[Tut] Streaming with XSplit for all.

*Edit - This tutorial is to allow users to STREAM the game, not play it themselves while streaming although I have added a section at the bottom thanks to Toxjee about how you could tweak it to stream yourself while playing.

Before you continue reading, I want everyone to understand I’m writing this out of experience, nothing here is fact and I’m completely open to anyone’s opinions on where they think something could be done differently.

So you want to stream your matches but have no idea how? I thought I would make a thread to give everyone a helping hand as I do get quite a few requests every day to help out with streams and I have no issue with helping anyone set up a stream. So below is my reasonably in-depth tutorial on how to you use XSplit and stream Call of Duty 4 (I will add other games too upon request)

I will be doing the tutorial as if I was setting up a stream, so feel free to use the guide as a walk through or just take the parts you need.

Hardware:
So first off, let’s try establish what you need to stream:
(This is minimum when you aim for a stable 720p 30fps 8/10 – quality stream)
CPU’s
Quad-Core (2.8Ghz +)
i3’s that are overclocked are stable-ish
Desktop i5’s do pretty well

High speed DDR2 or DDR3 RAM will do great. You would want about 3/4Gig’s minimum.
Graphics card isn’t all too important as capturing, processing, encoding of images (the frames) and streaming onto the internet is mainly CPU intensive.

You will need a reasonable amount of hard drive space if you plan on keeping the video files on your PC. (30 minute maps will run you about 500-700MB depending on quality)

For your internet, you will be look at about 2-3mb/s upload speed for a 720p/30fps/10quality stream. The more overhead you have, the better for when your stream peaks due to a high action scene.

Any headset with a microphone will do you good.


Software:
XSplit – This is an all-inclusive streaming application.
Website: www.xsplit.com/
Download XSplit: www.xsplit.com/download/

This is what it looks like once you’ve created an account and started up the application.




From here, we can break things into sections as we could first screen capture our game, set up our channel or create our scenes. Let’s capture our game first though.


Call of Duty 4 Setup:

(Jump to the bottom of this post to figure out how to incorporate this setup with streaming yourself while you play)

First we’re going to start with CoD4 as this is unfortunately not supported by XSplit to run fullscreen. What I would recommend doing is starting up CoD4 and creating a streaming config. (Please don’t ask for mine as I don’t want everyone’s stream to look the exact same, try some of your own tweaks to make it personal!)

So open up CoD4 and create your new config. Next type in these commands:

r_fullscreen 0
vid_restart
cg_scoreboardheight 500 (This hides the server IP to stop any people bothering the match)

Be sure to adjust the CoD4 window to an area that suits you well on your screen.

You can change your resolution to accommodate your screen although I found working with 1280x720 (16:9 ratio) best as it would mean that there is less resizing for XSplit to do.

You will now be left with this:




Screen Capturing:

Now we need to get the video fed into XSplit and this is how you do it:
Click “Add” on your Scene you would like to use, (I’m using Scene 1 and renamed it to “Game” by typing in the upper right text box above the scene selection) then click “Add screen region…”. Your screen will now turn to black/white with a red cross to help you select the area you would like to stream. Simple logic tells us that the game is running 1280x720 pixels as it’s what we selected, therefore, we need to select INSIDE the borders of the CoD4 window and it should equal to 1280x720 pixels of screen capture.

It should look like this when you’re about to let go of your mouth button:




The captured area will appear small after you’ve captured your region, don’t panic! Just hover your mouse over the corner of the game inside your streaming window and drag it to stretch over the whole area of your streaming window. You should now have a game covering the whole streaming window.


Understanding the “View” menu:

The view menu is literally how viewers will see the stream. Anything you change in there will affect your stream, so let’s break it down into each sub-section and how we’re going to accommodate it for our stream.

Resolutions:

When we open the resolution view, we see this:




For this stream I have selected 1280x720 (16:9) – HDTV (video)

This is of course so we can run our HD stream, but what if the resolution you’re looking for isn’t there? Maybe 1280x720 is just too high? Maybe you want to keep your high quality and lower your resolution so that your CPU can handle the encoding?

For this, we’re going to jump into our settings. Click on:
Tools -> General Settings… -> Resolutions

This will bring up a large list of resolutions with their aspect ratios next to them. You will see the majority are unticked and the few that are ticket are the ones in your “View – Resolutions” list. My advice is to search for any 16:9 resolutions as this is what the majority of people use around the world. Imagine this scenario: Your CPU doesn’t seem to be handling your 1280x720/30fps/10quality stream, so what you could do is drop it to 1088x612, keeping the 16:9 aspect ratio and your 10 quality with 30fps but now your CPU can handle the stream.


Frame Rate:

Frame rate, ah, the thing all CoD4 players would kill for. With streaming it’s the same scenario, more FPS in stream, the smoother the game and the happier the viewer. We have to take in mind though that more FPS means more upload speed. So we’re sticking to our 30fps for now but can look into it later. Nothing more, nothing less here.

