Isno's Live Stream Kit HOWTO (en)

[Isnogud]

For more than three month now I am working on the "Projekt:Livestream". When I was raiding with my guild we had a few people listening to our TS who where actually not with us in the raid (no Z, to low, whatever). I made videos of our bosskills and even sometimes when we wiped I put a video on my page. Then others could see our progress and we where able to find mistakes and see what was going wrong.

That's how I start to get the idea to stream live instead of making videos (and save me a lot of work). I start to google around to find a manual or whatever how to stream your own stuff live. I didnt find anything about that. Nothing. So I decided to put all the peaces together on my own. First I put a camera on my screen. Well, yeah. It suxx. Next I used my TV-Out of my video card an pluged it to anothers computer video-in (S-VHS). I set up a red5 (open source flash stream server) and I was able to stream for the first time. Wohoo! I had te reduce my resolution though and I didnt like that. But the ppl watching where enjoying it (like 5-6 ppl ^^). But of course I wasnt satisfied with this solution. So I kept looking around.

I found a software (driver) that was able to record my screen and pretend to be a webcam. Great. That was exactly what I was looking for.

Next I found mogulus.com AND I saw they support Flash Media Encoder. How awesome was that? I started to test and tweak around A LOT. And now I present you the manual so that everybody (with a fast pc and a fast internet upstream) can stream their WoW for free. All the software and even mogulus.com is free.

If you set up a stream I would be happy if you post your channel or page here. I will edit this thread so that we will have an overviews of the channels.

Isno's Live stream: http://www.3xms.de/wow/live
MH (5/5) / BT (8/9)

[Isnogud]

Isno's Live Stream Kit

1. Install VHScrCap:
> http://www.hmelyoff.com/index.php?section=9 - you may need to restart your computer.

Settings:

Start "config" in "Windows-Start" -> "Hmelyoff Lab -> VHScrCap". An empty window will pop up (unless you got a program running using the driver already). Click on "create new" and you will open the settings window.

Capture

You are going to configure which part of the screen should be recorded. You can either record the whole screen (Track Screen) or just a part of it (Track window and select the name of the window out of the list). Or you can define a certain area of your screen (with, height, left, right).

"Track window" - Choose this option to record a certain window. After you activated this option you can choose the name of the window out of a list. Even another window will be in front of this window, it will be recorded. But if you minimize the recorded window, it doesnt work anymore.

"Track screen" - Choose this option if you want to record the whole monitor, whatever is visible.

"Show frame" - Show a red frame of the area that is beeing recorded.

"Region" - After clicking on this button you can define an area which will be recorded. This puts in the values for "Left, Top, Width, Height".

"Window selection tool (aim)" - If you click on it, hold your mousebutton and move it over a window you can choose it. Usefull if you dont know the name or if you just want to select a sub-part of a window.

I am using "Region" to stream World of Warcraft. I only stream a part of my window. That results in a better quality and my chat stays private. I can change the values for the region on the fly. So if there is something of interest out of the viewing area I can change it real quick.

The values I use for my 1680 x 1050 resolution are:

Left: 300; Top: 60; Width: 1050; Height: 790



Settings

Now we are going to configure how to handle the recorded data. My values are in the square brackets [ ].


"Border Color" - Background colors to fill up areas (see Resize to output size). [black]

"Frame Rate" - Frames per seconds to record with. [15]

"Align Video" - Well, yeah, right. Center. [On]

"Show mouse" - Hmmm. [On]

"Show clicks" - Invert mouse when clicked. Why not. [On]

"Capture layered windows" - Record windows that uses a certain layer mode. Some games may need this. [On]

"Optimize screen capture" - Gives a better image quality. BUT costs a lot of performance. [Off].

"Optimize screen deliver" - Same here [Off].

"Resize to output size" - Resize the streaming image to the size the streaming program is working with. Lets say that Flash Media Encoding will stream in 648 x 468 but your defined area (region) is 800 x 600, VHScrCap will resize the image to 648 x 486 and fill the rest of the area (due to aspect ratio if set) with the "Border Color". [On]

"Use linear resize in 32bit mode" - If you aer in 32 Bit mode its the better way to calculate the resize. [On]

"Keep aspect" - Wanna guess [On]

"Specify output size" - Instead of "Resize to output size" you can put in the value for that. Overrides "Resize to output size". [Off]

"Register in ROT" - This is for developers only. [Off]

[Isnogud]

2. Create an account at www.mogulus.com (free, only valid email needed):

> http://www.mogulus.com/channels/signup

[Isnogud]

3. Install Flash Media Encoder (FME). (free, email needed):

> http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmedi ... iaencoder/

Settings:

Video:

Size - Most of the time I use 648 x 486. It's possible to set it to higher values, but it will use more bandwith. That depends on your internet connection and it may causes lags in WoW.

fps - Frames per seconds FME tries to stream. I stream 15 fps which seems to be quite alright. Could be more, but uses bandwith. You need to find out whats best for you. I can tell that people prefer to watch a non-laggy stream than to have a laggy stream with good picture quality.

Bit rate - We define how much bandwith FME is allowed to take. I got an upload bandwith of about 1 MBit (http://www.speedtest.net). So I put in 550 - 650 Kbps which seems to be fine. More is still possible, but WoW gets laggy again.

FMS URL: rtmp://fme.mogulus.com/mogulus/[YOUR_CHANNEL]/username=[YOUR_USERNAME]/password=[YOUR_PASSWORD]/isAutoLive=true

Backup URL: (Nothing, leave it empty).

Stream: Whatever

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Replace [YOUR_CHANNEL] with your channel name on Mogulus and [YOUR_USERNAME] and [YOUR_PASSWORD] with your username and password for your mogulus account (without the brackets "[" and "]").

No spaces are allowed in the channel name. Use only lower case letters in the FMS URL for your channel name.

If you are going to use more than one camera you need to define a different name at "Stream".


THATS IT! (short version)

Click on "START" and watch your stream. WAIT for a few seconds before you're doing anything. You will see a lot of "starting/stopping" messages. Thats ok.

[Isnogud]

If you got questions, please ask them here or at my board where I got an "English" section.