Critical Edge: Building Your Own Stream (Part 1)

Just to add to the OP. The computer for streaming doesn't need to be as powerful as the one listed. I personally use an ancient computer (Athlon 64 3000, 2gb and geforce 7200. pretty crappy specs by today's standards) for my capture card (blackmagic intensity pro) and it's good enough for capturing uncompressed footage.

You'll need a more powerful CPU if you wanna record to a compressed format and if you wanna stream at the same time, but about any quad core and any good dual core should be powerful enough. The only reason to go crazy with RAM and GPU is if you want it to be a multipurpose PC. There's no way getting around the fact you'll need a harddrive raid if you wanna record uncompressed though.

I haven't confirmed this myself, but I've read that as of the mandatory xbox 360 update which released this December the xbox uses HDCP when outputting via HDMI, which means blackmagic capture devices can't capture directly from an xbox 360 using HDMI anymore.

I assume Jaxel will talk about it in a future post, but it's also insanely important to note your maximum upload for streaming. You can check your current upload max here: http://speedtest.net/

I don't have a lot of experience with streaming, but if your upload speed is 100KB/s or lower, then I don't think you can expect to stream in any good quality. And of course, common sense applies, if you or anyone in the house turns on torrents or anything which takes a lot of bandwidth, then the stream will become awful.

And also remember you can open the stream yourself to check on the quality. I've found that bandwidth is the one thing people underestimate and the primary reason why streams end up choppy.
 
I haven't confirmed this myself, but I've read that as of the mandatory xbox 360 update which released this December the xbox uses HDCP when outputting via HDMI, which means blackmagic capture devices can't capture directly from an xbox 360 using HDMI anymore.
Just to confirm, you can still stream from HDMI on BMI devices as of the latest update. Just did so a couple of days ago :) I have a feeling the HDCP only covers copy-protected video content.
 
Does anyone know if games are playable through the blackmagic? That is, if I were to hook my xbox straight into a blackmagic, display the video on screen and try to play how much lag would there be? Would it be unplayable lag, noticable lag, or pretty much ok actually?

My end goal is to put an overlay on the screen while playing. Is there a way to accomplish that goal without a capture device?
 
Does anyone know if games are playable through the blackmagic? That is, if I were to hook my xbox straight into a blackmagic, display the video on screen and try to play how much lag would there be? Would it be unplayable lag, noticable lag, or pretty much ok actually?

My end goal is to put an overlay on the screen while playing. Is there a way to accomplish that goal without a capture device?
There is fairly noticeable lag. Do you mean that you want to see the overlay on the actual screen you are playing on? That won't be possible without lag. Typically you split the signal, play unaffected on another TV/monitor, and then run the other signal to your capture device and do your stream business on the computer.
 
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