With the recent tease of nasa of a new found major discovery in the planetary neighborhood, NASA came out today to announce they have found, with the help of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) the evidence of salty water flowing on mars.
Open Broadcaster Software (OBS for short) is one of my favorite pieces of free software. It's extremely versatile in function, allowing you to do many things that paid software can do without spending a dime.
What is OBS?
Plainly, it is a program that allows you to stream to many different sources as shown below, or record to local storage.
It allows you to set up multiple video/image/text sources on your scene to add whatever you may need. Game? Obviously. Facecam? Can do, will do. Want to set up a ticker when someone subscribes or for relevant stream information? That's possible.
What is QuickSync?
QuickSync is a technology that Intel implemented in 2011 on the Sandy Bridge architecture of its CPUs. When enabled, your computer will do video transcoding using the integrated GPU on your processor instead of using your cores or a dedicated GPU.
Other reading.
Okay, why does it matter? Why use it compared to Raptor or ShadowPlay and FRAPS?
Good question! A lot of this comes down to personal preference and is based around low level computer hardware in theory. Both Raptor and ShadowPlay still have an impact on performance, not much, but that little bit can make a difference between hitting smooth enough frame rates and starting to get annoying stutters and lag. In the case of FRAPS, as will be shown below, for a low end system that will not be the solution.
Why deal with that when there's a zero-impact solution that does better?
The main benefit of QuickSync is that your CPU and GPU have alleviated loads because there's no extra encoding done on them, allowing your tasks such as gaming to run at full speed unimpeded.
Why not FRAPS? Everyone uses FRAPS!
Fraps was useful when it released, it was one of a handful of good recording programs for games that wasn't watermarked and provided performance metrics that were useful. Downside? Your performance tanks if you want good quality. And you'll have a hard time of storing all your videos. 24 hour gameplay session you want to put on YouTube? I hope you have a large RAID array for all that footage.
I've done a test, some variance between the runs but the point is made nonetheless. FRAPS will do worse for your framerate for the same, but I'd have to argue worse, quality.
Here we have the test shown running with QuickSync, unfortunately I have no ability to point a camera at my monitor and run it without OBS recording, so you'll have to take my word that there's no performance impact.
FRAPS? Good luck playing with that frame rate.
And of course, the quality. The above was recorded in OBS (Again, OBS did not effect frame rate) but you'll want the raw footage to see for yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-Bo1Wno05c
Remember the difference in file sizes I mentioned? FRAPS took up 4.22 GB for a shorter run, 106 MB using OBS for the same quality.
You've convinced me, my computer is not the best, I don't have Linus' storinator, and I want to upload my gameplay to YouTube. Where do I begin?
Congratulations on taking your first step to a better recording experience! To begin, we must verify that your CPU is even able to begin the task of QuickSync encoding.
Now, I'm a lazy person, too much so to deal with Intel's website, so we'll use Google-fu. Open up Google and type in your CPU's name.
But I don't know what it is?? It's just an Intel!
Okay.. Back one step. Press your Windows key or click the start menu, we're about to search up in this bish. Type "dxdiag" with no quotes. Click dxdiag.exe.
You'll get a window like this, you can find your processor shown with the red arrow.
Okay! I've found out what I have!
Excellent, back to Google-fu young grasshopper. Nine times out of ten if you put in your processor tier (i3/i5/i7) and SKU you'll get the first or second result from Intel's website. Click that link.
Now you've found your way to Intel's spec-sheet page. There's a lot of interesting information here, but only one field that's necessary for our needs. Intel Quick Sync Video. If the circled field says "Yes" then you're in luck! You're able to do this! Click on "Software Downloads" now. Sort by your operating system, and change the relevance to "newest." Download the latest driver for your system, making sure it's not the Pentium/Celeron driver if that's not what you have. Install the driver.
Now what?
Well, first you need to go in your BIOS and enable the iGPU even when there's a dedicated one in the system. This varies by system, motherboard, etc. Make sure you have the latest BIOS version (hey this site is helpful to find out how to do that) and enable it.
Now, I've followed the following video the first time I did this, but I think I can summarize it pretty well.
Not using the LTT video because quite frankly it's...lacking...
Right click your desktop and hit "Screen Resolution." Press the "Detect" button in the top right.
So far in all of my testing and with various evidence you are going to need to have a secondary monitor plugged in to your motherboard in order to enable the iGPU so you can capture with OBS. As I've shown, it's easiest to just set it to the top left corner using a second input on your primary monitor and just ignore it. Top left because you will very rarely, if ever lose something up there. And if you do you can just use OBS to show the screen without having to change input settings on your monitor. Which is nice.
