Wow. I did not know about the Torx security thing. It looks like the ifixit kits come with a torx security instead of a regular torx, so I never even noticed when I took my controller apart to replace a shoulder button. 🤯

I thought that passing everything through it would allow the USB to feed/write the video stream without any other processing

Unfortunately no. It captures the signal and turns it into something that the computer can digest, but the signal isn’t something that just proxies straight through to twitch. OBS is always going to do some re-rendering.

A few tips:

If you open OBS settings, there is a “Output” section. You can change the output mode to “Advanced”, and then select a “Video Encoder” … this is where you would find NVENC (there might be a way to do it in the simple output mode too, but I dont have an nvidia GPU to confirm.

You’ll most likely want to change the Output resolution on the “Video” section of the settings down to 1280x720. Twitch limits your bandwidth anyway, and people tend to find that 1080p at low bandwidth doesn’t look any better than 720p at the same bandwidth (less compression artifacts because it doesnt have to compress as much, if at all)

Twitch has an option for bandwidth tests (or at least used to). This will make their servers accept the stream, but you don’t actually go live on the site. You can use this to see how your computer handles the streaming. On the main OBS dashboard, you’ll see a 30.00 / 30.00 FPS in the bottom right corner (or whatever your resolution you’ve selected). There’s also a CPU meter down there.

In the Docks menu there’s also a Stats dock. It will tell you how many Frames are missed due to rendering or encoding lag. If you have 0 missed frames, then your PC is handling the encoding just fine. It will also list how many dropped frames due to NETWORK you’ve had. This would indicate that there is a problem between you and Twitch/Youtube on the internet. Your computer is rendering the frames just fine, but Twitch isn’t receiving them.

Use the stats dashboard to figure out where you are losing frames and then fix that (if its rendering/encoding, then its NVENC or your CPU struggling. if its Network, then its your ISP struggling). And if you aren’t losing frames, then you have nothing to worry about. This dashboard will also show you CPU and memory usage, but realistically, if youre using a 3080 with nvenc, those usages will probably be very low.

Even with the elgato doing “video encoding”, how does it get to Twitch/Youtube? It doesn’t do THAT kind of encoding. It’s encodes the HDMI capture into a local format that is basically a webcam stream. It has to be broadcast from OBS. and even if you are using the Elgato as a video source, OBS is going to re-encode it into what it wants to broadcast. There isn’t really getting around the video encoding cost of OBS, unless you have a device that streams to the internet directly from the capture card (which it doesn’t seem like Elgato makes one. Someone else might, but that’s not really what they are for)

They can. But Elgato also makes a “Camlink” in addition to the “HD60” series. And the Camlink dongles create a UVC device, which can be used as a webcam with no further tweaking necessary. Using a full desktop capture card for a webcam is slightly overkill, but absolutely works.

Streamers use a capture device to stream on a second computer, with an extra GPU so the stream doesn’t interfere with their gaming performance. Don’t want stream encoding to hurt your framerate.

I’ve never heard of anyone using a multiple device setup for internet bandwidth reasons (im sure its happened, but I would have to believe it’s generally not the reason people use multiple devices)

… What exactly do you need the Elgato for? All the Elgato does is capture external HDMI signals.

If you had 2 PCs, you would use the Elgato to send the gaming PC’s screen to the streaming PC. If you had an Xbox, you would use it to capture the Xbox’s screen on your PC for streaming.

If you have 1 PC, you don’t need an Elgato, KDE already knows what your PC screen looks like, it is laying it out.

What you should be doing is just “open OBS and set up your scenes and start streaming.” The only thing you might want to do is go into the video settings and set it to use NVENC (I think you can do that on Linux) to offload the encoding to your GPU (which has dedicated encoding hardware) instead of your CPU.

Everything else should just work the same as it does on Windows.

To be clear: The Elgato HD60 X does not do any streaming… it is a video capture device. OBS does all the streaming, and it already has access to all the things it needs to capture by nature of being on the PC. You can just capture your desktop in OBS without the Elgato.

You’re right. There are multiple definitions of the word stable, and “unchanging” is a valid one of them.

It’s just that every where else I’ve seen it in computing, it refers to a build of something being not-crashy enough to actually ship. “Can’t be knocked over” sort of stability. And everyone I’ve ever talked to outside of Lemmy has assumed that was what “stable” meant to Debian. but it doesn’t. It just means “versions won’t change so you won’t have version compatibility issues, but you’ll also be left with several month to year old software that wasn’t even up to date when this version released, but at least you don’t have to think about the compatibility issues!”

Debian aims for rock solid stability

To be clear, Debian “stability” refers to “unchanging packages”, not “doesn’t crash.” Debian would rather ship a known bug for a year than update the package if it’s not explicitly a security bug (and then only certain packages).

So if you have a crash in Debian, you will always have that crash until the next version of debian a year or so from now. That’s not what I’d consider “stable” but rather “consistent”

It’s a nice tool to have around anyway. Even for my windows VR PC. The power at my house went out yesterday and the base stations restarted into a fully on state. I didn’t have to turn on the VR PC to turn them back off, just had to open Lighthouse PM.

In pineapple express they call it “the dopest dope I ever smoked”… But I now realize that movie is almost 20 years old.

apparently having all the logic inside firmware (like Nvidia does)

Based on this part of the quote, the nvidia implementation has a lot of the functionality inside not open source binary firmware blobs. And that includes the functionality that the HDMI forum wants staying secret. It’s in the closed source firmware, so this is ok, since the open source part only has to send instructions to the firmware, and not include the implementation.

AMD has less functionality inside the firmware. Which means the drivers are “more” open source. But any proprietary stuff that the HDMI forum wants staying secret would have to be in the open.

It’s a good thing League of Legends is adding Vanguard so it can’t be run on Linux anymore.

I switched to FreshRSS which works just as well, and doesn’t have a toxic dev

ProtonDB reports PC and Steam Deck separately. So unless the video creator took the PC stats and then added in Steam Deck and just counted SteamOS as Arch themselves, it’s probably just omitted entirely.

Also actually watching the video: Arch was already riding along at 20-21% before 2022. And in some cases dipped down to 19% mid 2022… So after the Steam Deck launched, the Arch numbers went DOWN. So yet another sign that Arch isn’t Arch + SteamOS: this is purely desktop usage.