Good Small or UltraSmall Form Factor for OBS?

[jlklein]

Hi folks,
We use OBS at church for streaming on a 2017 iMac 27" with 24GB and the Radeon(?) graphics card (i.e. not "onboard"). Works great. So, as my family band has been livestreaming a lot from home due to the COVID stuff, we decided to play with OBS to up our game from just using an iPhone. Main reasons are so we could plug our USB mixer into my laptop for direct sound and the scene abilities of OBS. The scenes allow us to keep it on our logo with no sound while we "go live", fade into the camera+mixer sound for the performance, then fade back to logo/no sound before we stop streaming. Using the iPhone, someone has to hit go live at the phone and then walk over to the band area, and vice versa when we stop, which looks rather amateur.

Anyway, my Latitude E6420 isn't quite up to the task, as although it's an i5 2.4GHz, it has an integrated video card and shared RAM, which maxes out at a paltry 8GB. I could bring one of my desktops down from my office (aka "crap room") but I'd prefer something smaller that isn't all over the floor. I was wondering if there are any recommended SFF or USFF desktops I might just mount under the table we have our cameras/monitors set up on that would do a good job of livestreaming? There's oodles of them out there, but I'd like to get recommendations from folks who have actually used them successfully with OBS. I have no problem with used good equipment, so even if it's no longer made that's ok. I'm a pretty big fan of eBay ;)

Thanks for any suggestions,
Jeff

 

[jlklein]

I should add that currently I'm using a Canon R600 camcorder via an Elgato Cam Link CLONE plus a Logitech C920 HD web cam (to see which we like best) and everything is set to 1280x720p/29.97 including the canvas. Max we'd probably ever go would be 1080p/59.94, no plans for 4K.

Thanks,
Jeff

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

I was looking for such last month. I insist on a business class, vs consumer grade, PCs. The issue I ran into with HP and Dell (and didn't bother looking much further) was that the SFF systems tend to have small power supplies and can't handle a GTX 1650 Super (100W) or better low-profile GPU. So, my recommendation would be to start with your target GPU, as that will drive Power Supply requirements. There are certainly smaller and/or boutique vendors, or a roll-your-own/DYI, so a SF system with decent GPU is possible, just uncommon, which means deals are less likely. I ended up getting a mid-size tower, i7-10700K, 1660 Super, 16GB RAM, with 5 yr next day onsite support for $1,500. not ideal (I'd have preferred a Ryzen 7 3800X(T) on a X570 based motherboard), but good enough...

This system is overkill for us, and what you are doing at the moment (House of worship weekly live stream). However, streaming (video encoding) can be taxing on system as you've found. Then once you have a video library, are you going to do any simple editing?? Are you going to want to play some pre-recorded content (which may be 4K from phone, tablet, or other device) at which point, a decent system isn't so overkill, especially a few years from now. Then again, I prefer to spend more now, and get something that I won't have to mess with anytime soon
Good luck. if you do find something relatively mainstream, I'd be interested in hearing about it

 

[jlklein]

Hi Lawrence,
No video editing required, other than with YouTube Studio, if at all. I used to use that to edit out the walk on/walk off bits from our iPhone videos (band videos from home, church videos via iMac are fine). No further editing as the purpose is to showcase our live, uncut, unedited performances for viewers and potential booking folks.

Note, last night's test didn't do bad at all with all background services off and only OBS and the YouTube Live dashboard open, and everything set to 720p/29.97 and 1500bitrate (simple settings). I think if I was able to find something like an i5/i7 with a dedicated video card and minimum 16GB RAM I'd be in good shape. I personally like the Dell stuff as it's easy to find out any info on it (unlike HP), but I may try to resurrect my daughter's ASUS N61Jq (gaming laptop), which was an eBay buy gone bad (they apparenlty dropped it and it dies after random periods of operation). It's an i7 with 8GB RAM, but also has an ATI Radeon HD5730 with 1GB RAM...I think the motherboard is the issue so I may just buy one of those and see how it does (if not, I need a laptop upgrade for me anyway <g>).

Jeff