pcworld.com/article/3543277/…

A lesson on the practical constraints of laptop upgradability.

Socket changes (LGA 1151 to LGA 1200), power and thermal constraints, &c.

I feel like this would be too vague a question to ask on the main site: a friend of mine wants to stream something he is doing live in a way that is easy for everyone to access, so probably stream live to YouTube. With a laptop how would you do this? He already bought a game capture card and an external camera. Is this stuff even necessary? I think his concern is the built in web cam was too low quality.

What exactly is a capture card and is it only used for streaming gaming?

@northerner You install OBS or similar software, set up the stream destination, and off you go.

Though a laptop might not have the raw processing power to encode the video...

I don't know of anyone who bothers with a "capture card"

@Bob he was using OBS but it kept saying the device wasn't connected or not turned on, yet he kept assuring everything was

I will tell him to skip the capture card step

If you have multiple GPUs (e.g. CPU integrated + separate dedicated) it can make sense to set up OBS to use the integrated GPU for encoding to save some resources for the game.

@northerner Wait, is your friend streaming a game or just whatever is on camera?

If it's the latter and they have a modern phone they're probably better off just streaming from the phone.

Get a phone tripod and set it up that way.

He wants to stream a church service

Yea use a phone.

I mean, you could in theory use a camera hooked up to a laptop... but I suspect a phone's easier.

If you're using a camera + laptop, "capture cards" are completely useless.

The phone wasn't high enough resolution so he bought a camera

...huh.

High-end modern phones do 4k60 video... older ones can at least do 1080p60

resolution is very unlikely to be your problem

I'd be surprised if you could even upload 4k60 video at a good bitrate without a rather high bandwidth internet connection

if you're talking about optical zoom that's a different issue to video resolution

but it's not something you'll solve with some random cheapo camera - e.g. most webcams aren't designed for zoom either

but if it's a church service honestly the audio is probably more important than video quality

just put the phone + tripod up front somewhere, but you might want to hook up a good external mic for audio

if you want a proper pro setup with multiple clip-on mics etc... idk

Probably sales man at the store convinced him to buy a bunch of stuff he didn't need by making the problem sound more complicated than it is

@northerner point him at the OBS discord, the folks in there are helpful

assuming he's done the setup guide etc

if he really wants to do 4k60, which seems overkill, looks like YT recommends 20000-51000Kbps

if you do the phone route, droidcam works [or used to work] over USB (even exposes a web interface for a browser source IIRC), but it can also be used over wifi if necessary

ok thanks

@bertieb probably better off directly streaming from the phone

e.g. YT Live supports streaming via the app

no need to complicate things by streaming video to the laptop first

cc @northerner

Quite possibly

I haven't livestreamed straight from a phone so don't have experience with that

unless you specifically need some effects you can only get on the laptop/OBS... but if you just want to stream a church service you probably only need whatever the camera+mic can see/hear

I would expect PC makes it easier to do extra things, and keep an eye on audience

but yea, definitely an option

regardless, it's worth doing a dry run of whatever method is chosen

and have the other as a backup

I think YT allows audience management via the website while you stream from a different device

or you could just disable live comments entirely

for the first few it's handy for "we can't see / hear well"

fair

@Bob There's a 24 hour delay before you're allowed to stream if you haven't tried to do it before.

@bertieb I want this, but in linux

@djsmiley2kStaysInside Which bit?

@MichaelFrank oh yea, true. been long enough I forgot :P

droidcam

however, I've heard the client is terribad D:

Droidcam for Linux?

yah

Aren't there a plethora of webcam apps in Linux?

yeah, but my 'cam' is a android tablet

So install Droidcam on that, and read the stream from an android device?

Or another app that speaks rtsp

Linux desktop reading from the cam on android tablet, via USB

Yea

oh, droidcam puts out rtsp?

that's simple then, ffmpeg.

I don't know what it puts out

yeah, not sure either :(

but I suspect ffmpeg'll read it

it spits out something over HTTP

:D

I had it on an old phone or tablet

can't rememebr which because years ago

I really need some kinda remote control on this tablet, as it's so damn hard to use

due to being old and slow :(

Airdroid?

I used to use that

Dunno if it's still on the go

/me tries to setup ipcam

I'll see if this is any good, I suspect it'll be terrible over the wifi

oh wow that's a lot better than I expected...

closes droidcam docs

Good good!

Funnily enough, I recently made myself a little timelapse camera with my old RPI 1

and a generic webcam I had lying around

ooo Icould do that

@bertieb can't get ffmpeg to create a virtual webcam device, but alas, need to work now

...virtual webcam device??

what are you trying to achieve exactly?

grabbing the stream from the android device, feeding into youtube as if it's a webcam on this machine

@:D

are you trying to stream a tablet's camera to a teleconference meeting or somthing?!

ahh

Just playing with things.

basically, yes ;)

I'm sure I had a second webcam somewhere

oh right

doesn't YT go rtsp ingest?

I think so, but no way the tablet will cope with it

and I'm thinking of mixing various webcam streams for things

youtube was just to prove it works :D

Yeah, but ffmpeg spits out rtsp

so grab stuff with ffmpeg, filter it (combine, etc), then output to YT

OBS is also be able to do this too, FWIW

yah

that's what I'm trying to do

right now ffmpeg failing, saying /dev/video0 doesn't exist...

which... maybe it doesn't, but it should be created

tim@MushaV3 ~ $ ffmpeg -re -i 192.168.0.109:8080/video -map 0:v -f v4l2 /dev/video0

does it exist? ;-P

ah

wait wait

why are you trying to create /dev/video0 ?

why not just output to YT's ingress URL?

