told that having that many devices on the same USB bus wouldn’t work, but it works like a champ. An hour plus of streaming with no glitching, bitrate at 6K the whole time with no drops and CPU usage hovering around 10%. I even did that last stream on the Mac battery and it dropped from 100% to 65% in that last 1 hour and 42 minute stream.
While I am no expert, my Mac is performing better than the beefy Windows laptop that I was using. One thing that did drive me CRAZY for a bit on the Mac was that my direct captures were blurry at times during a lot of motion. It took quite some time, but I evenutally saw the green camera icon in the top menu bar and when I clicked on it, I saw that the Mac decided to put everything into “Portrait” mode which is designed to give that blurry effect for background items and clarity for the “subject in focus”. If anyone ever encounters this, the fix is to turn that off!
For the Stern LVDS to HDMI, I had it working with just the converter card, but the output to my actual pinball display had some bit depth loss as I posted earlier. I took Neils advice and ordered the separate splitter board. I now have the machine output going to the splitter board and then one cable going from splitter board to LVDS to HDMI converter and another separate cable going from the splitter board to the display. Works like a champ. No more bit depth loss in the colors and no drop outs.
My last stream linked below using this setup with Foo Fighters… and you can also see the dumbest thing I have ever done in pinball with a 2.2B+ game going on Foo Fighters. Why I didn’t just take the glass off… I will never know. (one hour and two minute mark). Hard lesson learned.
I came across a really interesting device last week and had to order it when I realized what it could do. I’m using the Magewell Director Mini on the streaming rig to send a wireless NDI signal to Streamlabs on a desktop computer on the other side of the arcade. Makes the rig fully wireless without requiring line of sight (as long as your network is good). The box has 2 HDMI inputs and 2 USB for webcams which works for my setup just about perfectly. I made a short video demonstrating it but would love to hear if anyone has heard of this thing or played with it (or anyone else using NDI successfully?). It’s not cheap at $1,299 but so far I really love what it can do.
Note that there’s a bit of an echo when I’m close to the rig with my mic only because I kept the commentators mic hooked in so it’s processing two separate audio signals (one over USB and one over Wifi with the NDI source). Normally the player in the tournament would have no microphone and you’d just pick up the audio from the player cam mic which also gets the game audio.
Each NDI output stream is configureable to choose which program source you want to send through it so it can be a single camera or a “scene” that is a combination of cameras. That being said the device only supports two simultaneous streams so while I was able to create multiple NDI streams in the settings, only 2 could be activated at anytime. Shame, would have been perfect if I could get one more for the webcam and have full control in OBS (although I wonder how strong the network would have to be to pull down multiple 1080p60 streams reliably)
I just tested with the Camlink as well as a generic USB to HDMI adapter (those cheap ones you can find on Amazon) and neither worked. Interestingly they both give this green screen look but the Camlink you could actually see the live video behind it so probably an encoding issue. Would be super cool if they could support that for a “free” additional HDMI input, although it does hang somewhat precariously on the side.
The hanging issue can be resolved with a USB-A M/F extension cord. That’s a really strange artifact. I wonder if Magewell’s own HDMI to USB adapters would work.
The multi-stream limitation is not the worst, but I do like to switch different cameras (player and score) to fullscreen during broadcast and that wouldn’t look very pretty if you would just enlarge the scene. I guess this thing is fully scriptable as most magewell products have an API but it would need some work.
I think there might be an interesting scenario where you could have the box change to a full screen scene as input (which is then program out via same NDI stream) at the same time OBS changes to a particular scene (this is what I was doing quickly in the video when I switched to my phone camera, which was its own NDI source in the box). It definitely has a full API because they have a phone app and a web UI that are both doing scene switching so maybe some scenario with multi-actions using a Stream Deck. I’ll probably play around with that. I agree, I probably use the player camera and full layout the most and the score cam the least, but some more flexibility in mixing it all up would be cool.
I look forward to the litmus test.
