It’s been a while hasn’t it? I kinda forgot about this blog until just now. I’ve been busy with the YouTube channel, studying and working on a few projects, as well as enjoying myself and relaxing as usual. But I need to remember to write about what I’ve been doing occasionally. For no other reason that it’s fun to do!
I’ve started streaming which has been fun. Definitely a different experience from regular videos. In part because of the live interaction with the for now small audience, but also because I can relax, not worry about editing or mistakes. It still gets turned into a video that ends up on the channel as bonus content for those interested.
I started out by trying Beam.pro, but it turned out to not be a good choice since some of my viewers couldn’t watch the stream at 1080p and beam no longer allowed the viewers to chose the quality unless the streamer is a pro subscriber, which is fair. But this made me go to youtube for streaming. While the interface wasn’t super great or fancy their beta platform worked decently well. The one biggest annoyance with it was the irregular viewer counter which didn’t seem to actually reflect the amount of people watching the stream at that moment. Knowing how many are watching feels important, at least for me.
After a few streams on YouTube I decided to start looking at beam again. I tried to find out what exactly was required to allow transcoding (quality) options for the viewers. It turned out to be difficult.
The only options pretty much were “Going Pro” and becoming a partner. Going pro involves a monthly fee, which isn’t really something I’m willing to go for at the moment with my just starting out, and becoming a partner is something you have to apply for and probably requires actually having a decently sized audience and regular streams. Unfortunately their main website didn’t actually state which of these would allow transcoding, though I was pretty sure it’d be the pro option.
But instead of guessing I simply sent a message to the support asking about it and later that day got a short reply linking to an article on an entirely different site not linked anywhere obvious on the main one.
To have your request to become a partner you are required to fulfill a bunch of stat requirements.
They’re pretty straight forward I suppose. I obviously don’t have 300+ followers at the time. I have three. And my highest viewer count at any one time has been 6 as far as I know. The resolution is not a problem. Quite the opposite as it’s turned out.
I can safely say I will never show a webcam during my streams or videos. Not because I don’t want to show my face to anyone on the scary internetz.
No, the reason I wont do it is because I believe it doesn’t add anything that is worth covering up the game for. And I don’t play games that have a high emphasis on reactions that would require seeing my face. Like horror games.
But basically I wont be getting a partnership anytime soon. Which I wouldn’t really care about if it wasn’t for those transcoding options.
Fortunately there is an alternative. Which I was also informed about in this message, so thanks for that I guess. The alternative comes in the form of an option available to everyone in the channel settings. I’d seen this before this issue came up while investigating what options were avaliable to me. That part of the settings page looks like this:
As you can see it says “Transcoding Profile” which I had no idea what it meant. You’ll also probably notice the little question mark button there. I saw that and thought “That’ll probably explain what this is.” Boy was I wrong. The popup that appears when you click the question mark looks like this:
I had no idea what these numbers were. It makes sense now of course. Particularly knowing what “transcoding” means. But for a button with a question mark on it this explains nothing of what you would expect. I’d change it to an exclamation mark instead.
But basically what this does when you choose the default profile, which is actually not default since this starts on “Disabled”, is that your viewers will get two quality options while watching your stream. “480p” as can be seen up there, and “Source”. Source simply means whatever resolution you’re actually sending with whatever streaming program you’re using (I use Open Broadcasting Software).
I used to stream at 1080p, but to accommodate some of my viewers I’m now streaming at 720p. Because given the choice of streaming at 1080p, forcing people who can’t watch 1080p to watch at 480p when they could watch 720p, and streaming at 720p I’m going to do the latter of course.
But since I now have this option I will most likely continue to stream on beam.pro from now on. Barring any significant issues. Maybe one day I’ll become a partner. One day.