Month: January 2017

XSplit Sponsors Genesis 4

“My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

This quote is from the Genesis chapter 4 of the Holy Bible. This is a statement that Cain has made to his Lord, that he has had enough and is to follow a path of a ‘world warrior.’ It is a type of a statement if you are a hardcore fan of fighting games and want to be at the top of its ladder.

This weekend, from 20th to the 22nd of January, the 4th iteration of Genesis, a Fighting game tournament, mainly praised for its Smash Bros. series competitors, will be held at San Jose Convention Center.

XSplit Sponsors G4

If you’re a Smash Bros. or other traditional fighting game enthusiast, this tournament could be yours to conquer and to test your abilities against other players who enjoy the games as much as you do. As per many fighting game tournament entry standards, it’s open for everyone to enter and regardless if you’re a competitive player or just want to be part of the community, you are guaranteed with endless entertainment throughout the weekend.

The game titles to be played are: Smash Bros. series, Rivals of Aether, Catherine, Towerfall and Street Fighter V.

Some of the event’s production and streams will be handled by VGBootCamp and our own Support Manager, Armando Gonzalez will be directing the stream over at twitch.tv/teamsp00ky. Be sure to check them out as they will cover majority of the games played during the event.

For more details of the event, be sure to check out their event page at smash.gg/tournament/genesis-4/details.

New XSplit 2.9 Update with Beam FTL Support

As of January 30, 2017 11:00 AM EST: We have updated the DOWNLOAD PAGE with an updated version of XSplit Broadcaster 2.9 which now supports Beam FTL.

The following has been addressed since the initial 2.9 beta with FTL support that was released last January 17:

  • Resolved issues with AV Sync
  • Resolved a leak in the Beam plugin (ping threads not terminated)
  • Added parameter to NVENC to avoid B-frames (B-frames are currently not supported)
  • Added parameter to Quick Sync to avoid B-frames
  • Added bitrate and frame drop status for FTL
  • Resolved issues wherein automatic ingest selection did not work well outside of US (still improving the automatic selection including showing the resolved ingest)

We have published a maintenance update of XSplit Broadcaster v2.9 with support for Beam’s new low latency protocol called FTL. An update to XSplit Gamecaster is also planned to follow in the near future.

This release contains new core components, and while we believe it to be stable, it is still deemed a beta release undergoing testing. If you install this release, note that it will automatically be updated when the final 2.9 update with FTL support is released.

XSplit Beam Properties

The FTL support is baked into the original broadcast plugin for Beam as a checkbox. If selecting FTL please note the following caveats:

Missing features

  1. Stream recording
    The option to save your live stream locally is disabled. You will still be able to record locally while streaming, but you will need to manually start a local recording which requires an extra encode.
  2. Adaptive bitrate
    The experimental adaptive bitrate settings still show, but the function is not yet implemented for FTL.

Encoders

When selecting x264 encoder, we add additional encoder settings to optimize for low latency. For other encoders, we have not yet performed this optimization so selecting other encoders than x264 may result in added latency of about 0.5 to 1 second.

Low latency is great but it does come at the expense of video compression. So if you want to keep the low latency and get slightly better compression, but more CPU usage, then change your x264 preset from “veryfast” to “faster” , “fast” or “medium” if you have a monster rig.

We expect to make some updates to the Beam broadcast plugin over the coming days, so stay tuned to this blog post for more information.

NOTE:  Due to the changes to Beam’s infrastructure, RTMP streams (the original protocol used in XSplit) will now get upwards of 15 seconds delay when streaming to Beam.