I really don’t like making updates like this on my own website, but in this situation I feel it’s important to get the point across.

Ever since May I’ve been messing around with streaming on Youtube. The reason I wanted to do this was to help my channel grow and to use it as a helpful way of recording footage for Eternal Memories. Eventually I thought it would be a fun idea to make full game playthroughs of some of the games I played, and since then I actually have completed quite a few games from the VC/PSN/eShop, with more on the way. Unfortunately, I got too carried away with this as I eventually made the dumb decision to turn every new game I bought on Wii U/PS3 into means for a playthrough, thinking it would just be as simple as me hitting the record button and playing the games like I normally would.

I was dead wrong on that one. Since May my Mac-only setup demands too much for proper streaming, mainly due to shitty upload speed, (Not even one mbps can be achieved at my current speed and to my knowledge I can’t upgrade it due to my location) bitrate and sync problems along with tons of other issues. Using OBS on a mac isn’t as easy or as good as if I used it on a PC, but being barred from buying one at the moment (Don’t ask, it’s a stupid reason…) I’m stuck with having to test out random solutions for the mac version in hopes that they would work and to stop the blur issue.

Yes, this blur issue never happened when I filmed from my capture device’s native software before I started streaming. The thing is, that software sucks really badly, often cutting out and refusing to work after a few minutes of recording. I was sick of having gameplay videos destroyed by a bad program so I turned to streaming as an optional solution, and for the most part it actually works pretty well for most of the games I play. Titles like Ys IV, Bonk’s Adventure and a lot of retro games work fine with my setup, but newer titles like Pokken Tournament and Tokyo Mirage Sessions do not. At all. They blur into a mess that’s impossible to identify, and I’ve been sick of the occasional comment complaining about the blur.

For many months I blamed my composite capture device for it, but upon doing research in the past week as I prepared to save money for an AVermedia capture card I learned that unfortunately, it’s more to do with my internet than my capture device itself. My max bitrate at this crappy speed is 450, (Any more and the stream will not work) and this entire time I was apparently streaming at a bad resolution, so today I went ahead and fixed it in hopes of seeing improvement. (since these are my max settings, the most I can do) The good news is that it did seem to improve quality a little bit for my Majora’s Mask playthrough, but it didn’t play nicely with Tokyo Mirage, leaving most action scenes a blurry mess. I was disappointed and angered that I wasted seven months doing something that was pretty much a waste, with little discussion, no sudden influx of subs or followers and overall just a ton of headache.

The only real positive is that streaming and then editing via the youtube video editor led to faster uploads than if I recorded it with my device, (Where a 15 minute gameplay video would take a good 6 hours to upload, while a 2 hour gameplay video edited from a stream would take about one hour.) which means more content. Still, quality over quantity is a big thing that I forgot about, so now I’m going to make up for it by cancelling the following playthroughs:

-Twisted Fusion
-Tales of Symphonia
-Beyond Oasis
-Shining in the Darkness
-ESWAT
-Fatal Labyrinth
-Tokyo Mirage Sessions
-Sonic Generations
-Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection
-Decap Attack

I may add to this list if I forgot something, but basically anything that’s either filler, too blurry to continue or just too long will be cancelled in favor of games I can actually complete on the channel. This does lead one question remaining…

What about the Tokyo Mirage Sessions review?

To be honest, the sole reason I never got around to it was because I wanted to finish the game on stream first. Sadly, the issues with streaming along with demotivation and other things made it take much longer than it should, so as of now I’m cancelling the playthrough of TMS, but I have now played enough of the game so that i’m still able to give my honest thoughts on the title. Expect those in a couple of weeks, hopefully. That big cloud should be gone now, and the playlists/videos will be edited accordingly. My sincere apologies to those who were enjoying the streams of the games above, but I do have plans to continue for other titles like PMDI/PMDII along with Monster World, so I’m not quitting streaming altogether!