The point?
If you're entirely new to streaming/recording and how it works, I intend this rather long post to give you an insight to capabilities of your equipment when going for a streaming rig setup, some issues I faced that I didn't know of until I came across them and some more advanced things you can do to perhaps save money or improve your stream. Before you get into it, setting up a great looking/sounding stream unfortunately isn't just plug and play and for the most part if you want that 'studio' sounding and looking stream, it takes a lot of messing about to get it just right, especially the voice audio portion as all voices differ.
Why did I setup a streaming rig, I'm only a small fish!
I setup a streaming rig because I wanted my gaming rig to just handle the gaming, there is 100% in my opinion and experience a noticeable affect on game performance/rendering/display when you're recording to disk or encoding to stream, it feels far smoother playing games when not streaming/recording even though the FPS doesn't appear to differ and no, the cpu isn't maxed. I spent quite a long time recording footage and streaming that the odd time when I played without doing this, I could see the difference and frankly it made me want to stop recording! I wish I'd have setup a 'streaming rig' before this, back before I streamed and only recorded gameplay, it's a major factor in why I didn't continue to make content for my Youtube channel.
I'm an audiophile/videophile, I'm that person who'll watch a movie and have to tweak the audio/video on occasion causing "sighs" when the movie is paused. I want my stream to look as good as it can but as someone who doesn’t earn a lot in my full time job with a family to support, it must be for as cheap as I can!
This 'guide' should explain how to setup a dual PC streaming setup for streaming on twitch, right from the equipment needed to the several common issues that don't appear to have easy to find solutions. This should work for any streaming service and recording setup, using OBS Studio. I’m not going to tell you how to be a streamer, I’m still working that part out myself.
My aim was to set this up as budget as I can but the truth is, you really cannot go full budget and have an acceptable, professional sounding/looking stream. You can however go nearly full budget, just remember that 'quality' acceptance will differ from person to person. Everything below is my experience and my opinion.
Streaming Rig - Overview
This first section will be details on my current equipment, where I sourced it from and some information on where you could possibly save more and why I didn't want to, when I could have.
CPU. It is all purely about your CPU capability, if you have a CPU that isn't being fully used, you're not using the correct speed encoder to get the best out of what you've got. Your streaming rig GPU is pretty irrelevant for the most part, unless you're using NVENC which I do not advise as you need a higher bitrate for equal quality compared to x264, just get a discrete GPU to avoid any issues, anything will do, if its similar or better that what I have then don’t worry. I will add that boot speed is for me important, especially if your rig crashes mid stream but mostly you'll get a routine before you start streaming, you'll boot your streaming rig in advance if you don't leave it on all the time.
The visual overview:
http://imgur.com/sjIInAz (mic now has a pop filter on!)
I really should clean my case...
What is my streaming rig capable of?
60fps @ 3500kbs on very fast preset. I’ll be moving to an i7 to change the preset but for now, this runs perfectly and looks great anyway!
Streaming Rig Spec
- CASE: BitFenix Neos ATX Tower Black/Red Window
£24 - Purchased from a known UK retailer from their b-grade section, saved £15 on the case itself + £12 on delivery as I'm a member of their forums which grants free postage. You could just source ANY case that supports your equipment, these can be picked up extremely cheap, cheaper than what I bought there. You only need something that looks good if you're vain about it. Someone locally maybe selling something off at collection price only. Honestly, it's a little bit of metal.. if you really wanted to you could mount it onto your desk. Depends how ghetto you want to be at first.
Will I upgrade this? Absolutely! Right now a silent machine isn't what I'm working towards but it will be.
- CPU: Intel Sandybridge i5 2500 non k variant/version + stock fan - turbo @ 3.4ghz most of the time.
- RAM: 4GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM
- MOBO: Gigabyte GA-PA65-UD3-B3
- GPU: GTX 460
- PSU: Corsair CX430
- Main HDD: 500gb Seagate Barracuda
£100 - Purchased from the members market of a forum I'm part of, it requires you to have a certain minimum registration time + post count, working on a trust/feedback system. These sort of 'deals' pop up quite frequently on this forum alone and I imagine if you're part of several computing forums you'll have more to search. Look for bundles where possible to save on postage. Bare in mind that this was a privately listed sale.
