Is it possible to stream retropie to twitch?
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Thanks! Very kind of you to say
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@kikinaak said in Is it possible to stream retropie to twitch?:
The fact that I was reaching for some tylenol halfway through that probably sums up my chances of getting it going. But ah well, I picked up a pi to learn on (and game), so in for a penny in for the pounding. Thanks for the link!
A simpler solution would be to pick up an HDMI capture card and use that. ;)
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@Douggernaut I'd be the first to agree with you - that's the route I initially went down, but even the cards in the £100+ range where receiving a disturbing percentage of 1 star reviews on Amazon.
It's nice to have the option to running it all natively; if you run the all-in-one script, it's about 30 minutes to obtain, build, compile, and install - and it's just running a single script to do so.
Setting up RetroArch to use FFmpeg, and modifying a couple of runcommand entries to get the emulator to launch with recording enabled is a few minute's work.
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@RetroResolution I'm sorry to hear that one-star reviews turned you away from that avenue, but it looks like you've managed to find/make a different path. Thanks for sharing your hard work!
I haven't had any difficulty with my capture card, so I was curious about reviews after your post, and had a quick look at some options:
- Elgato HD60 (USB card) - 4.3 Average, 8% 1-Star (I have this one)
- AverMedia Live Gamer HD (Internal PC card) - 3.7 Average, 17% 1-Star
- Hauppage Colossus (Internal PC card) - 4.0 Average, 6% 1-Star
- BlackMagic Design DeckLink Mini (Internal PC card) - 4.0 Average, 18% 1-Star
For comparison: - Raspberry Pi 3B - 4.7 Average, 21% 1-Star
- Raspberry Pi 2B - 4.7 Average, 8% 1-Star
- Raspberry Pi 1B - 4.7 Average, 4% 1-Star
With some, I can see why you looked for alternatives. It may also be that capture cards were not as numerous nor as well-supported back when you were researching your options. I wonder how RetroPie would be reviewed if it had that system in place!
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@Douggernaut thanks for the summary of capture cards - I was close to buying an Elgato myself, but I tend to be a bit unlucky with technical items failing (it could just be as I have bought a lot of kit in the past!)
The ratio of 1 star reviews isn't as high as I recall - probably me misremembering; that said, if a capture card is over £100 I'd hope it was nearly flawless.
I'm stunned at the 21% 1 star rating for the Pi 3. Of course people are generally more motivated to complain than to praise, so the stats tend to be polarised.
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@Douggernaut said in Is it possible to stream retropie to twitch?:
I wonder how RetroPie would be reviewed if it had that system in place!
RetroPie ruined me for modern gaming. I'd give zero stars if it's an option. STAY AWAY!
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@RetroResolution The 4.7 average still says a lot for how many stellar reviews the Pi 3 receives, regardless of complainers! As for expecting perfection for price - I hear you, that's quite an investment you definitely don't want to go to waste. Again, I'm glad you found another way and are generous with sharing your experience. :)
@mediamogul I was thinking more along the lines of the somewhat intense learning experience scaring some away, but that too!
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@Douggernaut an honest review of RetroPie: 1 star because when I spent less than $100 on a development board designed for learning, self motivation, and tinkering I was distraught that I was actually required to exert minimal effort to read the manuals provided to me for free despite me having zero Linux experience.
I demand a self contained retrogaming board that runs n64 100% and GameCube too! I demand that the developers who spend their free time and resources making retropie, make RetroPie as user friendly and as pretty as all my Apple products! And when I asked for help they gave me links to things and told me to help myself rather than doing it for me so zero stars for customer service!
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...And what about Scarecrow's brain!?!
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I've also decided to take a try at this, so this thread is very helpful. I'd like to avoid using a capture card if I can - if it's possible to do without one, why should I get a card? @kikinaak (or anyone else) - any progress? Any tips for those of us just starting to dig in? I'm currently making my way through RetroResolution's guide.
