Question / Help Monitoring your own stream + follower alerts

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Fudgecake

New Member
Hi all,

I was wondering if you monitor your own streams on Twitch or in OBS? Until now I always did it on Twitch but there's one thing that's causing a bit of an issue.

I used TwitchAlerts to get follower notifications but the gif always only showed up 30s or so after the sound and I couldn't figure out why. I tried Nightdev to see if that made a difference but it's the same thing.

Then I realized I heard the sound through OBS and saw the gif in my muted stream on Twitch. I'm not even 100% sure that's all there is to it, and hence my question about how you all monitor your streams. I figure it makes sense to follow it on Twitch but I can't see a way to sync the alert sound to the alert gif in my stream.

So now I'm thinking if there are any disadvantages to monitoring my stream in OBS and having the pop-out chat next to it so I can still follow that? The alterative is to quickly switch to OBS every time I get a follower to see who it is, or do as I do now and pay close attention to my stream when I hear the alert and wait for the it to show up on screen, but neither of those is very practical.
 
FerretBomb

FerretBomb

Active Member
You really don't want to be watching your stream from the same system you're streaming from. If possible, not from the same connection either. Especially not using the Twitch video player.

Normally what I do is test on a private testing-only stream so as not to annoy my viewers, and watch the VOD back later. Before this, you can just record locally and watch the local video to check things like audio sync.

There's a reason that many of the career livestreamers will have a dedicated 'monitoring' laptop sitting off to the side, and unmute it when needed.
As far as alerts, I use the OBS preview window for basic monitoring, as it's very low-impact as compared to using the Twitch video player. It doesn't give a realistic 'outgoing' preview (as it's the pre-encoding, uncompressed video) but it's one of the best ways I've found to manage it.
 
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Fudgecake

New Member
I should've mentioned this before, but I mostly stream ps3 games and use my laptop to follow chat and check my own stream.

Do you mean the big streamers have a 3 device setup: a computer/console they're playing on, a pc/laptop to stream from and a second laptop to watch their own stream? What exactly do you mean by private test stream?

So I'd want to pause (and mute) my stream on Twitch and pop out the chat so I can still follow it while monitoring in OBS? I don't really see how I could follow the chat without having the Twitch player open (even paused and muted).
 
FerretBomb

FerretBomb

Active Member
Are you using the laptop to encode the video? What is taking the signal from the PS3 and sending it on to Twitch?
Normally the gaming PC and encoding PC are the same system. If they are using a 2-PC setup (gaming PC and encoder machine) then yes, it'd technically be a 3-PC with a preview laptop off to the side, not interacting with the gaming nor encoding machine at all.

You can use Chatty, or just pop out the chat window and close the main browser window.
 
F

Fudgecake

New Member
FerretBomb said:
Are you using the laptop to encode the video? What is taking the signal from the PS3 and sending it on to Twitch?
Normally the gaming PC and encoding PC are the same system. If they are using a 2-PC setup (gaming PC and encoder machine) then yes, it'd technically be a 3-PC with a preview laptop off to the side, not interacting with the gaming nor encoding machine at all.

You can use Chatty, or just pop out the chat window and close the main browser window.
Click to expand...


I use an Elgato Game Capture HD. I'm using Chatty now and everything's how I want it to be.
 
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