Streaming Multiple Devices For School Esports Program

Falcorn · April 19, 2022

First of All Let me say thanks for any help that you can give me. Getting a Bit out of my zone for this one.

I work for a School District in the states and my school is wanting to become a host for our states esports program. What this entails is that we have to purchase some gaming pcs some Nintendo Switch's, Xboxes and some ps4's. We also have to be able to have a way to view said systems. And The person in charge of the esports team wants to stream the systems to twitch/youtube. Im Trying to figure out what would be the Best way to facilitate this.

What pops into my head is that we can Use obs for the Stream and have 3 streaming pcs. One to stream 5 pcs, One to stream another 5 Pc's and the 3rd one to stream the consoles. However im not sure if thats the best way to do it or how to get to that point. Do i just buy a capture card for every device and throw it into the streaming pc and have at it or what. Honestly i am a bit confused on how to get there. Bandwidth is not an issue as i already plan on putting a 10gig switch into the esports room along with a fiber connection to said switch so they can use our 5gig internet connection. Cost is also a bit of an issue but i have already made hime aware that it is going to be insanlet expensive to do this. Also do you think a lan cache would be worth it or do you think it would be to difficult to pull off in an educational network.

mariushm · April 19, 2022

You're gonna need hdmi capture cards for the consoles, with pass through (one hdmi in , one hdmi out). Ideally, you're gonna want hdmi capture cards that send the raw video to the computer, not cards that have a hardware h264 encoder on them and compress the captured video before sending to pc (that introduces latency, and reduces quality of the captured video and also adds the extra step of decoding the h264 stream back into raw video)

You could use NDI or something similar to push lightly compressed streams through the network to the main broadcast pc - basically see all those capture cards as separate "inputs" in your main obs, and use those inputs in scenes. For 1080p content, this network transfer would probably be in the 200 mbps

Network transfers related to broadcast and streaming should go either on separate switches or at least in a separate vlan, safer to not mix it with regular traffic.