Project 1999 - Streaming and upload limits

After a couple of weeks messing with tech to try to get a decent stream happening, I thought I'd share the knowledge.

Firstly, a dedicated capture card (I bought the Live Gamer Portable) has some benefit but not as much as you might think if you are streaming from the one system. It actually can take a lot of load off the CPU, though on a top end machine now the benefit of that is not so great. It will probably save you a few FPS ingame. I spoke with the guy who codes the excellent Open Broadcasting Software (OBS) app, and he claimed his program would not impact a decent system, but it actually does a bit. I lose up to 10fps using OBS over the LGP on my Macbook Pro which is a quad core and should on paper kill EQ. It's not a video card issue, it's a CPU thing in this case. You will almost certainly lose more with XSplit and FFSplit.

Secondly, the absolute first requirement is a decent upload speed. Forget about everything else. I am capped at 1Mbps which is atrocious (Australian internet plans are draconian and 10 years behind the rest of the world; I don't know why either). You cannot stream adequately on 1Mbps. If this is you as well, don't bother. I can possibly get 2Mbps and am looking into it atm (but this is the highest upload allowed by Telstra's obnoxious shaping). If so, this will probably allow 720p which honestly is the minimum I would stream at. Anything less and people won't bother watching the blurry image.

Thirdly, and this is for Macbook Pro owners (which is actually a great mid-level gaming system if you set it up properly, but please let's not get into the Apple/PC hate debates; I like both and use a laptop for convenience only, a modern PC is obviously the gaming rig of choice) - your headset mic will not be recognised unless it's USB. This is an issue with the Windows drivers paired with Apple hardware (everything works fine in OSX). You will have to get a 3.5mm -> USB adaptor if you want your voice to be heard on the stream, and this *may* cause issues with a dedicated capture card that you will have to work around as they don't like USB where Audio is concerned.

Fourthly, after a fair bit of research I can confidently say that if you don't talk while playing on your stream, not many people will watch. I've watched a fair few streams now and they are really surprisingly engaging, and only because of the streamer's banter and reactions. It becomes a shared experience, as well as informative if you are a gamer. Without that, it's not really interesting at all.

I actually think that streaming is going to be a significant part of the games community moving forward. I'm a little late to the party to understand this, but I believe it's got huge potential, and very few in the industry understand or know of it (yet) even though there are people who now make their living doing it.