I’ve been experimenting with a few live streaming services lately, in order to broadcast live gaming footage, mostly of the StarCraft 2 beta. It turns out that there are two big streaming sites that cater to this scene, namely Livestream and Ustream. They both have an audience numbering in the tens of thousands, but curiously manage to be flawed in entirely opposing ways.
In this article I hope to point prospective broadcasters to the right tool for them. Both Livestream and Ustream have their uses and the choice between the two depends greatly on the system you’re using, the reason you’re streaming game footage and the size of the public you’re streaming to.
There is a lot of debate about these two services going on in the game streaming community, and especially the StarCraft 2 community. Many broadcasters are heading over to ustream, but many more are sticking with livestream as each has its separate set of benefits and drawbacks.
Livestream
Livestream is a streaming service that actively supports game casting. It’s the partner for Xfire that provides its live game streaming functionality and the Livestream Procaster tool natively supports game casting. It even mixes your audio (one of the main problems with Ustream) so that it automatically records both your microphone input and speaker output, which is also an option that you can alter at will.
This really is the best part of Livestream: it’s easy. Set up an account, install Livestream Procaster, fire up a game and press Ctrl+F1. That’s all you need to do to get to streaming and it performs brilliantly, because Procaster hooks into your game process to capture footage. It also adds an in-game interface which allows you to follow the chat on your stream without needing to go windowed or multi-box. Heck, you can even start and stop the stream in-game. Awesome!
The downside of Livestream is in the viewer experience. Unless you’re paying for the premium service ($350/month), your channel will feature in-stream advertisements and you’ll be limited to 500kbps streaming. As a result the quality of most Livestreams isn’t quite up there with a Ustream broadcast. Worse, Livestream has become ridiculously popular as of late and has some stability issues. The Procaster tool regularly loses connection mid-stream and the site does not cope with large amounts (thousands) of viewers on a single channel well.
Ustream
In terms of stream quality there is no equal to Ustream. Broadcasters aren’t limited to a 500kbps stream and the advertisements aren’t quite as intrusive as their Livestream counterparts. This would appear to make it a superior choice, but it can be easy to forget that Ustream was never intended for game streaming.
Their own tool, Ustream Producer, doesn’t allow for the streaming of on-screen events without the use of webcam-simulator tools such as VH Screen Capture or ManyCam. This will result in low quality footage, because you need Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder to actually achieve that fabled superior image quality, rendering Ustream Producer useless (webcam-simulators still required!). And then you still need tools, such as Virtual Audio Cable, to get the in-game audio to record along with your microphone input.
It took me many hours to get Ustream working properly, which resulted in yet another problem. Because Ustream requires so many separate applications in order to properly stream game footage, it is much more resource-intensive than Livestream’s Procaster tool. You can immediately forget about working with Ustream if you don’t have a quad core processor and even then the heavy demand it places on your system can still result in large quantities of dropped frames which make your stream unbearable to watch.
Regardless of the streaming service, you won't get image quality like this
Ustream definitely has an edge in stability and stream quality, but the cumbersome setup, lack of an in-game interface and heavy system demands make it a less-than-ideal choice for all but power users. It’s the superior option by most accounts, but you’ll need a quad core processor, a few hours to figure things out and no interest in having an interactive stream (no in-game interface means no in-game chatroom monitoring). I can at least help you on the setup front, so I’ve posted up a guide to get Ustream game broadcasting working.
My platform of choice is Livestream however, for its superior game performance. I couldn’t get Ustream to work without a lot of frame drops, which is due to my running it on a dual core processor while gaming at the same time. Add to that the facts that Livestream doesn’t require dozens of funky applications to stream game footage and has a proper in-game interface, and I’m not even certain that I would go for Ustream if I did have a quad core processor.
On that note, be sure to check out my Livestream for some live gaming action.
Loading ...
I’ve watched your livestreams a few times now and i wanted to say: keep up the good work :0
You should start a youtube channel!