Sunday, March 13, 2011

Setting Up Game Streaming

For a while I've wanted to figure out how to stream the games I play so that other people could watch if they wanted. I know I enjoy watching other people play games from time to time, so I thought it could be fun to have other people watch me. I've tried to get stuff set up for streaming before, but the sound didn't work right, or the video would end up choppy, or something would just go wrong. But yesterday, I was successful.

The key for me was a program called XSplit. I've watched a lot of other people stream League of Legends on own3d.tv and so I decided to make a channel there. They suggest using XSplit so I downloaded it and installed it. After setting up XSplit, I clicked broadcast to my own3d channel, and nothing showed up. It seemed like I was broadcasting, but even my friends couldn't see anything on my channel for some reason. The only time video would show up is when I'd turn off the broadcast. A brief amount of video would get through right at the end of the broadcast. I still haven't figured out why XSplit didn't work for me with own3d (I might need to open ports or something).

So I decided to try out my ustream.tv account that I'd already set up in my previous attempt at streaming since XSplit has an option to use a ustream account. Magically, it just worked. I did spend some time playing around with the settings in XSplit to get the sound to work right, but I was able to broadcast 2 hours of minecraft just fine. Then I decided to play a couple games of League of Legends, and they also worked just fine. One thing I'd noticed other streamers using to get LoL to work in windowed fullscreen mode, was a program to shift the window slightly. This thread on the LoL forums tells you where to get the program and how to set it up.

I also tried streaming a Starcraft 2 game, but the stream was kinda choppy, probably because I had the graphics a little too high. In the end, I'm glad to have streaming set up on my computer and I hope my experience with setting it up can help other people in the future

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