Hi there;
It's good to have some feedback, as it is my goal to make the stream as good as possible I always want to hear what can be done.
Firstly I think for the most part it went very well, I didn't notice any real issues with the upload to the streaming server and nor did many people report issues with buffering (choppy framerate).
Because I wanted to play things safe I did not max out my connection and kept the quality a little low, however my upload speed should be enough to deliver much higher quality bitrate streaming - I will toy with this during the break before the next race.
Regarding the music. Firstly I'm willing to forgoe it if people really do find it a problem. Personally I like the music (I guess I would) because I have sat and watched hours and hours of LFS car sounds and to be honest; it really gets horrible listening to the synth car noises without something good playing in the background. However I am willing to play tracks suggested by the viewers, as long as they're on Spotify and iTunes then that's fine. If I can setup a poll then I will.
As far as the camera work was concerned, I was using the tv director tool which tries to make an exciting race from the broadcast. I have noticed in the past too that it isn't always reliable when it comes to watching the action. However a human can easily miss the action too but I agree it would be nice to vary it somewhat with different angles etc - again something I will try to expand on more next time.
As far as commentary goes, this becomes more tricky. Because of the nature of the stream and the fact that there is a delay of quite a few seconds from what I see and what appears on the viewers screen, this means that someone watching the stream can't commentate, they would need to be in the server (just like the host) so they can commentate live.
I think it would be possible to use Skype or another VOIP program to bring someone in to commentate, but, this would use up extra network bandwidth - not too much but obviously I'd like to use as much for video as I can. I will admit that out of everything, commentary will be the hardest unless I do it myself and sadly, I'm not really happy to speak on the mic of 5 hours because my voice is very bad for radio and I'm quite a reserved person vocally.
On a similar note, if anyone has more streaming experience and can give me tips on:
Profile (Baseline/Main) and levels 1.3 to 5.1 then please email me at:
[email protected]
edit: I just fixed part of the camera problem; I have now adjusted the appropriate ini file and the tv director tool will now switch around various car angles. If anyone knows a great full set of new CVW's for all the LFS cars then please let me know.