Question / Help Moving from a 500€ rig for IRL events to a better one

[Raul]

I am posting here my evolution with streaming during the last 4 years because I want to improve the quality and wanted to share it looking for help and maybe it will be useful to someone:

First: I am not streaming games, but real life robot competitions with mixed video and app content (overlays with alpha video, several audio inputs, slowmo replays,...).

Had this rig since 2015:
- Pentium I3
- 8GB RAM
- 1 AVermedia AVerTV H727HD Capture PCI-E (it had visual artifacts on horizontal movement, not really usable IMHO)
- 2 AverMedia Live Gamer HD (using it either for capture or encoding the stream)
- Sometimes encoding with sw, sometimes with the i3 internal encoder, sometimes with one of the Live Gamer HD cards... quality is similar(ly bad)

Now, our streams are clearly not optimal, or at least I see people streaming in 720p with way more pixels / less compression.

720p - Feb 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wt_gpM47EU
720p - May 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLKtlONXZqo
480p - May 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfIE_dg0vSw

----------- Evolution from here ---------

I am thinking whether to go the "small improvement way" with devices like

Option 1:
External HDMI encoders to provide a USB 3 input to the PC (Magewell from 250€ or Chinese clone for 80€). But I understand I still need to encode in OBS losing some quality... so I don't really see a benefit in the final result.

Option 2:
Acquire a PCI card from Magewell that can do 2080p for 250€ and hope that the huge resolution compensates for the probable compression loss I will get.

Option 3:
Acquire the blackmagic decklink sdi 4k with several inputs so I can have several cameras and use HDMI to SDI converters (cheap) to use the inputs (this would only be 280€ for up to three cameras)
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1044783-REG/blackmagic_design_bdlksdi4k_decklink_sdi_4k.html

Option 4:
Acquire the BlackMagic Intensity 4k card for 250$ with HDMI input
https://www.videoguys.com.au/Shop/p/31017/blackmagic-design-intensity-pro-4k-pcie-bintspro4k.html

Option WTF:
Acquire the "Blackmagic Design DeckLink Studio 4K Capture & Playback Card" for 600€ euros (which seems to eat 4GB as I read online) and then probably go full crazy and acquire the "2017 Blackmagic Design ATEM Television Studio HD" for other 900€, or the higher level BlackMagic video desk for 1800€

The last option will probably make OBS unfeasible (I would need several BlackMagic capture cards to be able to swap and make fancy things and that would be a lot of money) and I will have to try to get used to the Blackmagic features and lose the benefits (and crashes) of many OBS plugins. But hopefully I will be streaming at realli'sh 1080p

Any recommendation?, what do you think? Do you have similar problems?

 

[BornDownUnder]

What is your full setup for doing these mobile live streams? Really need more details on your hardware and software (OBS encoder settings for stream output) to have a better idea for an upgrade path.

 

[Raul]

Thanks for the followup BornDownUnder.

Sometimes I use one of the "AverMedia Live Gamer HD" as an encoder (meaning I can not use it to capture video) and sometimes I use x264, the internal i3 encoder for some reason did not work but I don't put a lot of trust in it.
In any case, no matter the encoder there was so much quality I could get with this 500€ setup, the video was never really 720p in my opinion, you can compare in the youtube links. Now I am thinking of 720p real or 1080p real but due to experience my felling is: if you try the best settings a device can give the manufacturer is always messing with quality and the result is not as stated... that is why I am thinking of 4k already.

My felling right now is that the limitation is in the capture cards, not in the cameras because the raw video from the cameras is waaaaaay better than what I see in the preview screen in OBS or what I export to video or stream, even on pretty high quality configurations.

I updated the original post to reflect this info.

 

[Raul]

Sorry for bumping, my post was probably too long, Summarizing here:

To capture an HDMI camera and get best possible quality in OBS would you rather use
- Magewell USB dongle up to 1080p for 250€
- Magewell PCI capture card up to 2k for 250€,
- Blackmagic PCI HDMI 4k for 280€ (70 bad reviews on amazon.com and 4 other good in UK ???) or
- BlackMagic PCI SDI with HDMI to SDI converter 250€ (and then use cheap SDI to HDMI converters)
Last time addition: Blackmagic Design DeckLink Mini Recorder up to 2k for 180€!!
Thanks in advance

 

[Harold]

The bulk of your limitations is actually coming from the i3 you're using.
Hardware encoders currently still struggle to match the quality per bitrate of x264 (although intel's quicksync was the fastest to get the closest in quality)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVfJaMBxsyY this was done with logitech c920s as the cameras and an i5 4690k based system running on ubuntu 16.04. The 2018 one will have cameras connected via a blackmagic decklink duo2. in the same i5 system.