Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

KC was streaming on Twitch yesterday (With music/mc/video), and they got BANNED for copyright music apparently! Today they're on UStream and only streaming video.
I'm working on an email to FIRST HQ giving them my comments on this topic and suggestions on improving it in the future (including getting comments from those who have streamed events in the past) and including a link to this topic.
I'm surprised with how much they work with Show Ready Events to ensure the same feel of events in person, that they have never set a standard for themselves when it comes to virtual viewers of events, who will be watching long after the event ends.

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

This would be unusual, can anyone confirm?

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

How did this camera and setup work out for you guys? I am looking into putting together some higher quality streams for St. Louis going forward and this is a great price point. I went ahead and purchased the camera just to play around with it and see what we could do.

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

I've been out of the country for most of our events, but I'll send some of our webcast people over here.

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

I don't think we ever used the cheap camera for an actual broadcast. We're using the GoPro again this year because we wanted to use that widescreen webcam on our robot instead.

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

I received it yesterday and it does seem perfect for on-board robot use. The field of view is pretty great for a cheap webcam but the video quality was somewhat 'grainy' and had some noise. I suppose you get what you pay for and the GoPro is still a great inexpensive solution compared to some of the high end A/V solutions out there.

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

Thanks for posting this Allen. It has been very helpful as we prepare to stream the 10,000 Lakes Regional for the first time. Here are a few thoughts I'd like to share:
- The HD Hero 2 is a mini HDMI port where as the newer GoPro models are micro HDMI. We bought this skeleton case for our Hero 2 and made a cutout for the HDMI and SD card slots.
- Much like the Elgato, the AVerMedia LGP C875 is a USB capture device, but it also has a driver that allows it to be DirectShow compatible allowing it to be used with a greater variety of software.
- Like Andrew suggested, we purchased a speaker stand that we were easily able to slide an extendable painter's pole into.

Thanks for everyone's input in this thread. It has been very informative. ::rtm::
Nate

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

One question I have is how are you guys getting the high resolution real time scoring overlay? I thought the Scorpion box could only output a composite video source, but streams like PNW have really sharp real time scoring info - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWduHPHCZjk

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

Although I didn't see it, people who were watching Ventura told me it was very good. Anyone have the specifics for that event?

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

We were banned from Twitch while streaming the NYC Regional. Not for music copyright though, for "nongaming content". We were displeased to say the least and have still yet to receive a response from Twitch on the matter.

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

The FMS case outputs DVI, at least on the PNW fields. This is then converted and split into an HDMI signal that we overlay on our stream and show on the FTA's desk.

Twitch is a gaming focused streaming site. They have the right to take down any stream that doesn't fit with the style of content they want on their site. I agree that it is frustrating, but you just have to accept that fact.

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

The only thing is, Twitch has "FRC: Recycle Rush" as an option in their "what game are you playing" menu when you setup the stream, so unless those categories are submitted by the community and not reviewed by anyone, Twitch should be ok with FIRST competitions being streamed.

The real problem is that the "non-gaming content" flags are submitted by users, not twitch admins, if you get enough flags you get banned automatically for 24 hours and the appeal system is too slow to be of any use.


Our first event this year was streaming to Twitch and got banned in the middle of Friday competitions. We switched over to Hitbox.tv (basically a twitch clone with fewer restrictions) and had no issues aside from having to refresh the stream every few hours due to length limitations.

Re: Live Streaming and Recording of Events
 

All the District scorpion cases do not have a scan converter in them so FIRST gave us an option of what video output we wanted. I think all the districts opted for DVI as you can get DVI, VGA, and HDMI from the DVI-I output.

For MAR, we've done it two ways since the audience screen is limited to 1280x720 resolution.
1) 720p: 15ft DVI to HDMI cable straight into our video switch equipment.
2) 1080p: DVI -> VGA adapter into VGA->HDMI scan converter which scales the resolution up to 1080p then via HDMI into our video switch.

Obviously what you can connect to is out of your control, but on the standard scorpion case you could connect to the VGA pass through which will output the audience screen as if it was on another computer monitor. From that you could scale that to whatever resolution you wanted. This is what we were going to do in MAR before we found out this year that we were getting a DVI output.