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Giving This Livestream Thing A Go

After bothering my brother on his gaming livestreams, I had the itch to give it a go myself.

I’ve actually had the itch to get into media in some form or fashion for a long time. I never did get that off the ground like I wanted. Technology has changed a lot in the several years I wanted to do this. Things have also gotten a LOT cheaper.

I already own a cheapy web cam, so that’s covered. Unfortunately, the lighting in my room sucks and this web cam is worthless without it. Thankfully, I just had to pick up a cheap LED lamp ($4.50 to be exact) from IKEA. Now the world can see me! (Well, the lighting in the background needs work now. Also some shadowing issues to work out too.)

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so excited… weee….

I own a “professional” microphone too. Okay. It’s just a USB microphone from the game Rock Band. But it works great as a desktop microphone! But it’d be silly for me to hold it, so I need to prop it somehow. I’m sure as hell not going to buy an expensive microphone stand. But you know what works just as well? A cheap ass lamp.

Get old adjustable lamp. Cut off shade and cable. Boom. Adjustable Mic Stand.

My um… studio?

Now I need to be able to show gameplay or whatever while plastering my ugly mug. Let’s make some fancy graphics!

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Alright… not exactly fancy, but they’re graphics. So… whatever.

One of my friends have already mentioned wanting to jump in on the fun, so let’s get them in!

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Well, I mean, they’ll show up when I’m not playing around with the idea.

It’ll also be cool to start a Hangout and have my buddies show up whenever as I’m playing. But since I don’t own an audio mixer, it’s an audio routing nightmare. How am I’m going to pull that off? It took me a while, but I think a mix of Soundflower (actually, a special version of Soundflower), Line In, and the Aggregated Devices feature in OS X should take care of that?

Think I may have figured out my audio routing issues without the need for a mixer. Will have to test at some point.

I think this will work.

So now it’s all a matter of testing it all out. I figured I’d do a playthrough of Final Fantasy VII because I honestly can’t remember if that game is as good as people make it out to be. (VI and IX are my favs.)

I still haven’t decided how to stream things out. I was thinking Ustream since it gives me options for those with limited bandwidth (like me). They also have better mobile apps than Justin.tv / Twitch.tv. The only problem I’ve seen is that Ustream seems to squish the output from my camera switching app, CamTwist. I would like to do Google+ Hangouts Live so I could save it to my YouTube channel, but if I want my friends to join me, I’d need two Google accounts: the one linked to my YouTube channel and then a special one my friends would have to join. That would be more work for them. So, this issue is the main holdup for now.

Doing this is just for fun. It’ll be a fun learning experience too as I play around with that works and what doesn’t work. Once I have it all figured out, I can then possibly write detailed instructions. Fun times ahead!

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