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Streaming

Posted By: tem_sat
Date: Monday, 7 August 2017, at 10:12 a.m.

In Response To: Streaming (institute)

I'll give you an example. I streamed 52 matches at the recent Chicago Open in May. I dual-streamed to Ustream. All matches were streamed at 360p. I used my Thinkpad laptop with the following specs:

Intel Core i7-5500U CPU @ 2.40GHz, 16 GB RAM, AMD Radeon R7 M265 and Intel HD Graphics 5500.

That worked perfectly fine when using Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder at that resolution for producing two simultaneous streams. However, that laptop is nowhere near strong enough to dual stream what we streamed in Monte Carlo.

The day before we started the Texas Backgammon Championships in February, I attempted to test exactly what we did in Monte Carlo, but on my Thinkpad laptop. I opened two instances of Open Broadcaster Studio (the software used to stream to Twitch) and started dual streaming to our two Twitch channels.

After about 10 minutes of streaming, my CPU usage hit 100% and I started to get alerts from the OBS program about exceeding resources. One of the instances of OBS then started to crash on me. I tried to close it down and eventually had no choice but to do a hard shutdown on the laptop. I then went to restart it and found it couldn't even boot up Windows after that. After about 6 hours, it fully cooled down and finally would properly restart, but it was clear to me that my laptop specs were no where near up to the task of dual streaming with OBS.

One of the main reasons I like streaming to Twitch is that we can stream in HD (720p) without having to pay a monthly fee, however, if we want to run two streams from the same computer, it requires that it have EXTREMELY strong specs.

In contrast, I did indeed use my Thinkpad laptop to single stream the final with commentary from this year's 42nd World Championship. It was obviously being streamed to Twitch at 720p. The Thinkpad handled that just fine, but it was only a single stream and I had no other resource-intensive programs running in the background.

So, as long as you are aware that streaming to Twitch while using OBS is a resource-intensive job, and are also urged to be very careful to test your system should you elect to try to dual-stream from a single laptop, then I would highly recommend trying Twitch the next time you might want to live stream matches from a tournament.

The laptop (it's really a portable desktop) that the USBGF acquired is a totally different animal. (We named it the 'Monster'.) It can handle just about anything you could possibly ask it to do. It was totally rock solid over the entire week of streaming. The major difference between my Thinkpad and the Monster is the graphics card. The Nvidia GTX 1080 is the strongest graphics card currently available. That is what is doing the heavy-lifting when it comes to encoding the live streams. As a result, the amount of CPU we were using while dual streaming matches on the Monster never went any higher than about 20%.

Here is an example of the difference in last year's streaming quality vs. this year's streaming quality.

Last year at 360p: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJPfJgUkIhM&index=2&list=PLyLgBOJrk48fNbdXZGPTREVdjeAE7nMna

This year at 720p: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfqFgQCEaiw&index=23&list=PLyLgBOJrk48cxqQk9uGFur33dciu7L3-5

I hope that helps!

Tara

Messages In This Thread

• Streaming
  institute -- Sunday, 6 August 2017, at 11:31 a.m.
  • Streaming
    Bill Riles -- Sunday, 6 August 2017, at 10:24 p.m.
  • Streaming
    tem_sat -- Monday, 7 August 2017, at 10:12 a.m.