As of Saturday, my friends and I now are well underway to getting our blog project set up. We purchased our domain name. set up a basic WordPress blog on the new site, and set up an email and social media for our project, too. I made everyone email addresses for the domain as well as accounts for the WordPress blog. It’s definitely a good place to start. A lot of work needs to be done, but I think just getting the project rolling is better than nothing.
One thing that our group has been excited about is setting up a Twitch.tv channel so that we can stream fighting games, Let’s Play footage, and other gaming related things. Tyler and I had been talking about getting an XSplit license for a while now, so we finally decided to break down and do it while we were on a roll with setting up our current project. XSplit is a streaming product that allows for multiple inputs, text overlays, and other nifty little features for when you’re streaming or recording video. This was definitely the kind of product we wanted to have if we were going to start streaming our Persona 4 Arena (P4A) games, besides all the other things listed above. I’ve heard good things from other people about XSplit, and it was also affordable for our group, too. So after we got all the blog stuff squared away, we wanted to see if we could get the whole streaming thing rolling. We already had got a lot of things done that day… what was a little more work?
Wow. What a mess of an adventure. It was all worth it, but man… it sure wasn’t easy.
Tyler went and purchased XSplit, and as soon as he sent his payment in… we weren’t able to access the website to download the software. Even though he rebooted his PC, the website still gave us errors that wouldn’t let us download the software. I was able to access the website on my MacBook Pro, but for some reason we weren’t able to pull anything up on his computer. Not exactly the best way to start things. Eventually, after a bit of waiting and running around and stressing out, we were able to download the software from the website..
After getting the software installed on Tyler’s computer, we wanted to run some basic tests to start getting stuff ready for streaming. He was able to get his PS3 connected to XSplit just fine. Our next goal was to see if we could get a webcam feed going as well. I already have an HD webcam, so I dug it out of my stuff. We plugged it in to his computer and…
…another headache.
For some reason, XSplit wasn’t recognizing my webcam as a camera. No matter what we did, we kept getting an error saying that there wasn’t a camera connected to the computer (even though it obviously was). Not only that, but when we were trying to get the webcam to work, XSplit kept crashing. Not only that, but once XSplit would crash, we weren’t able to force close the program. Tyler kept having to reboot his PC, and we still kept having the same issue.
This was looking more and more frustrating, and we all were starting to wonder if we just paid for something we wouldn’t really be able to use. Not a good feeling, let me tell you. It was entirely possible that we just had an incompatible setup, but we all didn’t want to think that.
After even more running around, we were able to get this issue resolved by downloading the drivers and software for the webcam (should have thought of this in the first place). We were able to get feed from both the PS3 and the webcam going on at the same time. Awesome. We connected the feed to the Twitch.tv account that we made, and then we started fine-tuning what will be our setup for the P4A streams we’ll do in the future.
It took a lot of work with Tyler fine-tuning the technical details of the stream (such as the bitrate) so that we would get the best quality stream with the least amount of lag. Not only that, but we were trying to find the best way to lay out the elements of the stream (webcam footage, game footage, and player name overlays). We were at it for a couple of hours, but eventually we found a decent setup that actually worked well enough for all of us.
We ended up having a livestream of us playing P4A, and we actually had a couple of viewers that weren’t just our own friends. We got the quality of the stream running at a satisfactory level, we had two webcams running at the same time (our final product will probably have three webcams running at the same time–a room cam and two individual player cams), and we were able to efficiently change player name overlays quite efficiently. Even though it took several hours to get an optimal setup, I think we managed quite well for our first stream test. For our first day, I was more than pleased with the results we managed to obtain.
The only issue that we’re working on fixing is audio from multiple inputs. I’m sure we’ll be able to do something about this in the near future.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how this all turns out as we get better at what we do.
Tags: Atomic Mesa, P4A, Video Games