I don't think -re is necessary either

eg ffmpeg -i http://192.168.0.19:8080/video -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:v 2500k -preset faster rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/YTKEYID

heckit, I'm going to do this myself

will pop the results in matrix

got it to work in OBS in Linux, ffmpeg seems to work but YT never seems to receive data

ah, YT requires audio so I fed it null audio and it now works

Also @northerner (and maybe cc @bob) apparently streaming to YT straight from the YT app requires "At least 1,000 subscribers. Once you get 1,000 subscribers, you may have to wait to get access to mobile live streaming." :-\

support.google.com/youtube/answer/…

Huh. That's new.

Yea

I find it quite surprising

I guess it stops a bunch of low-effort, low-impact folks just livestreaming 24/7

or on a whim

but 1000 is a significant barrier

looks at his 50 subs

cough ...at least 2 of which are regulars in here...

think that might be the monetisation threshold too

@bertieb I mean they're not stopping people from doing that via third-party apps...

e.g. play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.streamlabs is a thing

as is play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rsupport.mobizen.live

@Bob Oh absolutely true

but that requires folks to go looking

I suppose

very weird

as opposed to having the YT app open and tapping "go live" :D

number of negative reviews for those apps around technical issues, tho all apps'll have those to some extent

I had a look as I wondered how they implemented it

@bertieb overall seems to be decently rated though

I'm kinda sorta familiar with the YT API, though not the live version

wondered if the apps were requing folks to use their own API quota

I find with a lot of those apps the "it doesn't work" ratings tend to come from those with ... ah ... dodgier firmware or just nfi what they're doing

the YT app for Kodi requires the users API keys

that said I'm not interested enough to test out those apps myself :P

yeah

and yup

might try streamlabs for fun

they make an "OBS for Dummies" application

which is endless source of fun for tech support on the OBS discord/fora

huh

I was also interested in how popular the apps are

so that's where I'd heard of streamlabs before

back when I was looking at obs :P

Ahh yeah

I think it actually does some quite helpful and useful things, particularly for monetised streamers

along the lines of subscription/donation alerts

which I should really look at at some point

as one of the, erm, streaming elite cough

...nope, couldn't say that with a straight face

if I could be bothered I'd have a look at YT's TOS (again)

but they probably don't care about the handful of sub-1k subs using these apps to livestream from mobile

my playlist manipulation webapp is still languishing in my todo list

something something yt api quota something

Ooh

lol yea

tell me about it

did you ever try asking for more?

never got around to it

I just looked at the ridiculously low quota

and put it aside for a bit

it's been half a year now

hehe, it's a fun exercise in "this really isn't designed for individuals"

turns out writing to a playlist is very expensive on quota

so, youtube playlist shuffle is broken on mobile

it never shuffles past the first 50-ish songs

great when you've got 1k songs in a playlist

erf

I wanted something that could at least work around that by taking a playlist, pulling 50-100 random songs, and shoving them in a new playlist

fun

then I found out that writing 50 songs to a playlist would eat an entire month's quota

fun

YT's playlist manipulation is terribad anyway

Oh, you could shuffle in-place?

It's doable for small amounts of playlist; I wrote a wee dealie to reorder the videos in one of my playlists

because the web interface was like pulling nails with your teeth

that's also a no-go

it's the same cost for any playlist write

Hmm

swapping 50 songs would actually cost 2x as much as just writing them to a new list

I wonder how many I reordered

lemme see if I documented

aha

I might be exaggerating a bit

> The one caveat I would mention is that you only get 10 000 API credits per day by default. Updating the video costs 50 units per update, plus the cost of the resource (for snippet this is 2), which works out to 192 videos per day, max.

it might've been 100 or 200 that ate a month

oh, it was per day?

Yup

blog.roberthallam.org/2020/01/…

says a lot about my memory :D

funny thing, that

What's an order of magnitude between friends :D

as they say

ha

you came to the same conclusion I did

about 3 months after I put my project on hold

It helped that I've also written for the YT API before

if I hadn't I'd've probably done the same as you

maybe I should just redo it as a simple script

I'd originally wanted to make an actual website other people could use

which meant the API limits really stung

Oh ya

at least with a personal script I could just do 150 a day or something

that's why the Kodi addon went that way I think

sure

in theory you could do a web app which gets people to auth with YT to use their quota

something something OAuth2

that was what I was doing

got bogged down somewhere in react-grommet land

Ah!

that's... beyond my ken :D

lol

got a bit too much for me too

Amen

FWIW the script I wrote ended up coming out at 72 lines, including comments

tho somewhat specifically tied to the reorder I was doing

but it's the thinking time involved really

Oh I also used the same approach to reschedule videos, it seems

...I noticed my own related post on that

I should chuck the code up on GH and update the posts really

yea, what I want to do is conceptually quite simple

might get back to that at some point

but for now, gotta play with my orangepi :D

Hehe

Just off the top of my head, I'd say grab all the ids and cache em offline to maximise quota (it's what I did elsewhere)

but you'll figure it all out when you get to it

enjoy the orangepi :D

I'm off for my state-mandated walk

@bertieb write costs so much more than read I'm not sure it matters

@Bob Aye good point, it's probably only a couple of videos either way; there's the request cost plus the resource cost (1+2 pulled out of my... off the top of my head), so it would add up over 100-200 videos