Watch Episode 2 – Greg and Aaron from Xometry
Watch Episode 2 Bonus Material
If you’re not subscribed to my second channel you might be missing Makers and Minecraft, where I take people who have done incredible things and play an incredible game with them. So far I’ve done 2 episodes, and so far I’ve had technical problems with every one. I honeslty don’t know how some people manage to do this right every time, I am only managing to fail over and over again.
In the past when I attempted to stream minecraft it came through more like a slideshow. To avoid this, with Episode 1 I was trying a setup where one computer was playing minecraft, and another computer was handling the zoom call and running OBS to put together the minecraft and zoom into one output. I thought that would take the load off the first computer and allow it to stream minecraft at full speed… only that wasn’t the case. It was coughing and sputtering the whole time. So I hastily switched everything to my main rig, expecting it to chug and sputter like it has in the past, only it didn’t. In my haste I had everything on a second monitor that only broadcast at 1440×900, so I had to upscale the resolution to fit in OBS which is currently set to record at 1080 but then broadcast at.. is it 720? Something like that. That’s a lot of up and down scaling, and I figured that would cause problems… and it didn’t! The stream was fine. Of course by then I was flustered, so the video itself was a cludge, but at least it wasn’t technically bad.
So with confidence I set up Episode 2 with Greg and Aaron. One machine both playing and streaming minecraft. Only this time, to avoid the up and down scaling, I’d run minecraft on my main monitor. Clearly, if this computer could handle upscaling my 1440×900 monitor to 1080, then downscaling it to 720 for streaming, then having it skip the first upscale would result in better performance.
I was wrong.
It makes no sense to me, but the livestream video was a slideshow. The audio was fine, but the video was Powerpoint. That is right up until I hit record right after, at which point… it was fine. yeah, recording without streaming was at full speed video. So what was the problem? Was it my internet? Was it the extra pixels in the Minecraft window? I don’t know. But somehow streaming while playing minecraft crossed a threshold that just recording didn’t. Should I take that as a hopeful sign?
Oh, and learned that zoom has a 40 minute time limit, so that’s going to be a problem I need to solve.
Next week Makers and Minecraft will feature an awesome maker as well as hopefully no technical issues. Wish me luck.
