Author: Lunnainn

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.

The Ripsaw, that is. Fortunately, I didn’t immediately have to pay for the shipping, so the shipping slip they emailed me covered that for me, for now atleast. I assume they will dock the shipping off from the price if they feel it’s needed, although from what I could see on the charts, shipping was only ~$6 if I had to pay it anyway, so hopefully it won’t sting too much. What I’m worried about now is the cost of fault search and/or the price dock for an opened box. That could still potentially be quite much.

It’s weird, but I had looked forward to being able to stream some of my games with the Ripsaw, from Dead Cells, Ghost of Tsushima, The Order 1886 and Chaosbane from the PS4, to Yonder, Jump King and Breath of the Wild on Switch, as well as Satisfactory, Diablo 3 and Tomb Raider trilogy on PC – amongst other games – that now that I realised that I cannot do that, I lost interest in playing games at all. I mean, I can still stream on the PS4 from the PS4, but it’s not the same thing, and sure, it wasnt like the Ripsaw was meant to stream from the consoles anyway, but I would’ve been able to, had it worked. It was a small cool additional feature that got me bummed out that it didnt work.

I talked to the store I bought it from, and they sent me some files to print out, so that I could ship it to them for a refund. Then they tell me I have to pay for shipping (reasonable, I guess) as well as that they probably will do a cut in the pay-back, since I have opened the package, which to me is a bit weird…. how else am I supposed to know that the Ripsaw is broken? But I guess they want to resell it, so that they can sell it as a bargain item, and for them not to make a loss, my money pays for the margin. But why resell a broken item as a bargain item? It’s also all there, the only thing that shows it’s been opened is the (cleanly) cut sealing on the box – I even saved the plastic wrapping and wrapped it as it was. I did a bit of calculating, and in modest numbers, if I pay for shipping the broken item back as well as having a price cut on the payback, I might end up having lost 25% of the items price. For nothing. Like, thanks.

I usually like this company as well, I buy all my stuff from them. But if it actually ends up being that I dont get a full refund and that they dont reimburse me for the shipping, I’m going to be one sad cat.

And oh boy did I get dissapointed.

Short version – it doesnt work.

Long version – It semi-works, but not quite. Either way, it’s annoying as heck.

So, the idea is that you have one computer that you stream from – which handles the programs that make sure that whatever you want internet to see, they see – and something that you play your games on, a PS4, Switch, XBox or another computer.

You do this by putting an HDMI cable from whatever you play on, to your capture card (in my case, the Ripsaw), and then a cable from your capture card to your monitor. Voila, you see an image of whatever your game shows. This works for me.

Then you put an USB cable from your capture card to the computer that you want to stream on. This will let your streaming software see what you see on your monitor. That means, that your game that you see on your monitor is what you let internet see when you start streaming. This works for me.

Now, the issue is that you dont just want people to see, you want them to hear as well. Normally, this should work just like plug-and-play, but sometimes there’s settings you need to fix. Once set, everything is done, you’re good to go and stream, as long as your streaming settings themselves are set. This doesnt work for me.

Normally, capture cards dont include 3.5mm jacks, but this one did. If I put audio output on my speakers, the gaming pc can let me listen to sound. If I put this as my headphones, I can hear sounds. My monitor has built-in speakers – I can listen to the sound through there as well, which means that the Ripsaw does output sound. I also tried using a monitor without built-in speakers, the results were the same, so it wasnt because of the built-in speakers. If I plug my headphones into the Ripsaw itself, I can also hear game-pc audio.

Now, the Ripsaw does not output audio to the stream. I’ve tried several types of streaming software, SLObs, OBS and Xsplit for instance, but none of them captures the audio from the Ripsaw, no matter how I put the settings. I’ve googled this issue on both the software sites as well as official Razer, but any and all solutions doesnt work. The best I can have is in OBS, where the audio meters does give a bit of reaction, but all they output is white noise. Very loud white noise. The “funny” thing is, if I start something like foobar on my streaming computer and start a song, it streams the song without issues.

So, my first thought was that there was a settings issue somewhere, where I had told the streaming softwares to pick up and stream out the streaming pc’s audio, and not the Ripsaw’s audio. But no, every setting there was told me that Ripsaw’s audio was picked up and streamed. In fact, when I put the setting that the streaming software should pick up the pc’s audio it immediately made the bars on the audio mixer flat out – since it didnt pick up the Ripsaw-audio anymore.

