Tag: twitch

Categories
software

OBS Studio 28.0 Released with HDR, Native Apple Silicon Support & Lots More

If you stream video and audio online in 2022 you’re probably using OBS Studio. It’s free and open source software to stream to Twitch, YouTube and plenty of other services that have been created and gone out of business in the decade that OBS has been around. Today OBS Studio 28.0 came out with native Apple Silicon support on Macs since 2020 with M1 and M2 chips, the start of support for HDR (mainly on Windows, unfortunately), and lots more including a major update to the appearance of OBS.

I stream every day on Twitch and using an Intel version of OBS Studio on a Mac through Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer for running Intel binaries on Apple Silicon has been alright, but native support for the M1 hardware in my laptop I’m on will mean OBS runs more efficiently and is potentially less likely to kick on the fans. Unfortunately, one of the biggest features for Apple Silicon users, more support for hardware-based encoding, is still waiting for macOS Ventura which won’t be out until later in the year.

OBS Studio 28.0 is free directly from the developers for Windows, macOS, and Linux,  at OBSProject.com. A lot of things changed in this release so I recommend reading the full release notes here and note that some plug-ins may need to be manually updated to support Apple Silicon. The OBS project has a guide for OBS Studio 28.0 plugin compatibility here and you may want to check for and backup installed plugins in these locations. Note that for the first few hours after this release the download link for macOS on OBSProject.com still points to the Intel (x86-64) version of OBS Studio. You may need to download the Apple Silicon (arm64) download directly from the bottom of the release notes page on GitHub.

Categories
video games

YouTube Gaming

YouTube’s Twitch-competitor, YouTube Gaming, launched yesterday as an app on mobile devices and as a website. There are three major improvements that the announcement touts:

  • YouTube Gaming is your go-to destination for anything and everything gaming because it automatically pulls in all gaming-related videos and live streams from YouTube.
  • Viewers get personalized gaming recommendations based on the games and channels they collect. With over 25,000 game pages and even more gaming channels, it’s never been easier to connect with your gaming community.
  • We’ve also made it easier to create a live stream – check out the beta version of our new way to go live at youtube.com/stream today.

Lets talk about them in reverse order, starting with the streaming improvements.

If you wanted to stream to YouTube before, you had to manually schedule a start time and end time as an upcoming event. Scheduling didn’t suit the unplanned streams that are typical of Twitch and other game streaming sites. There’s a new dashboard for streamers as well that is a definite improvement over the Twitch dashboard because it seems like someone at YouTube actually put some thought into the design and what information streamers want to see when they’re streaming. Large text lets you know the health of your stream’s quality, how many people are watching, and how long you’ve been streaming for.

When you’re finished streaming, the stream will be archived by YouTube and begin processing immediately. Twitch only saves your videos temporarily and waits a short time for you to create highlight reels from them with a YouTube export option. For people who don’t have storage space or the upload bandwidth and time to dedicate to editing and re-uploading a local copy of their recorded stream this could be a great improvement. 

Of course there are the typical launch-day issues.

Yesterday, when I first attempted to stream Black Ops 3 to YouTube Gaming from Open Broadcaster Software, the new live video dashboard said that my stream was fine but all viewers saw was a blank “offline” message. Later in the day the issue cleared up and streaming worked.

Overall, the front-end for viewers on YouTube Gaming is redundant when all of the same content is available through YouTube proper. Scrolling through the homepage can best be described as an experience in wondering how a website from a major technology company in 2015 with so many resources can perform so poorly and slow your browser down so much if the new site loads at all. Today when I browse to gaming.youtube.com in Chrome I get a 404 page. Now we’re into launch week issues.

When it does load, YouTube Gaming’s front-end is fine and replaces the most common textual searching for live and archived game videos that users do with graphical box art of games to follow and click on to find what they’re looking for. The carousel of the most popular live video streams at the top of the page is a major improvement over the similar feature on Twitch’s front page. Twitch’s front-door carousel immediately starts loudly defiling your speakers or headphones even if you’re just momentarily browsing the front page while looking for something else or logging into the site. YouTube is nice enough to mute the audio.

The duplicated content just makes me think Google is getting ready for when, like other Google products have done after 6 months to a year, YouTube Gaming goes kaput and reintegrates with YouTube. This is a product that doesn’t need to exist. It is a sub-brand of a sub-brand of a product at a company that was fine without a gaming-specific site. At a time when the major improvement YouTube needs is a reduction in automated copyright notices that deny gaming video creators the ability to monetize their work on that platform YouTube is instead focused on recapturing a group of live streamers that long ago departed for the more live stream friendly waters at Twitch.

Competition for Twitch is good, but in order for a site to compete with Twitch effectively it needs to be useful from day one. YouTube Gaming is not quite there yet.

Categories
internet video games

YouTube Gaming

Alan Joyce:

This summer, we’ll launch YouTube Gaming, a brand new app and website to keep you connected to the games, players, and culture that matter to you, with videos, live streams, and the biggest community of gamers on the web–all in one place.

YouTube Gaming is built to be all about your favorite games and gamers, with more videos than anywhere else. From “Asteroids” to “Zelda,” more than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that title. You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTube creators.

Keeping up with these games and channels is now super easy, too. Add a game to your collection for quick access whenever you want to check up on the latest videos. Subscribe to a channel, and you’ll get a notification as soon as they start a live stream. Uncover new favorites with recommendations based on the games and channels you love. And when you want something specific, you can search with confidence, knowing that typing “call” will show you “Call of Duty” and not “Call Me Maybe.”

 Live streams bring the gaming community closer together, so we’ve put them front-and-center on the YouTube Gaming homepage. And in the coming weeks, we’ll launch an improved live experience that makes it simpler to broadcast your gameplay to YouTube. On top of existing features like high frame rate streaming at 60fps, DVR, and automatically converting your stream into a YouTube video, we’re redesigning our system so that you no longer need to schedule a live event ahead of time. We’re also creating single link you can share for all your streams.

A sub-site specific to games with custom search isn’t going to solve everything wrong with using YouTube for game streaming and pre-recorded videos but the other changes are very important. Scheduling a live event ahead of time makes sense for developers and publishers live streaming but doesn’t always work for people like me who would rather build up an audience of subscribers who get notified when I go live.

The most important change YouTube could make is to recognize that I’m in a game and more intelligently handle copyright notices. Video games are full of copyrighted music, and without legal advisement it is difficult to navigate YouTube’s current copyright notice system. To be fair, YouTube is more intelligently handling that problem than Twitch’s policy of just muting the audio for the portion of the video where the copyrighted music is present. I’m still terrified that my YouTube account will get shut down if I dispute the copyright notices with a claim of fair use, which is the only way to get some videos to be viewable again in the United States.