Twitch.tv

• Streaming

Over the holiday weekend I started a new Twitch channel for EndgameViable, because I like to do weird stuff like broadcast my gaming sessions for the entire world to see. Plus, all the kids are doing it. (Actually I’m not sure if I like it or not, but I like it when other people do it.)

So yeah, tune in and watch me play games you’ve already seen before! Follow @endgameviable on Twitter and you’ll get an obnoxious tweet every time I go live.

I feel like I need to come up with some kind of gimmick for this. Because I don’t think people tune in to watch the games themselves, they tune in to see the commentary about the games. So maybe I should talk in a funny voice (besides my real one) or wear a funny hat or something to distinguish myself. Maybe I can get my dog involved somehow.

Anyway, one of my short-term goals is to find a way to capture/broadcast some of the old Quake demos I have. I’ve managed to install nQuake and play the demos, but I still have two problems: 1) All the players in the demo have the same default skin so you can’t tell anyone apart, and 2) ezQuake doesn’t seem to stream all that well. The only way I could get anything but a black screen was to run it in a window on my desktop, and then capture the monitor output, which looked pretty awful.

For the technically curious, I started out using FFSplit, but I was getting rather frustrated with it because it crashed quite a lot. So I tried something called Open Broadcaster Software (OBS). It’s a bit harder to setup but it’s a lot more stable, and it seems to have more flexibility in adding overlays and stuff. I just wish they would add some compression/ducking options to the mic input.