Note: I would NOT recommend the non-k (non overclockable) variant of any CPU, little did I know that the non k variants throttle individual cores when you reach around 50c, which happens on the stock cooler of course, while one core may run at the full "turbo speed", the subsequent cores run at slower than the previous core, overclockable versions do not have this 'issue'. HOWEVER, the 2500 non k is absolutely fine for streaming at 60fps I've found. Do your research on the CPU you're getting.
Storage: Assorted sizes
£0 - Currently unused as not needed but on standby, from HDDs I've had in the past. You can pickup a cheap storage drive second hand, you don't need a good storage drive unless you also plan on recording direct to drive or you're planning on not streaming but just setting up a recording rig. Make sure if you're intending on recording to it that you have something capable of handling the write speed, in general avoid eco drives and anything below 7200rpm, especially if this drive has programs installed on it.
You’ll need storage if you intended on recording to disk at the same time as streaming, great for those high quality highlights to post to youtube for example.
Capture Card: Avermedia LGP Lite (Live Gamer Portable) USB
£60 brand new, I've seen these go for a 1/3 of the price on forums and second hand websites but I always worry that they've been abused, dropped or overheated and that's why they're being sold on. I like it, it's simple and it works, it isn't capable of 1080p 60fps though and right now as of writing this, there are very few streamers that stream in 1080p, all of the streamers I follow use 720p, I believe due to the bitrate on twitch it wouldn’t be worth doing 1080p, that and encoding 60fps 1080p would destroy most systems!
Camera: Logitech C920
£60 - Same as above really, you get issues with mobile phone cameras where they degrade when dropped, I wanted to avoid this issue buying second hand. I actually picked up this camera as my Lifecam 3000 HD wasn't handling my green screen, this was however due to light levels within the room and the Lifecam 3000 HD supports the green screen quite well with adequate lighting.
Microphone: Samson Meteor
£46 - Personally I would say if you've got a spare microphone, use that instead of buying something extra and make it work, unless it really is full potato. I was using Tonor USB Condenser microphone, while it was better than my headset it still wasn't good enough for me, the difference in quality is huge.
See a comparison video I made here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S5jNGdMBCc
I do like to run a separate microphone on the streaming rig, it prevents any audio issues from the gaming rig if it stutters, most notably between games and games crashing. It's more likely that the gaming rig will crash and you want to keep the continuity of the stream. I also have a push to mute button on my headphones cable and on the samson, these are nice additions.
You 100% do not need a separate microphone though, by using voicemeeter banana, you can send your microphone from your gaming rig to the streaming rig without issue though, to avoid having to mess around with audio delays between the camera as it's usually on the streaming rig and the audio being sent over, I would probably run the camera on my gaming rig on the OBS that's open there, see below for full setup to understand what I mean. Though this really doesnt go well with the theme of your gaming rig being just for gaming, especially if you run the camera at a high resolution you’re going to be splitting the gaming rigs attention. I would try your best to make the audio delay / sync work if you really have to send your microphone across the network. Really though a £7 desk microphone would remove an unneeded headache here.
Green Screen:
£6 - Studio green screen fabric from ebay, make sure its not plastic and make sure it's bigger than you need, when you put it up, cut it to size. Originally I nailed this up (ghetto style, I was eager to see if it worked!) but you can purchase velcro tape which works quite well, I'd recommend the stronger stuff, I ended up needing to super glue it onto the velcro tape as the adhesive on the velcro just wasn't good enough. Don't worry if it has creases in, just try and get it as flat as possible, your lighting will be what matters.
Lighting: Softbox Light on a tall stand.
£25 - This came with a stand, softbox and 135w bulb. I invested in a 30w bulb which produces 150w, for about £7.50 purely because it'll pay for itself in just a few short months, depending on stream time. Your lighting is by far one of the most essential features, even if you don't run a green screen, having a dark looking camera and having to use the gain and exposure to create a lighter looking picture, degrades the quality hugely and on most cameras reduces camera framerate which just looks poor quality, you could very likely get away with just putting a high watt output low energy bulb in your usual light fixture, failing that run a bedside lamp nearby.
