Pyrosmania Games on YouTube and Twitch

Posted on November 1, 2014 Updated on November 1, 2014

Hello fellow gamers! Sorry for the absence. My goal has always been to push at least one post a week, and it’s been nearly a month since my last one. So where have I been? Working on something pretty cool.

I’ve been working on getting a solid setup for commentary videos for the Pyrosmania Games YouTube and Twitch accounts. That’s right, Twitch! Not much has been done quite yet (very very soon though!), but here’s Pyrosmania on Twitch if you wanted to follow.

Getting a stream/capture setup has been a very difficult, confusing and time-consuming process. For now, I’ve been focusing on getting a stream set up for the PlayStation 4 and PC, but I’m hoping to figure out a setup for SNES and N64 gameplay as well. My goal is to release the first video on YouTube and/or have a Twitch stream within the next couple of weeks.

The most difficult streaming setup process

To start with, here’s my equipment: Hauppauge HD-PVR 2 GE, Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920, Blue Snowball microphone, generic table set microphone, and of course, my PC and the PlayStation 4.

Setting up the PS4 for commentary has presented some major audio issues. The PS4 only outputs the game’s audio stream via HDMI and does not capture mic audio used in the game. This means that commentary audio must be captured via a mic connected to the computer. But because I’m using a desktop mic to record commentary audio, I have to wear a headset connected to the PS4 to hear the game’s audio (so that only my voice is picked up by the mic, otherwise it will echo as it picks up the HDMI audio stream and the music coming through the mic audio).

Unlike the PlayStation 3, the PS4 does not allow for multiple audio output. So, you have two choices: HDMI or headset. If you choose to output to headset, then it stops all output to HDMI. So now you’ve got no audio stream to record. But not using a headset isn’t a good option or you will have that echo. Aye, what a headache.

Here’s a video from my endless audio testing process:

So that took me about a week of testing and trying to figure out how to make the audio work. The ultimate fix will require me to get an optical output headset, but I’m going to hold off on that for a few months (I just bought two non-optical Razer Krakens for gaming, geeze). So PS4 gameplay vids won’t have the most stellar audio for a little bit, but I think I’ve made a decent enough setup for now.

After I finished setting up for PlayStation 4 videos, I realized that I really wanted to do commentary videos on a PC game that I kept seeing floating around: Five Nights at Freddy’s. I had seen quite a few vids from people playing this, and they were all pretty hilarious, so I felt that it would be a great game to start with. But then….Five Nights at Freddy’s has some terrible resolution issues that kept killing the PVR-2’s record stream. That took me awhile to find a fix for. There are currently only a couple of help videos on YouTube that didn’t really solve the problem, so I will likely make a help video for this soon as well.

For now, everything should be good to go. So expect the first ever Pyrosmania Games commentary video on YouTube and/or a Twitch stream within the next week or two!