Now, sometimes this is all you'd need to do for enabling QuickSync. But in my case, and probably yours, you'll have to plug in a monitor to the motherboard. Roll your eyes at this, I know. But it's a necessary requirement it seems. You can do what I did and plug your motherboard in to your current monitor for all intents and purposes. As you can see above, I have mine plugged in to my current monitor, set it to a low resolution and move it to the very top left. I'm not likely to accidentally lose a window or my cursor with it there, so that's how I use it. If you have a second monitor to use however, go right ahead and use it as you normally would.
Done! How do I have fun in OBS now?
Home stretch, we're almost there.
Start OBS, click settings, and go to the encoding tab. This is where the magic starts. There'll be a radial button for QuickSync, click it.
Now personally, I set my bit rate to 60,000 and enable CBR (constant bit-rate) for maximum quality no matter the scene, and it works well, as shown above. If you're streaming however, set it at most to 3,500, no higher.
Set your output folder, and file name. Make sure when you're setting it that you switch from *.flv files to *.mp4 files. You might notice in the top file path box I have D:\OBS\OBS-$T.mp4, the file name is OBS.mph but the -$T is a sequence to add the full date and time that the file was recorded. Handy if you need to keep track of multiple files instead of renaming it constantly.
Here are my video settings, I prefer recording at 1080p and 30fps because my system can't maintain 60 all the time. And it helps keep the file sizes even smaller. But this is all up to what you want to do.
Next you'll want to make sure you QuickSync preset is set to 1 for best quality, enable CFR to make sure your frame rate doesn't fluctuate, change your encoding profile to main, and the keyframe interval to "2." Notice you are able to set OBS to allow recordings/streams up to 120 fps.
Finally, set your audio options and whether you want the microphone/sound device muted in OBS on the main window (enabled shows red by clicking on the speaker/mic icons, gray is muted).
After that you can set up your scene?
Yup, this is the very last step.
On the main OBS window you'll see two white boxes, the one on the left is your scenes and the one on the right are the sources for your different scenes. This is helpful for when you need different overlays on what you may be doing, but don't want to constantly create and recreate scenes.
Now, there are orders to how sources is listed. Sources at the top will be overlayed on top of sources below them. In general you'll want a game to be the very bottom source so everything else is overlayed as shown in my example at the top of the post.
To add a source to your scene just right click on the source box, mouse over "add," and click what you would like.
Window Capture - This is for capturing a window you have open, say Chrome, Spotify's playlist, etc.
Here you have options to select what you want to do with the window you've selected. Notable options are a sub-region, so you can select only a section of the window instead of the full window, and a color-key so you can make a window transparent except for certain colors inside (helpful for say a twitch chat).
Monitor Capture - This is for adding a source showing your entire monitor, useful if you're wanting to record a guide shown on your desktop.
Image - Adds a still image to your space, I personally can't find any uses for it except maybe a short FAQ or tip jar maybe? Choices are endless.
Image slideshow - This is like the Image option, but allows you to select multiple images to rotate between showing.
Text - Plain text can be added to the space. You can choose font, color, size, formatting, etc.
Video Capture Device - This is for use with capture cards or webcams.
Game Capture - And here we have the most important source, game capture. Open your game and alt tab, refresh on the preferences and use the drop-down menu to select your game. Resize or set it to stretch and even ignore aspect ratios to make it fit your space and you'll be up and running.
Done? For realsies?
Done. The only thing left is for you to set up your personal scene and get cracking on those videos.
If you all have any questions don't hesitate to ask, I don't know everything but I can give it a good shot and will at least lead you in the right direction.
Ugh this is Windows XP all over again. People sticking to vastly obsolete OS' for the hell of it. Listen Windows 7 was nice.. in 2010. Just let it go. Even Windows 8.1 has been vstly superior to 7 for over a year.
Google introduced Project Sunroof, an easy way to test if your roof is suitable for solar panels.
It is currently only available in the following cities: San Francisco Bay Area, Fresno CA and Greater Boston MA.
Source: http://www.google.com/sunroof
I think it is a great way to get an idea about how effective the solar panels would be on your roof and hope that it will also come available in other places around the world.
Wow, what? Isn't Google basically the god of the internet? It's a little weird to me that they can simply be acquired...
EDIT: Oh, this is a Google project thing, I see.
Everyone doing multiplayer games nowadays do a horrible job at singleplayer, that's why no one plays them.
I LOVED Call of Duty 4's and both Battlefield Bad Company's singeplayer campaigns, but both went down the drain for every single installment afterwards.
I wouldn't blame the players not playing them, I would blame the devs either not caring or the publishers not giving enough time for the devs to actually make a meaningful singleplayer.
*Edit, to continue on after thinking about this a bit more.
I'd be fine for them not making a campaign mode, but I'm not fine with it still being $60. The multiplayer better be amazing to be worth full price, otherwise this will be another bargain bin pickup for me just like BF4 and BF3.
You know, I'd probably be fine if they did $30-$40 multiplayer game, then add a $30 Season Pass or something and charge $60 for a bundle, make it worth it at least.
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