So, the image goes through fine, everywhere. The audio, however, only goes through “everywhere” locally, meaning anywhere I can sit in my own home and listen to it on speakers or headphones. But I cannot make the Ripsaw find and stream out the audio anywhere.

Now, you could think that this is easily solved by changing computer to stream from, that the streaming PC is too old or too bad or something. What if I told you that this was the third PC I had tried? Now, first I tried to hook up my Switch and PS4, through my gaming PC, which is a mastodont to say the least. i7-9700 CPU, 32GB RAM, RTX 2070, just under a year old. Same thing there. I could see an image everywhere, and hear the sounds everywhere as long as it wasnt through the stream. I thought to myself that “that sucked, but fine, the PS4 has its own streaming setup anyway and I’m not really interested in streaming Switch games anyway. It would’ve been nice if it worked, but hey, it’s not a BIG deal.

Then I tried my laptop as a streaming PC, just to have my gaming PC being what is captured. The laptop isnt an ideal solution either, but it’s what I had – Ryzen 5, Radeon Vega 8, 8GB RAM; I expected it to not be too good, but I had to make an attempt. While the laptop did get hot, it surprisingly worked. Video everywhere, audio everywhere “local” and nothing in OBS/SLObs/Xsplit/OBSlive/Player.me or the stream itself. So I sighed and decided to try out the “super computer” we bought like 7 or 8 years ago, which surprisingly for its age, but not surprisingly for how good it was supposed to be for the time, did have all the requirements necessary to use the Ripsaw; Windows 10 64-bit, 8GB RAM, i7-3820 (which isnt too far off the requirements), and a GTX 1060. The issue I have and described above is what I had on the PC-to-PC streaming setup. Which is when I realized there was something wrong with the Ripsaw itself.

I am now in the talks with the company I ordered it from, not even a day after I recieved it, to see if I can refund it and perhaps just exchange it for a better card if I just pay the difference between the two cards (roughly ~$20). I still havent heard back from them though, but since they claim to have a one year open policy for refunds and exchanges, I kind of expect them to take it back and, if nothing else, give me a new Ripsaw (so I can see if the next card have the same issues) or refund me the money. If they refund me the money, I’ll just send it back along with +$20, so I can have that better card. I say “better”, even though I dont know, mostly because it’s apparently much easier in setup. Whereas the Ripsaw is “basically” plug-and-play (+fix some settings), apparently the Elgato HD 60S+ really is plug-and-play. And I dont need fancy features right now – I want to plug-and-play and play in 1080p60, with audio and lagfree. That’s all I want.

..except for me. I made the mistake of getting a bit too much sleep when I was putting the boys to bed at around 19:00. I woke up at ~22:30, cooked in my clothes. It felt awesome to get a bit of rest, not going to lie, however that screws up my entire sleep schedule, because I’m probably not going to be able to get some sleep for a bit now.

The reason I’m this exhausted, is because I decided to refurnish the apartment this weekend. Yes, the entire apartment. The only thing I havent moved, is my daughter’s bed, her wardrobe, desk and two of her bookshelves. Oh, and a shoe-shelf in the hallway. That is, if you’re not counting the freezers/refridgerator/washing machine. Other than that – yes, everything. Over the course of 48h, I’ve – with a lot of help from the Lady, ofcourse, so I havent done this single handedly – moved every piece of furniture we have, as well as all the tech and cable management, and such. This has forced me to use muscles I’ve forgotten I had, and I ache all over and I’m just simply exhausted.

Since friday afternoon, I moved the kitchen table and chairs, so instead of the table standing next to the window and forcing two chairs on the long side of the table to be directly infront of the dishwasher and sink, and the little guys chair be infront of the refridgerator (thus enabling him to grab the door and open it..), I just turned it around 90 degrees. Now, the little guy is infront of the sink, but further away from the counter than the regular chairs were, and instead of sitting infront of the dishwasher, I now have my back towards the window. It feels more spacious as well.

In the bedroom, we just moved the beds around to give the Lady more easy access to “in-and-out” because of her ischias issues, so she doesnt have to walk as long to reach her side of the bed. Also, the boys’ beds have switched sides now to be more accessible as well. Only downside is that my side of the bed is now furthest away from the door, where it was only 2 meters before – which I think is an entirely acceptable “drawback”. The way we have the bed placed now, the headboard is blocking the window from being able to open, which is both a downside as well as an upside – the downside is that we cant open the window, the upside is that…well, neither can the kids.