@RetroResolution - the guide mentions overclocking for building ffmpeg, but the guide itself does not include overclocking. Is it necessary/recommended in order to get this process working smoothly to overclock the pi? I have a raspberry pi 2b
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@lwszolek no progress here, but I have not tinkered with it much. My circumstances prevent me from overclocking my pi at present (heat management issues) and I'm thinking an external card is the way to go once I can afford it. It offloads recording to another device and lets the pi focus on far important matters like playing the game :)
I will toss an update on here if I ever manage to get it working. -
Hi,
I have my third and final part of the guide on recording (and using twitch) 90% complete; I'm sad to say it's been on hiatus due to a family tragedy. I aim to get back to it, if for no better reason than to take my mind somewhere else.
I dislike releasing unpolished guides, but may have to if I cannot motivate myself sufficiently - maybe rework it at some better time.
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@lwszolek to be honest I'm not sure how the pi 2 will handle native capture - this entire project has been undertaken on a pi 3 @ 1350mhz; on less demanding emulators it's likely to be okay. Further tweaking the ffmpeg config to trade quality for speed is also an option.
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@RetroResolution - I am sorry to hear you're going through a hard time right now. Online tutorials are not a priority next to RL. If you don't get around to finishing the guide, can I peek at the unfinished version? If you like, I can help edit it or something like that.
Good to know about the pi3. I do have one of those lying around also, so if I can't get the pi2 at least working with nes emulator (my goal), I'll try that one.
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@lwszolek thanks for your support, it helps!
I did manage to complete another chunk of the guide - it's not been helping that the on-line editor keeps crashing under the strain (relatively complex layout for a WordPress page)
I will try and get this finished tonight - lost two days trying to install visual studio on Windows 7...
I'm happy to give you a copy to look at if I don't get it published today or tomorrow. -
@lwszolek said in Is it possible to stream retropie to twitch?:
@RetroResolution - I am sorry to hear you're going through a hard time right now.
I hate to hear this as well. Your guides are always a pleasure to view, right alongside Herb's and Floob's and I look forward to seeing more anytime you feel like producing them.
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@mediamogul thanks for your support, I do appreciate it.
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I've finally published the guide... I hope that you find it helpful - please feel free to ask me any questions (as I've not had time to polish it quite as much as I'd like)
Details are on the forum post here:
A direct link to the guide is here:
Recording Live Gameplay in RetroPie’s RetroArch Emulators Natively on the Raspberry Pi
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Has anyone actually succeeded with streaming to twitch? I just get Retroarch crashing with a bus error when I attempt.
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@zerojay I've not succeeded yet, as Twitch requires a specific x264 video and planar format; the trick to getting it working will be to use ffmpeg as a command-line tool to transcode some existing video file; this allows lots of tests with different configurations to be made without slow, tedious launching of Emulation Station, then dropping back to the terminal to make changes (this is how I worked out the settings for recording).
I have a link somewhere to a thread in which the Twitch codec requirements are discussed; it's on another machine, but I'll update this post to include it as soon as I can.
[Edit]
The link I was looking for is:
http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=115The example Twitch settings as found on the thread can be seen, below. The main issue is that the video codec is libx264 and the pix_fmt must be yuv420p. In the code I use to record to disk, the video codec is libx264rgb with pix_fmt set to bgr24
I spent an evening looking into this, but have not been able to directly ouput to yuv420p using any x264 codec. It may be necessary to recompile the ffmpeg library to include some alternative x264 codec library (one which directly supports output to yuv420p).
The ffmpeg documentation does mention (somewhere...) commands to interrogate a given code to see which pix_fmts can be used.
vcodec = libx264 pix_fmt = yuv420p # twitch only supports yuv420p scale_factor = 2 # Upscales with 2x to preserve chroma acodec = libmp3lame audio_global_quality = 75 sample_rate = 44100 format = flv # Flash muxer video_crf = 25 # -crf video_tune = animation # -tune video_preset = superfast # -preset threads = 3 # x264 threads
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