Question / Help Live Gamer HD question

[apparitionql]

I'm confused as to what the live gamer hd does to make lower the cpu usage... but anyway, my main question is, can I use this capture card with OBS but not as an encoder while keeping the CPU usage low? It's kinda hard for me to ask but like i've heard people say that the built in encoder for the LGHD is trash but isnt that the only way for the cpu usage to be low? Idk... someone wanna help me out here? :P

 

[Krazy]

Well encoding is quite a bit of strain on the CPU, generally you only want a capture card for a 2PC streaming set up, or if you plan on just streaming console games. Using a capture card on a single PC setup for PC games doesn't really provide much performance benefit, as OBS already captures games very efficiently.

 

[richard_hawkes]

I'm confused as to what the live gamer hd does to make lower the cpu usage.

If I may be so bold as to jump in here.

The Live Gamer has an onboard x264/h264 hardware encoder. In theory then, this means it can do all the necessary grunt work to encode those gaming frames down at the bitrate you require. You then need an application that requests this encoded stream and basically routes it out to the internet. RecCentral is the application that does this for you. At no point does RecCentral do any h264 encoding. It literally pushes it out to the internet (eg Twitch).

Now then, when you get an app like OBS involved, all bets are off. Because OBS may have additional captures (eg webcams, titles etc), then the LG can't possibly know how to encode these as it can't even see them. So it now becomes the job of your PC again... And then we lose that wonderful hardware encoding.

So if, like me, your computer's rubbish and you want to stream at (say) 720p, I would consider going through RecCentral. It does allow you to include a microphone, so you can add your own audio. But that's it. No titles, no webcams, and very low CPU usage. If you want some bells and whistles, start thinking of a chunky i5 or above.

Here is some explanation on the Avermedia side:

http://q.avermedia.com/en/recentral/live-gamer-hd/stream-gameplay-with-live-gamer-hd

Good luck!

 

[FerretBomb]

Forgot to mention, the Avermedia hardware encoding also looks like poop.

Yes, you can use the capture card without using the built-in encoding (and their software, RecCentral) just by loading up OBS and selecting it as a video capture source. It just acts like a webcam. One with very high fidelity, as it's grabbing the video source directly.
Doing it like this will NOT lower your CPU usage though. Only way to offload like that (currently) is to use RecCentral and deal with the stream looking poor.

If you have a multi-core system though, and are concerned with the encoding eating CPU cycles that your game needs? Set the processor affinity. You can open the Task Manager, go to the Processes tab, find OBS, right-click on it, and Set Affinity. Uncheck half the boxes (and remember which ones they are!) I'd recommend unchecking the FIRST HALF of them (as Flash has to run on Core 0, and can't be steered away). Then go to your game in the Processes tab, Set Affinity, and uncheck the other half. So OBS only uses half, your game only uses the other half, and neither will (should) interfere with each other.
Down side, you'll have to do this each time you restart OBS or the game (as they revert to all-cores for the default affinity). But if you're getting weird in-game lag, it's something to try, at least.

 

[apparitionql]

Hmmm well my rig specs are an i5 3570k and a radeon 7870 + 8 gb of ddr3 ram. Now, I don't really wanna use recentral considering the quality is low + it boosts my latency pretty far up... I was thinking that the capture card could be used by obs but still keep the CPU usage low... anyway, since my rig has pretty good specifications, what does this have to do with the capture card and OBS? :o

 

[FerretBomb]

--> Unless you're playing a console game and need to capture the video/audio from that, forget you have the capture card installed at all, is the short version. It won't help you, OBS can't use it to encode/offload from the CPU. <--

So you'll just use the capture card to capture any console games you play (so just as a 'dumb' input), and let your CPU handle all of the actual final encoding.
OBS can't 'grab' the hardware encoder on the LGHD and push the encoding to it. It'd be nice if that worked, but it can't.

Use the estimator to get a good starting baseline: https://obsproject.com/estimator
If you're running into CPU utilization conflict problems, you can set the processor affinity in the windows Task Manager->Processes tab (right click, Set Affinity); if you're running into game-lag due to OBS using too much CPU, set the game and OBS to not use the same cores. I'd recommend pushing OBS to the last three or four cores (on an i7 you have 8 cores, so I assign OBS to 4-7, and the game to use 0-3). You'll have to do this every time you close and restart OBS or your game though.

 

[Krazy]

If you are streaming PC games, there is zero need for a capture card with your PC. You would only need one if you decided to do a 2PC setup (the only real way to get zero impact streaming).

OBS already uses hardly any CPU to capture the game (with aero enabled and window capture, or game capture) so all the strain that is being put on your PC is due to the x264 encoding. If you really want to try to reduce the strain of streaming, you can try the Quicksync stuff in the new test builds. Do not that your motherboard has to support being able to use the iGPU, and the encoding quality still isn't quite as good as OBS using the veryfast x264 preset, but it is miles ahead of any consumer level capture card hardware encoder.