Make sure when you set your lighting up, you do it in the darkest possible conditions, setting it up on a nice summer day with the curtains open is setting yourself up for failure when you do have a dark rainy winters day, emulate it with blackout curtains if you can or set it up after the sun has gone down and save some different filters, it'll save a lot of grief when you have the odd dark day in summer, a quick change of filters and you're good to go.
There's an overview of my setup and initial outlay cost of my setup, below are some issues I faced requiring me to pay out a little more to make things a bit more comfortable, I'd like to also state here that when you setup your stream you should always have one goal in mind: Seamless continuity! - It is very important that there is no fumbling while you are streaming, you don't want to be fiddling and ruining the flow of the stream as these interruptions will come at the most frustrating of times and it kills the mood, I speak from experience which is why my setup is how it is today.
Gaming Rig Spec
- CASE: NXZT Phantom (Red/White) Full Tower
- CPU: Intel Sandybridge i7 2700k @ 4.2Ghz
- RAM: Corsair XMS3 8GB 1600Mhz
- MOBO: MSI P67A-C45
- GPU: Zotac Amp GTX 1070 8GB
- SSD: 180GB Ocz Vertex 2
- Storage: 2x 2TB Barracuda HDD
- Mouse: Logitech G400
- Keyboard: Logitech G11
- Headset: Steelseries 200
- Monitor: Samsung 120hz
How it’s all setup
Gaming Rig:
- This is setup exactly how you'd set your gaming rig up plus an additional HDMI cable coming out of the GPU and going into the capture card. There is a 3.5mm splitter on the audio out jack (where you'd normally plug your headphones in) on the sound card creating two lines, one for my headphones so I can hear the game and one with a 3.5mm lead going to the audio in on the capture card so that it is passed on to the streaming rig.
- Programs: Voicemeeter Banana, OBS, MouseWithoutBorders
I run an instance of OBS on the gaming rig, this has one scene that has one main source, the one source runs a "Game Capture" that captures any full screen application. I right click the scene and 'project' it onto monitor 2, which is a fake display created by the capture card. See below on the issue about screen tearing for a more detailed description.
Gaming Rig Voicemeeter Banana Usage:
Receives sound from the streaming rig, stream alerts and music. Meaning I don't need to run stream alerts and music on my gaming rig, causing an echo. Doesn’t send ANY sound to the streaming rig.
Streaming Rig:
The streaming rig recieves sound and video from the capture card, video through the HDMI and sound through the 3.5mm audio port which is split from my headphones.
- Devices: Camera, USB Microphone, USB in from capture card.
- Programs: Voicemeeter Banana, OBS, Bot, Stream Alerts, Foobar, MouseWithoutBorders
Streaming Rig Voicemeeter Banana Usage:
This program sends any sounds that the streaming rig hears which is stream alerts and music playing on foobar directly to my gaming rig so that I can hear it, without the need of running the music program or stream alerts on my gaming rig. Unfortunately there is no way to mute sources on OBS and this is the only way, without a hardware mixer to get sounds from the streaming rig (most importantly, stream alerts) without duplicating the sound and causing a feedback loop.
OBS Settings
This is just the important stuff, everything else is at your discretion or can be left default.
- Video Bitrate: 3500kbs - Personally I don’t like my stream to look pixelated, I want it to look good, I stream for myself and I believe times have moved on since the recommendation of 2000kbs due to viewers potato connections. The main argument about bitrate is being able to appeal to all viewers as a streamer without source/quality options, I’d love to see some twitch numbers on average bitrate from the viewer POV, I would personally adjust my bitrate accordingly but for now, I want my stream to look good.
- Preset: Veryfast - This will be changing, very soon to whatever I can get it to below this but veryfast still looks good.
- Encoder: Software x264, don’t bother with NVENC if you have it, it requires significantly more bitrate to look as good as x264.
- FPS: 60 - I think you need at least 2500kbs to make 60 look good, perhaps even 2800 as a minimum.
- Downscale filter: Lanczos - Just looks best imo.
- Resolution downscale: From 1920x1080 on the initial preview, scaled to 1280x720 for viewers.
Your OBS settings should be set so that it is using all available CPU power, primarily you change the “preset” to make it so that you can use more CPU in favour of less bitrate where possible. You should be aiming to use 90-95% cpu usage, you don’t want it hitting 99-100% and causing frame stutter/choking/lag.
I didn’t make a video for this as there are so many out there already.
