I tried to get OBS running tonight.

I failed.

I’ve been streaming direct from the PS4 up to this point, but my reasons for trying to get OBS to work is to get two main things:

  1. I’d like to be able to add random things to the screen, such as timers for my speedruns, or things like “stream starting soon” or “on a short break” type of messages

  2. ability to record playthroughs direct to my hard drive with the commentary

I’ve got an elgato. It theoretically does #2, but in my experience, capturing the live audio commentary inside of the elgato software results in a commentary track that is horribly out of sync with the gameplay. Apparently elgato is working on a version of their software where you’ll finally be able to have the live audio commentary as a separate audio track, but that still doesn’t tell me how much of a syncing nightmare it’s going to be.

Second, in my experience, once you tell the elgato to livestream what you’re doing, your hard drive recording quality plummets. Basically, if twitch were more reliable, your hard drive copy would be about the same quality as you’d get just downloading your broadcast later from twitch.

So then. OBS it is!

Tonight, I basically bailed on OBS because I couldn’t get the syncing to work quite right. I’d fiddle with the mic offset and could never get things to line up quite right.

Frankly, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the problem were me given that I seem to tie my brain in knots anytime I’m trying to figure out an audio/visual sync problem. My brain seems to only know that they’re out of sync. Yet for some reason, it can’t identify which one is ahead and which one is behind.

Plus, I do wonder if the OBS settings take a little time to take hold and possibly that was my problem. Like, that I was basically testing before the audio had time to catch up. Who knows.

I was also reminded of how much I hate Windows. It’s the little things. Like the fact that I don’t know where anything is in Windows 8. Or that I can’t remap the caps lock key to ctrl without going into the registry apparently. Or that my trackpad is both backwards (since I got used to the “natural” scroll direction on the mac) and that the acceleration is just all wrong.

And then the audio. Oh god, the audio.

My freaking Turtle Beach headset just magically works on the mac side. On the windows side, after I installed Reason, it complained about lack of inputs. So I installed ASIO4ALL and promptly got blasted by feedback since it defaulted to the internal mic/speaker combination.

And then apparently, Reason can’t be used alongside the rest of the system audio. WTF? It’s 2014 and we’re still having this problem of audio devices having to be exclusive to one app? I tried futzing with the settings, but then, instead of getting error messages about the device already being in use, Reason would simply make no sound at all.

Oy vey.

I really really just want to be able to hear myself when I stream. For instance:

  • is my box fan too loud? (I nearly died the first few nights when I decided to turn it off so it wasn’t distracting; I’ve since decided that the airflow benefits outweigh the audio pitfalls)
  • am I bumping the mic inadvertantly? (especially given that I have a headset where one of the cables tends to keep rubbing against the mic arm causing some nice static)
  • am I making breathing noises? (I try to avoid this by keeping the mic below chin level, but how am I to know if I can’t hear myself)
  • is my voice distorted? (especially when I get excitable and yell at the PS4)

The built-in monitoring on my headset is simply not loud enough for me to be able to tell any of this. Plus, I would really like to run my mic audio through Reason, so I could apply things like a noise gate, some compression maybe (or a limiter at least), maybe a few goofy effects.

OBS does have a noise gate, but as far as I can tell there’s no way to actually hear what it’s doing. They give you a visual monitor, but that’s not enough to know if the gate is making your breathing noises worse (for instance, oftentimes, if I have no noise gate and take a breath, it just sounds like a normal breath, but with the noise gate it chops it up such that the breath ends up being more noticeable).

OBS on the mac

A girl can dream. Audio would certainly be far more pleasant to work with on the Mac side.

The OBS peeps are indeed working on a universal version of the OBS software (and the mac beta is already available), but apparently I’m screwed because Elgato apparently refuses to release proper mac drivers that will work with it.

I do wonder though how well just plain old screen capture of the elgato window would work. I’ll probably even try that at some point. My concern is that I think it would be less efficient than OBS being able to read the elgato’s data directly, possibly resulting in lesser video quality and/or higher CPU usage and/or more disk space required for recordings. Etc, etc.

However, all of this is slightly moot at the moment as the mac version of OBS doesn’t even have a mic offset built-in (supposedly the code exists, but they haven’t built a UI interface to it yet).

Well, I suppose it’s not moot as I could probably whip something together through a combination of soundflower and sox to add the delay myself, but since I need to be able to hear myself without the delay, well, my head starts to spin thinking about it all.

For good or bad, OBS on Windows is probably the way to go, at least for the foreseeable future.

I’m sure I’ll be able to figure out an acceptable mic offset at some point. My biggest concerns are:

  1. will the mic offset need to be fiddled with every single session or will it be somewhat reliable?
  2. will the mic offset need to be fiddled with over the course of a single session? I mean, from my test recordings with the elgato software directly, the delay that existed 0 minutes into the session would not be the same delay 30 minutes later.

And if we’re talking about a 4-6 hour Tomb Raider stream, oy vey, I can’t even fathom how far things could drift.

I do wonder how much a faster computer might change the drifting sync situation with the elgato.

But maybe, just maybe, the drifting sync is an elgato software problem and OBS would be immune to it.

So obviously, I need to get things going with OBS and then have the guts to do an entire session with it, that may well crash and burn.

Hey, if I had the bandwidth for it, I’d just have two twitch accounts and send one feed direct from the PS4 and the other feed from OBS and then see what would happen.

As it is, I’m lucky if I have the upload bandwidth to support a single stream.