Month: March 2016

It’s that time of the year again. It’s Insomnia Gaming Festival time, or I57 for short. And XSplit is going to be there along with some awesome streamers.

If you’ve seen us at i56, you probably remembered ‘The Zonda Show’ which is hosted by the man himself LtZonda who will be holding some awesome talk shows again for this event including interviews and embarrassing stories from Asus UK stream team.

We’re sure you’re familiar with some of them having seen them stream everyday on Twitch, or upload videos on their respective YouTube channels. One thing we’re sure of is there will be plenty of gaming content to watch out for from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 to Runescape and back again to Elite Dangerous.

Our community manager Sllayt3r will be there with some awesome XSplit merchandise including T-shirts, lanyards and free Premium licenses. Make sure to see him and grab some great stuff for FREE 😀

Of course if you’re not able to make it to the event you can still catch the whole stream LIVE on twitch.tv/ltzonda across all 3 days. Or keep an eye out on our Twitter for updates throughout.

One of the new features included in our latest update (0.10.28.0) is the Title, a new source that you can add to your presentation. With the Title you can now easily add and edit text to your presentations.

To add a Title simply click on File >> Add Title. A small window will pop where you can enter the text you want. The titles should work in conjunction with background graphics that can be created by you. For some inspiration, you can take a look here…

It’s also possible to get a Title from a remote web page. Say, in a situation where you have a text, a number or a price that may change from time time depending on different situations.

In this case, the Title source can be set up to grab the text from any online webpage at specific time intervals.

Watch this demonstration to quickly see how it works.

*note: The title source requires Adobe Flash Player to work. Click here for more info.

That’s it see it in action!

Sean “Day 9” Plott is arguably one of the most prolific and well known streamers and videogame personalities working in the world today. With a background firmly rooted in Starcraft II and a global fanbase spanning tens of thousands, Sean has built a regular following through his daily broadcasts and presence at a number of high profile gaming events. Sean has since branched out into games development and is now working with Artillery Games on what is sure to be an exciting new venture.  

We were offered a rare opportunity to have an in-depth interview with Sean that we’ll be publishing over the next few days. If you’ve ever wanted to make it on Twitch, become a professional shoutcaster or find out just why Sean has chosen to power Day[9]TV exclusively with XSplit Broadcaster, now’s the time to find out!

In our first installment, we dive right in and find out just why Day[9]TV is live streamed using XSplit Broadcaster as well as learn a little about Sean’s hectic work schedule and hardware configuration!

Can you tell us a little about your work schedule and what’s involved to produce Day[9]TV?

Sean: “Right now Eric (Eric Buckhart) and I are working alongside Artillery Games on their upcoming new title, so a lot of the day is waking up, heading into work and getting there around nine-thirty or ten and then generally staying there until 4pm or so, and that’s when I begin preparing for the show.

To actually put on a show it’s generally just sifting through a lot of the StarCraft games that have been played, selecting one, narrowing it down to what I think would be an actual topic as oppose to just sort of blabbing away. Then at 6:50 I go live and at 8:30 the shows done and to be honest, most of the work with the show is purely on a creative content side, there’s really no set up work for us. I basically open XSplit and hit go.”

Why did you settle on using XSplit Broadcaster as your primary live streaming and recording software?

Sean: “It’s really the reliability and consistency. Its the fact that I can open up XSplit and say go live and now I’m live, and all of the scenes that I set up last week are still there, and I know that everything is in good condition.

In fact it’s so convenient I’m starting to have problems that are really down to laziness, problems where I will of forget to change the elements on one scene so that when I switch to it I’m like “ohhh those are the overlays from Friday, those aren’t the overlays from the StarCraft show” – and then I literally click live on air and then it just switches back under five seconds to the StarCraft overlays. It’s that ease of use that allows me to only focus on content so I never had to worry about any other headache.”

Could you walk us through the particular features that help you in producing your shows?

Sean: “Definitely the scene mixing is tremendous, the fact that I can set it up and that it saves is really nice, easy and straightforward. Given the fact, and I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but especially for me and Eric, we had to deal with so many encoding headaches with changing keyframes and bitrates, when its trying to do an interlace or not and any of that stuff, its actually all really clearly listed out so all those little knobs I like to turn, I can turn if I want to. Like on one of my PCs I stream at a slightly higher bit rate because the internet can handle it. And if I can get a better processor than I’ll probably be throwing more key frames in there. Its all these little tweaks I like because they’re there, but I mean for me its literally just the stream switching being so easy and the fact that when I go live its so reliable.

Oh also the notification for the frame dropping is fantastic because I do a one-man show, so when I’m there, I’m trying already to manage three different things: the game, I’m trying to look at the chat and see if anything is going wrong there and see what they’re saying and I’m trying to make sure my conversational flow is actually making sense. I love that the little thing pops up or I can see flickering thing showing dropped frames, that’s really nice because its very easy to just talk to no one and not know that you’re offline.”

When live streaming a broadcast what do you feel is a more important factor? Stability or performance?

Sean: “So for me that would depend on the scale of the show. Isn’t that great? I literally don’t give you an answer! For the huge live events, I definitely feel like stability is really key, and the reason why I don’t think performance is as important for the big live events, is that its harder to communicate to 200,000 people that are trying to tune in. Whereas if I’m doing my own personal shows, I want the performance to be really really nice because people expect personal broadcast to go down every now and again, and they’ve sort of been trained that if it does go down I’ll type in the chat “hey guys, sorry my stream crashed” and they’re like “alright, we’ll wait”.

