Saxxon and I finally got our streaming situation sorted out and purchased hardware - it's a matter of a week or two before everything is set up, implemented, and tested! We have a bit of a strange setup, considering we want to use our existing media room to do game streams. Rather than have us in front of a webcam at a desk, we're going to stay parked on our lovely, very floofy couch, and use the 4K LED TV we've got mounted on the wall, along with the 7.1 speaker system in the room. To mitigate the issue of microphones picking up feedback from the room, we decided to use wireless lavalier microphones, which we'll have pinned to our shirts. This will allow us a greater degree of freedom to move around, plus still use the audio system and TV we already own.
While that all sounds good, we had a large snag to deal with: how do we get audio and video from our game source piped into our streaming PC? Initially we were planning on streaming from the same PC we would emulate or play PC games on, but with the setup we have, the only monitor would have been the television mounted to the wall. To resolve THAT issue, we simply decided to use our other tech/music production PC to do the stream, while the other gaming PC is free to do what it does best. We opted for the Elgato HD60 Pro PCI-Express module for our HDMI capture, but our source was very picky - everything in our media room is powered by a Marantz receiver. Fortunately for us, this particular model of receiver allows for two simultaneous HDMI outputs. The way that works is that the video resolution rendered by the receiver is chosen from the greatest common resolution shared between whatever screens you have attached. In this case, the Elgato limits HDMI to 1080p, so while we're streaming, our 4K TV will be forced into 1080p mode. This isn't a big issue, though, considering Twitch streaming generally works best while the video output is 720p.
With video taken care of, we only had to worry about audio next. Unfortunately for us, the receiver gave us two undesirable options: pump audio through the HDMI cable, but only have audio work on the endpoints and not output from the receiver to the speakers (we'd be forced to use the terrible speakers in the TV), or get sound from our 7.1 system, but have it downmixed to stereo and use RCA outputs on the receiver to get audio from 'Zone 2' to an audio mixer, which we'd pump into the streaming PC via USB. We opted for #2 for two reasons - while the first was described just above, we also want to be able to control the mix from our microphones before they enter the streaming PC. While the USB mixers we have aren't super fancy or anything, the one we decided on has a decent microphone pre-amp built-in, and we can control levels from both the output from the receiver and from the wireless lavalier mixed-down output.
In total, this gives us:
- Video on our wall-mounted TV
- Speaker output throughout the room
- Video input to the Elgato of whatever we stream through the receiver
- Audio input to the USB mixer from both the analog output from the receiver and the microphone mixdown from our lavaliers
All we need to do at this point is wait for the lavaliers to arrive in a week or two, get things tested locally, and hope our first stream goes without a hitch! Provided everything goes smoothly, we'll work on populating the text on my Twitch channel so basic rules of conduct are listed for all to see. Saxxon plans to make a locally-hosted webpage we can throw into OBS Studio so we can update content like game name, player names, the game audio/video itself, etc, so it's not just us talking over the output from whatever we're playing. In theory, we should have all of that wrapped up before 2017. Wish us luck!