Issues Faced and Solved!
Capture Card - Audio Lag/Desync through HDMI.
I found that sending the audio through the hdmi was oddly causing me an audio desync issue at random times, it didn't matter what I did, I couldn't stop it from happening and it always meant that I was fiddling mid stream resetting captures, audio engines and ultimately the program doing the stream encoding which is almost as bad as having to reboot.
Fix: Move to 3.5mm capture, however this created another additional issue. Apparently the PSU can cause some sort of interference, white noise, hiss, static, its very low level but when there is no game or voice sound, it's obvious. You can of course run this through a filter program but this creates a delay while it's going through the pass through meaning to have to play with video/capture sync timings, you can use OBS noise reduction but this I found actually really affected the audio during certain sounds and in some cases reduced the audio volume and sound to a low underwater / robotic sound! You can see this static noise with your capture card audio display bar jumping up and down when no sound is supposed to play, similar to what you see when you're looking at a microphone input that has a hiss/white noise.
Solution: Purchase a 'ground loop isolator', mine cost me around £7 - it completely stopped the audio display bar moving, the bar was still displaying an output but it was completely still but there is no audio issue there. Additionally to this, I read that you can run it through another piece of hardware, notably a hardware mixer if you have access to one. The ground loop isolator just sits in the middle between the origin and the destination, almost like a sound strainer for sound I guess.
Images:
http://imgur.com/2ArXYRY - From the soundcard
http://imgur.com/ECXcUdc - Into the splitter (3.5mm jack you can see goes into the capture card)
http://imgur.com/2pUwi9A - Into the capture card, yes my table needs dusting but I’m changing it soon. The small rectangular box is the ground loop isolator, it has a 3.5mm female port on both end of it.
Microphone Placement
Turns out, that microphone placement is very important and when you come from using a headset mic all your gaming life you don't realise quite how close it needs to be before it sounds distant and echoey.
Solution: It needs to be around 6-10inches away from your mouth, this is achieved by purchasing a microphone 'boom' or 'arm' - They're pretty cheap though the really cheap ones suffer with not being able to hold the weight of the microphone, the one I purchased was £15. Of course you could have it somewhere on your desk but I found having it on the arm meant the keyboard noises weren't so loud on stream. You could also get creative with some duct tape.
Controlling OBS on the streaming rig
Before I even setup the rig I was aware of a plugin remote control for it, turns out it doesn't work anymore or at least doesn't for me.
Solution: Additional keyboard if you have the space or if you don't have the space, like me, I connected a spare xbox controller and run a program called "JoytoKey" that makes the button presses act like keyboard presses. It fits nicely on my desk within reach and controls scene changes, microphone muting and music playing. Once the stream is running, you don't really need a lot of shortcuts.
Controlling the streaming rig's keyboard/mouse, with your gaming rigs keyboard and mouse and/or lacking space for the extra keyboard/mouse
Solution: Microsoft have a program called "MouseWithoutBorders" and its free, of course you'll need to either use your keyboard and mouse initially to set it up but once it's done, you can simply move your mouse over to the edge of the screen as if the streaming rig was a second monitor. Personally I enabled that you must press CTRL to prevent accidentally moving over during a game but it alleviated the need for an additional monitor, keyboard and mouse. I did originally try and use a second keyboard and mouse but it's very awkward at times without the space. I do keep them connected but even right now, as I write this I'm using the keyboard connected to my gaming rig but writing the guide on the streaming rig.
This is also great as you can control all the apps and programs you may have used over on your second monitor such as chat, bots, follow notifications etc.
Glossy screen and monitor reflections
The actual issue is when you are playing games that are very dark or in dark scenes, due to the lighting above you it causes patterns on your clothing to reflect or bright colours to reflect which means you can't actually see the screen but the reflection of yourself.
Solution: A few things you can do to mitigate the issue, wear plain clothes or at least clothes without stuck on designs that are a little more reflective. You can angle your monitor away slightly, which is something I really didn't get along with but it works. The actual solution I found was using NVIDIA's control panel (Sorry AMD I don't know the process!) goto "Display" and then "Adjust desktop colour settings" and turn up the brightness. Personally for me I found turning the brightness up instead of the gamma provided a better picture, as little as up to 65% did enough for me, find what's best for you.
