I have had a few couple of rough nights, where I end up not being able to sleep much. Which have in turn made me sleep for an hour here, and an hour there.. It sucks.
I actually did end up getting a full refund on the Ripsaw, so I had that going for me. Unfortunately, I looked around for another capture card that would, guaranteed, work with the things I have on hand, and it seems I might be a bit out of luck. The only thing I saw that, for sure, would work costs a bit more than double of what the Ripsaw cost – and I’m not entirely sure it works the way I want it to work. I know I can set it up to record whatever I want recorded, with any source, without needing a streaming PC, but if I want to be able to stream it, I must have a second PC as the streaming PC to stream. And I’m not entirely sure the PC’s at home will work with that. I cannot really justify the price of the Elgato Game Capture 4K60S+, although I’m 90% sure it will work the way I want it to.
The issue I had with the Ripsaw – the sound issue – will probably not be there with the 4K60S+, since there’s apparently a small program from Elgato that deals with just that, the Elgato Sound Capture, and the encoding itself is done in the 4K60, and not on an actual computer. Which means that if I’m correct, I can use the 4K60 to hook it up solo to anything I want to play on, to atleast record stuff on it onto an SD card, and if I want to stream, the 4K60 itself takes care of everything regarding to the encoding itself, meaning that as long as I have something – anything – to hook an USB cable into, I can stream it without needing an computer powerful enough to handle the encoding. Such as my laptop. And the audio issue I had with the Ripsaw is taken care of by Elgato software itself. In theory it should be as simple as that, but then again, in theory, the Ripsaw was a plug-and-play device. I cannot justify ~$560 in the hopes that it works effortlessly.
Now, I probably can buy a small USB capture card, BlueAVS/Goodan I think it was called, which doesnt have a HDMI cable out, for ~$20-25. I can make it work if I use my HDMI-splitter I already own, since that gives the image from one source to two displays, one being the monitor I play on, one being the USB capture card. The issue there is that I need a second PC that is powerful enough for the encoding, which I do have. In the Ladys PC. Which means we’re back to the possible audio issue again. If the issue lies with the Ripsaw, we’re good, but if the issue was my PC’s? Yeah…
I would love to have a capture card that can stream on its own, just plug an HDMI cable into it to the monitor, and an HDMI cable into whatever you play on, and then let the capture card itself handle the rest, from encoding, to audio mixing, to streaming it. All I need is to stream the game video and audio, and perhaps my microphone as well. I dont need any overlays or so, so I can be completely fine with such a streaming device not being able to provide them. Unfortunately, I know of no such device. The “best” I’ve got, is probably a capture card that atleast do the encoding by itself, such as the 4K60S+, or AverMedia LGP2+, but both of them are kinda pricey..
But in all honesty, as long as I can get my hands on anything that allows me to capture whatever I play, then stream it in 1080p60 hassle free, I’m good. I dont even care how it’s done, as long as I dont have to keep upgrading PC-parts or buy a completely different PC to handle it.
I’ve dabbled a bit with Twitch’s Beta App for streaming though, and as far as PC-game streaming goes, it’s…actually not bad. The resolution and audio of PC games works great, it doesnt really stutter my games because of the CPU work load.. It does add a bit of a delay, but that I dont mind at all. Unfortunately it adds another issue, but “atleast” it’s not an issue on “my end”, and that is that if buffers. I stream in 1080p60fps, which means I stream at a resolution that basically means that it’s HD, as well as 60 frames per second. A great image quality. I dont have any option to downscale it after its been streamed, which means that you have to be able to view it in that resolution. Most of the time when you go to a big streamer, you notice that the image quality they stream on is almost impeccable – that’s HD, the 1080p60. But if anything happens, or your internet speed cant really keep up, or you do stuff on your PC/phone that causes slow downs, the stream cant keep up. It’ll buffer, stutter, freeze, jump, unless there’s an option to automatically downscale the quality of the stream, to a lower resolution.
Now, Twitch being Twitch, they dont do that for streams such as mine, a no-viewer/very low sporadic viewer count, because that takes processing power from their servers, which is limited. So unless I’m someone who can make them money, they’re not going to offer me that capability of down scaling like that. What I stream in, is what will be shown, which means that if my streaming resolution is more than you can handle as a viewer at the moment, it’ll stutter and buffer. Apparently, a 1080p60 stream “should” only need a 10 Mbps internet to work just fine, and unless your device you use to watch it is really old, it should work too. When I’ve streamed I’ve had a couple of devices to view my stream as I stream them, the Lady’s PC, my phone, a browser tab on the same PC I stream from and my laptop, and even though I use all those devices to watch the stream on the same time, on the same internet, I dont have that issue.
However, a friend of mine complained about the stuttering and buffering, so he recorded a bit of what he saw, and it was awful. He watched for a few seconds, it buffered, rewatched those seconds, it jumped forward a few seconds and showed the stream, then jumped back, etc. It was completely unwatchable. Now, had I been a bigger stream, Twitch might have enabled more resolutions so that he could watch in, say, 720p instead. But I’m basically SOL there. From what I gather on troubleshooting that issue, what he could’ve done was to do a complete clear of cache, and restart his entire browser, but those are steps that isnt necessarily guaranteed to work, and it’s also not like he should be forced to do more-work to watch my stuff. But again, there was nothing of those issues when I watched the stream – not even when I changed over to cellphone data to watch the stream. And watching old vods doesnt show those issues either.
The one good thing about this, is that even though I stream this, I dont do it for anything else but for my own enjoyment. I dont stream for income, so if it doesnt work on receiving end for everyone, that’s kind of fine as well. If everyone had those issues though, THEN we are talking. But so far, he’s the only one that brought it up, and I cannot replicate it on my end, even with everything going on the same internet – although I have 600 down, so I can literally watch 60 HD streams at the same time without internet speed being the issue. (Me unable to replicate the issue does in no way mean that I distrust him – as I said, he even recorded what he saw and showed me)
Also, I’m getting a bit hyped. It’s ~2 weeks left before the New World beta. Not that I’m going to be able to stream it, since I work with a one PC streaming setup right now, and my gaming PC most likely wont be powerful enough to play AND stream that game.