Hey everyone, my name is Cristian aka «Trance» and I would like to share my impressions of XSplit’s latest feature, which is currently in development, the «Gamesource».
Allow me to introduce myself. I am the technical director at Level Up TV (www.levelupyourgame.net) and head of streaming at DreamHack (www.dreamhack.se). This has allowed me to become an XSplit user and beta tester since the early days of the program. A while ago I was introduced to « Gamesource » and been using it ever since with various games.
As the name suggests, it has been developed specifically for the gaming enthusiasts and I must say, so far in the early tests it has been great. What is « Gamesource » you might ask. Well, it’s basically XSplit Broadcaster’s solution to game capture by hooking directly into them. No more need for «screen captures» with this new feature. So instead of "add screen region" you will now also have "add game" as an option.
Quote from the XSplit Team " The « Gamesource » will be available in the final version of XSplit Broadcaster for both personal and premium subscribers. In the upcoming beta 4 final we will make it available to all users who have made a pre-order of either XSplit Personal or Premium."
What are the advantages of using «Gamesource» instead of the traditional screen capture way? Well for starters, I find the overall quality to be better, especially when running really high-quality streams at high framerates and bitrates.
Secondly, by using this method, you are no longer constrained if you are using a single monitor. This means as long as the game is hooked up to the broadcaster, that’s the only thing that will be shown on your stream, allowing you to do all sorts of things in the background without having to worry about not showing things you don’t want to (as opposed to the screen region).
At the moment, « Gamesource » supports games only in « window mode » but the goal in the long term is to be able to use it in a fullscreen mode, which would give it the ultimate advantage compared to a classic « screen capture ». Most of the traditional game formats are supported, DirectX 9,10 11 and OpenGL, etc thus enabling compatibility with most of the games out there. Please note, this feature is still in development so depending on different systems/games some issues can occur.
Below you will find a couple of short high-quality demo runs I did with Gamesource.
Please bear in mind that running such high-quality streams at these fps’ and bitrates require a pretty powerful CPU (preferably quad core and overclocked to ~4GHZ) and a stable 3 mbit+ upload on your connection
Here are the videos (you can view it fullscreen to see how sleek it is!):
Starcraft 2 (1080p – 30 fps – 3000 bitrate – everything on « high » in game)
Quake Live (720p – 60fps – 2500 bitrate)
Battlefield Bad Company 2 (720p – 30 fps – 3000 bitrate)
Counter-Strike 1.6 (720p – 50 fps – 3000 bitrate)