In my experience I haven’t really seen tremendous dips in my numbers when I have crashes on my personal streams. So I shoot for performance then, but again if I have an inability to communicate with that audience in a clean way, then I definitely would go for stability.”

Can you tell us a bit about your workflow and the tools and hardware you use for your stream?

Sean:“I actually have a pretty simple setup, I basically have the most decked out computer that I could afford at the time, to make sure all of the encoding is good and I can run high graphics intensive game at the same time. In terms of the stream tools, it’s very very spare. Its a Microsoft LifeCam HD, which is a fifty dollar webcam that’s great and I recommend to anyone. I use the Blue Snowball mic which is great, I’d recommend that to anyone. They’re very easy to use, you plug them in and now you’re using them, and then I have a very simple green screen that I occasionally use for certain shows.”

Be sure to check-back later this week for the next installment of our three part interview, where Sean tells us the secret on building and maintaining a dedicated audience and creating a professional level broadcast.

Welcome back to the final installment of our three part interview. To wrap things up we decide to cut loose and ask some of our most burning gamer questions. If you’ve ever wanted to find out some of Day[9]’s favorite streams, or what he’s currently obsessed with now’s your chance! Interview parts one and two here.

So what are your thoughts on competitive gaming and eSports in general? is StarCraft 2 dead?

Sean:(laughs) “aww man you know I would describe that eSports is finally getting to the level where it belongs. Not on any sort of ideological level it belongs, but there’s a hundred million gamers who are into eSports globally and who have never had the tools to be part of it.

There’s no stadium that you can go to, so the fact that Live Streaming like Twitch.TV has done an absolutely amazing job at growing the space. Now all a sudden, all of the tools are in place its just more of an infrastructure thing, like how do team houses work? How do the economics of it work? Not in terms of it being positive versus negative but how there is many different ways to monetize all of that stuff, so I think it’s in a very healthy and ever changing space. i’m sure the experience in the last four years has been very rapidly twisting all over the place and in different directions. Regarding StarCraft 2 specifically, every single game that has come out in the last ten years has had all these sorts of crazy rises up and then like these catastrophic crashes down and StarCraft 2 has had a crazy rise up and now its just kind of like settled at a very sort of calm clip and I think that many people who only see eSports starting in 2009, so they’re used to things only going up, but I think every  game hits a sort of natural settling point. To a certain extent I think the eSports space is healthier than ever and StarCraft 2, I think its safe to say is nowhere to even remotely being dead. It’s doing great! Blizzard has WCS on three continents now.”

What do you feel was one of your favorite moments from the Day9 daily in 2013?

Sean: “The whole year!?” (pauses) “you know for me, probably one of my big moments was actually playing through A Link To The Past. I think much like any nerd, I’ve had a backlog of games that I’ve never got quite around to playing. Link To The Past is one of the most important games in the history of gaming.

Its so essential and, I started it like four times and not gotten far and to of been able to of beaten that and also to of shared the experience with everyone there was just so nice and warm, because the game came out around twenty years ago and its so old, and to see people in chat go “oh my god, you’re slipping on that ice!? I had a horrible time on that ice too” and I felt really connected with the audience on that one. So that was probably my favorite one there.”

Aside from Starcraft II, are there any other types of live stream content you like to follow?

Sean:“So my favorite kind of content to stream are games where there are a lot of opportunities for discussion, like games that have that “here’s what I would do differently” – like SimCity  for instance, I really enjoyed talking about what they would of done differently, or a game like Hearthstone.

I really like streaming Kerbal Space Program might be one of my most favorite games I’ve ever streamed because its so possible for things to go so wrong and be like “oh my god!? he’s doing what!?” every person will have a unique experience in that game and that’s what makes it fun! Because the audience is being able to bring their own unique experience to chat, and I’m getting to see that, and read their “tips” and then violate and make an abomination of a spaceship. So that’s one thing I really like, but as much as I do love games like The Last Of Us, those are very scripted and are not as fun to live stream and I would much prefer to just play them offline. For the ones I like to follow? Speed Runs man, oh god speed runs so much, like Speed Demos Archives I absolutely just love watching them so much!

What are your plans for 2014, do you have any big projects on the horizon?  

Sean: “Oh for certain. There’s the usual things you know like making StarCraft content and playing some Hearthstone, (rather poorly) I’m pretty bad at that game but I’m still doing it. There’s just the usual stuff, but the big thing I’m really excited about is Project Atlas, it’s what we’re working on with Artillery, and the technology is just the sickest thing in the universe. Imagine your favorite game, and you just got a new computer and you’re like “alright, lets do this!” and you open up Steam, and then you have to begin the download and then you install it, and then there’s a patch and you’ve got to download the patch and then a little time passes and you’re like “alright it’s been four hours! time to play!”

With the Artillery platform, I just send you a URL and it says “loading!” and then fifteen seconds pass and boom now your in your game and ready to go. In a sense, we have really really simple flash games that worked like that before, but imagine if you could have fully 3D animation with lighting effects, particle effects and it looks like any old triple A game, but you just clip the URL and you don’t have to install anything. You could do it on a brand new computer, and that’s what I think is really really cool about the platform, and now that exists all we’ve gotta do is make a sweet game right? easy-peasey! What I can do now is take all of my nerd thoughts about growing up and playing RTS games about Warcraft, Command & Conquer, and Starcraft and try to expand the RTS genre. So that’s what’s going on in 2014.”

The XSplit team would like to thank both Sean Plott & Eric Buckhart for helping us with this lengthy interview project!