Our view option gives us this:



Now, the next two (or one depending on your version) I’m going to skip as it’s completely unnecessary to change although feel free to play around with it. So with this we move straight on to Scale Viewport. Scale viewport is simply as it says; it just scales things down to help you fit everything on one screen. I generally have mine around 40% so that I can keep it on my screen while not letting it cover my game.


Your channel/Stream settings:

Now we’re getting into the nitty-gritty things. In this part we’re going to be adding our live channel and getting our settings set up. Head over to “Broadcast” and then click “Edit Channels”. Pro tip: Middle-Mouse click your channel to quickly access your settings once it’s been set up. Now, your list won’t look the same as mine so don’t freak out when you don’t have the same channels as I do. Click on “Add channel” on the right hand side and select your streaming service.

Here’s my little Pro’s/Con’s to the services available:

Twitch/Justin.TV – Pro’s: Very game based, easy to use, has a chat with the stream, possibility for partnerships are relatively easy. Con’s: You must be partnered for a delay service and automatic VoD’s record everything you stream for only 2 weeks until partnered at which point they never disappear.

Own3d.TV – Pro’s: Delay service for non-partners, selective recording of streams and chat services that utilises IRC so you can combine it with your own channel. Con’s: Seems to be very LoL/HoN based with few FPS streams.
I won’t talk about the other services as they aren’t really Gaming related or easy to work with.


For this tutorial, we will be using Twitch.TV/Justin.TV. By click on the service for your channel you will get the settings page for your new channel which will look like this:



The settings above are the settings I would recommend for our tutorial stream. Be sure to set your “Location” to the server nearest to you. Once you have completed this, you are ready to try out your stream and test your settings! Testing is the longest part of any setup. Most streamers could agree, setting this stream up would take around 10 minutes while testing would go on for hours just to make sure we’re getting the best performance out of our kit.



Continue reading to learn about multiple scenes and binds.
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So you’re streaming a cup and the games have breaks between them, let’s add some cut scenes so that people don’t have to see you chatting to players on xfires and showing IP’s!

For this part, we will be working with the “Scene” section of XSplit. Bro tip: Name the scenes you use – Having multiple scenes causes confusion and you will likely select the wrong scene not knowing what it’s for.


Scenes:

When working on scenes, first thing to do is make your “Scale Viewport” a decent size so that you can lay things out correctly and have a clear view of what your viewers will see. Let’s add an image of anything related to what you’re streaming, it will be used so that you can divert to another screen between games. Click “Add” -> “Add media file…” and then select the image you would like to use. I will be using a old Team-Element screen I used during a cup to advertise a little for them (You owe me for this Kevlar!).

Once again, stretch the image out to cover the whole streaming area. You will have something that looks like this:



As you can see, the image is laid out for us and we can now add more on top of this.


Text in scenes:

So we want to say who’s coming next on stream just to allow the viewers some notice of what’s coming their way and how long they could expect to be waiting for the next game to start. For this we will once again head over to the “Add” -> “Add title…” which brings up a box that allows us to enter text. From this we can add teams who are going to be playing and what it will start. Bro tip: Untick “Show Embedded fronts only” for a larger text choice. For this example I will be using scrolling text to show the stream is rolling video and change it to red to make it stand out among the background. Text CAN be edited during a stream unlike other settings.




Hotkeys:

Our final piece for this tutorial! In this section we will look at how you could use hotkeys to change between scenes so you don’t have to alt+tab out of games. Head over to “Tools” -> “General Settings” -> “Hotkeys”. Once in Hotkeys we will be able to set certain key combinations to scenes. For example, pressing ctrl+2 will take you to our “Wait” scene while pressing ctrl+1 will take us back into the “Game” scene.




Streaming while you play
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First off, I want to thank Toxjee for this tip as I didn't think about/do it myself, so full credit to him.

So, instead of having your game set up for your stream angle, set it up to your standard config but set it to windowed mode (r_fullscreen 0) then use the commands below to make the window "hide" the borders.

seta vid_xpos "-3"
seta vid_ypos "-25"
(vid_restart at this point to view your changes)

If it seems the game screen it too high or too low, use the "ypos" command to change the height. Some screens will have difficulty (such as mine) which for some odd reason seems bigger than the game resolution, not by much though. I don't have a fix for this at this point in time.

Toxjee and myself would HIGHLY recommend a second screen for this setup though as your start bar will begin to annoy you covering the game. This can be in a few ways, here are the 2 common ones.

1 - Drag your start bar to your second screen.
2 - Ctrl + Alt + Delete and end "explorer.exe" only to restart it once you're done streaming.

Once again, thanks to Toxjee

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To close off, here’s a FAQ I will be updating with any questions I pick up in the replies:

Q: My stream is black and dies when I try stream!
A: Make sure you’re in windowed mode.

Q: My microphone audio is not being picked up, where could I change it?
A: Tools -> General Settings -> General -> Microphone

Q:My PC can't handle the settings you posted and I want to try some other settings, can you help?
A: Sure, just drop your specs, upload speed and what you've tried already and I'll reply with settings I feel would work, test those out and help you find the right settings.



If you guys have any big issues or need further help then contact me on email at mennace[atsign]quadv.com

Hope it helps!


edited 2011-12-18 12:08:52