Question / Help 2 PC Setup nvenc into x264

[flavored]

Hey lovely streaming enthusiasts :)

I'm doing a double pc streaming setup and while I have a capture card, for the reasons of more efficient management I would like to avoid using it, as OBS and all its settings, overlays and other files will have to be migrated and managed from a separate station which isn't ideal in my case. Thinking of this I was considering doing a nvenc capture (30-40mbit) from the gaming pc to a local nginx server and then VLCing it from the streaming PC with the required x264 settings. The question is, what performance implications my gaming pc is facing doing this? Does anyone have any data on nvenc perforomance impact? Any other cons you could think of in this case? Thanks!

 

[Jack0r]

The big cons is that rtmp streams tend to give you problems when being played back. Even on a local setup of nginx I cannot guarantee that it will always work right away. Especially with the rtmp playback support inside vlc.
The usage by OBS and NVENC on your main system should be very low. I can only compare it with QuickSync or VCE but both use practically no CPU at all.
I personally only recommend this setup if you dont own a capture card, or if you need a very expensive card for your setup (higher than 1080p input or higher fps than usual). Or if you want to stream and do a high quality recording at the same time, it can also be used. But for a "simple" 2 PC setup the Capture Card way is easy to set up and normally works flawless afterwards.
To manage everything more efficient you could either use OBS Remote, HotkeyNet or a tool like Synergy or Mouse without Borders to do everything from one keyboard/mouse.

 

[DryRoastedLemon]

I did this when I was streaming Dark Souls 2. It was a little tricky to implement. There was about a 5 second delay between what was happening on the second PC and what I was seeing in VLC. To accomodate for that I used Dxtory to capture Dark Souls 2 as a video source, using a buffer size of about 5000ms in OBS. I also delayed all the audio by the same amount in the settings. I didn't get it quite right, but it was good enough for me. Using a capture card would completely do away with that issue.

I haven't had the time to edit the footage, but here's one highlight I decided to make right away:

What CPU do you have? It's mostly CPU intensive. I'm running on an i5 750, and I was streaming at 720p. I was having very little issues. For some reason I got some encoding issues in the very start of the stream, but the rest of what is probably over 8 hours of gameplay footage is perfectly fine.