Because of how the cable management were done, the only way my daughter could have internet on the computer that she borrowed from her mom (the aforementioned Lady), was to have an ethernet cable pulled from the router into her room through the door, forcing her to be unable to actually close the door. She also rarely uses the computer anymore, since she’s playing games on console on her TV instead. So in order to let her be able to close the door, we removed the PC and ethernet cable, and we also changed the console she borrows (she had my PS4, she’s borrowing the Lady’s Xbox now instead). Thus, I had to move her TV-bench close to the outlet because of cables and the fact that the Xbox was larger than the PS4 so it couldnt fit on the TV-bench itself, so I also had to move one of her dressers close to the TV-bench to let the Xbox stand there instead. Then I promptly told her to tidy her room, because it was a mess!

The livingroom is where most of the energy went. Earlier, I had the computer desk at the furthest side of the room, just next to the ethernet outlets, next to the windows that is connected to the balcony. Next to the desk, we had a small “crafts table”, the sofa, with a fairly large clothes chest that had the lenght of it alongside the sofa and short end towards the wall pinned between the crafts table and the sofa, then we had a “book case corner” (two small book cases that enclosured the corner of the room – leaving a 0.5m x 0.5m gap on the floor being used for absolutely nothing), and going out from that corner-case (?), we had the Lady’s recordplayer and then the door entrance. Going from the balcony door, we had a large cedar coloured cabinet that held most of the Lady’s liqour and a water fountain tank, and infront of it we had the clothes rack. Next to the cabinet we had a thinner glassmonter where I had some Collectors Editions of games, my collectibles and some other stuff, then we had the kids toy drawers and table, then the TV-bench and a small cupboard that mostly placed there to cover the wall outlets.

Now, the computer desk stands in the lefthand corner from the door, so I had to pull a long cable from the ethernet outlet across the room along the wall. I hope that the little guy never finds that cable and pulls it..
That means that I now have the window that was above the sofa before on my right hand side, and the Lady’s old PC stands on the floor (I know, I want to lift it up from the floor but I have no way to do that right now) next to my desk, and the crafts table on the other side of it with her speakers, monitor, mouse and keyboard on it. On the other side of the window to my right, is that cedar cabinet, and just next to it we put the sofa. So except for directly underneath the window, the ethernet cable is held in place and out of view by the liquor cabinet and sofa atleast. Just infront of the sofa we put the kids play-table to act as both livingroom coffee-table as well as an area to play on, with the toy-drawer under the “balcony-side windows”. In the corner besides the actual balcony door I now have my “Collectibles-glassmonitor”, and going out from that corner alongside the wall is the TV-bench, the Lady’s recordplayer, the small cupboard and the two thin black bookcases that were in that corner I mentioned earlier. The clothes chest now sits infront of the TV-bench to “block access” to the consoles and cables from the little guy, and the clothes rack now occupies the wall besides the two book cases. To block, atleast the view, of the wall outlets that the cupboard blocked earlier, I put a small cooling chest. If the little guy ever gets close to the outlet to play with it, he needs to move that cooling chest first, which means there will be a lot of noise, so I can stop him then if not sooner. Ofcourse I have those outlet plugs for child safety, but there’s still the extention cord being used to power the TV and consoles there, and I dont want him to pull the plug.

The room feels alot bigger now – well, all three rooms does, kitchen, bedroom and living room, and it’s easier to move about. Earlier we had our bed so close to the big guy’s bed that there was basically no room to walk there to the Lady’s side of the bed, and it felt too “clustered” with beds. Now there’s actual walking space between the three beds (ours, the big guy’s and the crib). Which means that our dog now occupies said floorspace to lie on instead… You win some, you lose some.

Oh, and you can now reach the balcony without having to cross navigate everything and push and pull the clothes rack to get by. Which is a big win for me!

Now, my next project is to see if I can get a hold of a tub cheaply. I’d love to have one again, and it would be so much easier to give the boys a good scrubbing and to let them play with water alot easier. I mean, I love that the showerspace is so generous, but man I miss laying in a bath. Well, that, and to get my streaming situation fixed, it’s stuttering and pixely and all, and I do believe it’s a hardware issue, since my fiber is supposed to be 500/500, I’m fairly sure it’s not because of that. I think it’s because my PC cant be the gaming computer and the streaming computer, the CPU cant handle both at the same time.
(Dont tell the Lady, but that’s partly the reason why I ended up putting her PC next to mine, so that I’m going to use her old PC as the streaming PC when she’s not using it, and I’ll probably resort to using my own PC to as the streaming machine whenever I stream PS4/Switch games..)