I've got some new streaming gear!

So a few days ago I brought some new streaming gear to upgrade the quality of my streams. This was mainly to fix an issue with lighting and make it easier for me to switch scenes without having to alt+tab and so on.

So what I brought was a pair of Neewer LED lights with stands for around £60 and a Elgato Stream Deck XL for around £200.

As you can see I've already customized some keys, adding a little Shmoogle face in the bottom corner as well as controls for muting, scene switching and controlling Spotify.

Over all I'm extremely happy with the results, my webcam looks 1000 times better than it used too and managing my stream is a breeze now.

Unfortunately I've also had some technical difficulties these past few days. One issue was No Man's Sky crashing my GPU driver and my stream along with it when trying to play. Turns out this was an issue with the game that is fixed in an experimental patch which I used yesterday, this allowed me a full stream with no crashes caused by the game so I'm happy with that being fixed.

The other issue I'm having is OBS's AMD AMF Encoder just randomly stopping encoding and skipping 100% of frames seemingly due to 'encoder overload' even though the encoder is far from overloaded. I have a feeling it's a problem with the latest AMD graphics drivers version 20.5.1, So I've reverted back to the recommended Verison 20.4.2 and I'm hoping today the stream goes without a hitch. I won't know until today's stream whether the issue is fixed or not.

If my encoder doesn't brick itself I may file a report to AMD about it.

Next on my TODO list is to make some good transitions and stream assets. I also need to decide what level of bitrate I want to use, I'm debating if I should continue with 1080P60 streaming at 4500kbs or scale down to something like 1600x900 or 720p60 with a lower bitrate so that people on mobile can watch without buffering.

I don't get a lot of feedback on this kind of thing so it's hard to tell if people are actually able to view my stream without issues. It's not easy balancing accessibility and quality. More so since Vimm currently only supports transcoding to 480p or source. So you have a choice of low quality low bitrate or the raw stream I send out.

On a side note, I now have a stream discord server. Links is below in the footer. I currently don't know what I'm going to do with it yet. I might use it as a means for cross service chat if possible if I end up streaming to multiple platforms. I might try my hand at doing some giveaways as well.

Time will tell. I'm still running on a casual none serious streaming mode. I don't want to focus on growth and streaming to get views and money etc cause it stresses me out and demotivates me when I make no progress, Rather I'm just going to continue to stream because I happen to be playing games and have the full setup already, might as well make use of all this gear I spent money on. That's my general though process on streaming at the moment.

This helps me keep it fun and engaging and helps keep me interested and from burning out. I'm also very surprised at how well I talk during streams now, It's really helped boost my confidence a bit.

Anyways before this post get outrageously long I'll end it here. To summarise, I improved my stream quality, the world nearly ended, I'm still keeping it fun!