You can always try the ingame brightness/gamma settings. I went with the control panel as its global and some games don't have the brightness setting, for gameplay reasons like in Dead By Daylight that has offerings in game which control the brightness making it easier or harder to hide but for me, not being able to see the majority of my screen is slightly difficult.
Where to find it:
Screen tearing on stream
I noticed that even in the OBS preview that the screen capture appeared to be tearing, more noticeably in movie playback cutscenes (not gameplay cutscenes) in games but also definitely there in normal gameplay. Setting the refresh rate to match didn't work and meant I couldn't use the 120hz setting on my monitor.
Solution: Set your display settings to a dual monitor setup, make your capture card act as an actual monitor/display. You can see what's on it when you check OBS on the streaming rig. All you do then is run OBS on your gaming rig to capture the source, right click the scene and project it onto the capture card "monitor".
Video Tutorial:
Can't run the higher refresh rate I want with the capture card.
Running the capture card as a clone of the monitor or as an additional side monitor, no matter what I tried it would not let me run my monitor at 120hz and the capture card at its max of 60hz, it kept forcing me to use my monitor as 60hz. I've had this monitor for years, I literally cannot play unless it's on 120hz, it is hugely noticeable.
Solution: Reinstall windows with the main gaming monitor (120hz / 144hz Whateverhz) only connected. When I clean reinstalled windows, I left my capture card setup connected and for some odd reason it detected the capture card as the primary monitor, I was very confused on initial boot after the reinstall that I had a black screen on my monitor, turns out it was displaying to the capture card which I obviously couldn't see as I didn't have it setup on the streaming rig's obs.
There is apparently a regedit fix, I tried it and it didn't work for me, though by this point I'd lost all patience after uninstalling countless monitor drivers and trying countless combinations, it just wouldn't let me run my monitor at 120hz so I just re-installed again as it was basically a fresh install anyway. There just doesn't seem to be a simple way to tell Windows what your want your 'main' monitor to be, yes you can select "make this main display" but it still doesn't allow you to use the refresh rates you want for some reason.
Stream Alerts playing on gaming and streaming rig without audio duplication.
You need the twitch alerts to sound on the gaming pc and as you cannot mute audio sources on OBS you're left with a very small amount of options.
Solution: Use a program called Voicemeeter Banana on the streaming rig, you use the VBAN portion of this program to SEND the audio over LAN to your gaming PC, once your gaming PC receives it, it then PLAYS it as normal so that you can hear it, then as your gaming PC is now playing those sounds it will be picked up by what ever method you use to send your usual game/desktop sounds to the streaming PC meaning that your streaming rig can then broadcast that to those watching.
This removes the need to run the alert sound on both machines which removes any echo, yes there is a very minor delay but as this is just for the alerts (I also use it for music) it is not noticeable at all, if you were to play a video clip on the streaming pc and use the streaming PC OBS to capture it, there would be a noticeable delay, as long as there is no video to accompany the sounds you want to hear it is fine.
Video Tutorial:
Conclusion
I think I’ve covered every issue that I faced in getting my stream to where it is, I will continue to improve my stream and yeah, of course I’m not a big streamer and I’ll be very surprised if I ever make partner but it's nice to have a project I really enjoy, even the technical side of things but definitely the streaming side of things. Overall, I do this to create some ‘real’ reaction footage to stick on a hard drive for my kids one day, I’d love to see some videos of my dad playing from back in the day when we played Counter-Strike 1.6 and before but there aren't any and sadly he’s no longer alive.
It's not easy to setup a dual PC stream, I hope I’ve consolidated a lot of the uncommon issues and setups into one area for people to follow.
If there is anything I’ve missed, anything you’d like to see a tutorial on then fire me a PM or contact me elsewhere!
A lot of this has been written and proofread at stupid times of the morning, after working 12.5hr shifts over a number of days. As have the videos made to go along with it, I really hope after all this time of writing it makes sense.
Finally, without the viewers I’ve had and their contributions I certainly wouldn’t have the setup I have right now and even when people come by and offer genuine feedback, it’s hugely appreciated and has also contributed as I’m always looking for ways to improve the technical side and the general stream side.
Submitted by ToejaMski | #Specialdealer Special Offer Online Shopping Store 2016
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