Did you fully uninstall the old AMD drivers?

edit: lol you replied 7 seconds before I hit the post button. Post what you did on the OBS forum thread for posterity. :)

Snowballs are in a really awkward price bracket. They're not that great compared to most regular large diaphram mics which you can get for not a lot more (inc the gear required to plug it into your computer), but they're already stonkingly more expensive than a regular mic.

If you want a good audio mic, just got the full hog and get the real thing.

Ultimately it comes down to the eternal conflict of product vs platform that has existed ever since computers became a commercial venture as opposed to an academic one.

The average user doesn't want a platform, they want a product. Platforms require you to know things and work out how to use them, but a product JustWorks(TM). The fact that the designer clearly has an eye for a visuals and a product design background, but is missing this key issue, is pretty odd.

I'm bassically the head /r/tf2 mod. We don't run them. It's these guys that do. They have some policy in place for reporting hackers, go check that out.

Windows 8 is fine, but on a regular old desktop PC there is nothing that makes it worth switching to over Windows 7.

Yeah but I'd rather not have to. The issue isn't really bandwidth, the issue is Apache being garbage at handling a high rate of requests even if they 404.

kbits or kbytes is an important distinction.

1mbit = 1024kbits = 128KB/sec

Considering you posted this 2 hours ago it's quite possible. The guide is sitting on the front page of /r/starcraft, /r/dota2 and /r/tf2 right now as well. Bassically a few russian Dota 2 websites translated my old guide and posted up on their site which is totally cool and I don't have a problem with, however they didn't reupload the screenshots on their own website, they just embedded them from mines. That combined with Apache's really terrible default settings is causing my web server to bassically DDoS itself.

http://skyride.org/2013/09/obs-streaming-tutorial/

So I finally wrote a new guide from scratch. This one is a lot more indepth about choosing settings and stuff. Feel free to post here if you're stuck.

Yeah, I agree. Part of the problem at VTV was that we didn't have the whole infrastructure in terms of events like TF.TV now has and a process for advertising on /r/tf2, so most of our viewers knew we were live because they subbed to the channel on own3d/twitch and got the "VanillaTV is now live!" email, so any casts on VTV2 got a really underwhelming amount of viewers. It's much less of a problem now for TFTV to do it.

Added! :D

I can't speak for the NA side of TF.TV, but I can't imagine the problem is all that different from the issues we had/have on the EU side.

It's a bit of a catch-22. See, anyone who has the right combination of talent, personality and willingness to cast and improve is already doing it either on youtube or their own channel. Most of the people you think of as great casters today are just the people who happened to meet those 3 criteria right as the whole casting/streaming thing was kicking off. These people don't grow on trees. They only appear every so often.

Now back when I was in VanillaTV, we had "Open Mic" where we'd let bassically anyone who was willing cast a couple of games to see if they were any good. Skully in particular (personal opinions aside, the guy's a solid caster) was one of about 6 or 7 people out of a recruitment drive we did, and was really the only guy who showed any real potential and work ethic. Mia again is a newer face who's come to light pretty much the same way. Realistically though, in the dozens of people that program trialed, those 2 are the only real stars it produced.

Now you look to TeamFortress.TV where the focus is much more on quality over quantity, and you see the problem. By using existing popular streamers like Slin, Seanbud, etc you know what you're getting: a good personality, knowledge of the game, and ample experience in the limelight. If you expand that to the more sociable, invite/high IM players (or prem/div1 here in Europe), again that's probably a safe-ish bet.

However taking any random person willing to cast and throwing them in front of >500 people? That's not going to work out too well. Even if you run a program like OpenMic, you'll end up with >50% of the games you cast being done by that program, which leads to a lot of people complaining about a lack of quality in casting because you always need a reliable caster to partner the new guy with.

If you want to cast, go for it. Don't rely on BO/TFTV/VTV to provide you a platform, streaming is easy as fuck these days. If your internet and/or PC is a bit of toaster, you can always just locally record and upload to youtube. If you feel confident, get in contact with the bigger orgs, send them links to some of your stuff, and if you're any good we'd be more than welcome to bring you on board.

tl;dr: Good casters don't grow on trees. Throwing inexperienced casters in front of a big audience is bad for both audience and caster. If you want to cast, just do it, practice, and if you're any good we'll tripping over each other to bring you on board.

The site visits are nice, but the actual team sponsors are paying for exposure (i.e. their logo being shown in regards to the team winning stuff all over the net), not the visits. It's brand awareness.

The sponsors who understand that are the ones happy to plow bucket loads of money into esports. EG is particularly good in this regard.

Around 70% of the viewers on Twitch.tv use ad block.

Think about that for a minute. Imagine if you ran a restaurant, and 70% of the people who came in didn't pay? I'm sure you could find a way to make it profitable, but it's pretty hard. Like even for a guy just streaming to try and make a living. Even if you got that down to 40%, that's the difference between barely making ends meet, and living comfortably.

Personally I put my money where my mouth is and don't use ad block, but trust me, if Joe average starts using Ad Block, the internet will be a very different looking place.

8)

I have a tool that records it all. I'd happily make it public, but my server just wouldn't be able to handle the load I'm afraid. :(