Learning How to Live Stream Part 2
It’s been a year since I wrote my last post about “learning to live stream”. I think that should give you a very clear indication of how well I’ve progressed. I mainly stopped streaming after a few experiments last March because of the time requirement involved. The only window of opportunity I had “go live” was from between 9:00PM and Midnight. That would have meant cutting into time I spend with Mrs P. Plus, due to health reasons, she often goes to bed before me. And as I use the spare bedroom as an office, my constant babble would have kept her awake. So this is yet another project that got shelved. However, a year later I find myself with a lot more time on my hands due to the current “global situation”. So today I fired up SLOBS once again and tried to get back on the horse. As with my previous experience, there’s a lot of fine tuning to be done if you want to live stream to any standard. So this latest outing was mainly a technical test to determine what needs to be changed in my current set up.
First off, I’m running a different PC this time round. To cut a very long story short, there is a Intel Graphics chipset on the Gigabyte Motherboard but the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 doesn’t support it and requires a discrete graphics card. So I couldn’t run a second monitor this way, as I did last year. However, my current NVIDIA GTX 1050Ti has 3 outputs; DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. So after buying a DVI to VGA adapter, I managed to attach a second Acer X223W LCD monitor (1680 x 1050) and reconnected my existing primary Dell U2412M monitor (1920 x1200) with a DisplayPort cable. The cost was minimal (about £13 in total) and all items were delivered from Amazon in a matter of days.
The next issue has been tweaking various settings in SLOBS. Something that remains very much a work in progress. It took a while to resolve the “there was an error fetching your channel information" error message. Google presented a simple solution; enabling 2FA (Two Factor Authentication). However, it took several attempts before my Twitch Account recognised that this facility had been turned on. And then there’s the fiddling with settings. I play games at a default resolution of 1920 x 1200 (16:10) but the stream outputs at generic 1920 x 1080 (16:9) and so the image is distorted. I managed to resolve this issue after I stopped broadcasting. I also need to display my Twitch account Chat Channel on my second monitor so I can keep up with any comments. I suspect this wasn’t working earlier due to the 2FA issues, so I had to use my Fire HD 10 as an alternative means. It’s far from ideal. Another lesson learned is to stop using my headset and to switch to desktop mic. I was surprised how hot my ears and head got.
At present another matter that’s complicating this process is my own personality. I like things to be just so and it bugs the hell out of me when they’re not. I’ve yet to master the subtleties of SLOBS interface and many of its settings are not immediately clear to me. Hence every few minutes I’m Googling questions and then having to watch various YouTube videos for answers. I may have to speak to other streamers and see if I can essentially “crib” their settings as I’m sure that for many, this is a fairly generic process. In the meantime, I’ll try and persevere. If I stream every couple of days, I’m sure I can iron out some of the obvious imperfections and improve the overall presentation. As for sprucing up my “banter”, that’s a whole different blog post.
