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Comment by QuantumNomad_ | Hacker News Reader

I’ve sometimes heard Twitch streamers mention that they use two computers for streaming. One is the computer you are seeing on stream, and the other computer is running OBS and using a HDMI capture device.

With this new live streaming feature in Asciinema, I could imagine that a small subset of programming streamers could skip buying a HDMI capture device. Specially the kind of developer who works exclusively in the terminal. This small group of people could now stream their terminal from the dev machine to the OBS machine using Asciinema 3, instead of capturing HDMI output.

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That shouldn’t really matter for asciicinema streaming which 0 effect on any kind of performance.

The 2 device setup for game streaming was born because of the heavy CPU usage of x264 encoding. So you could have a PC for the game only while the streamig PC takes the encoding load.

But even then nowadays a lot of people moved on from that since you can use your GPU for encoding (Nvidia NVENC) which almost has 0% overhead and providing the same or slightly worse quality. Really OBS x264 should be only used for offline video recording say for a Youtube video

Another feature of this is that if your primary PC crashes, which happens sometimes especially with some games, your stream doesn’t go down too. This is more important for streams with more viewers and longer runtimes, as restarting the stream drops all the AFK viewers who may still be contributing ad revenue (or just boosting active viewer count which has other flow on benefits too).

You can see this effect in long streamathons/subathons as twitch automatically kills long streams so you’ll see multiday streams get cut up either manually by streamers or automatically by twitch every 24h or so, and the viewer count drops significantly and takes quite some time (many hours) to recover.

YouTube recompresses everything anyway so I found the higher quality you upload the better the result, especially for complex stuff like high-paced gameplay.

And at very high bitrates nvenc quality is just fine. It's mostly at the lower bitrates x264 really shines.

Of course for livestreaming there are different constraints.

Twitch streamers do that because they are streaming GPU intensive workload (video game) that would compete with streaming software for GPU resources.

It also prevents driver crash caused by a video game to crash a stream.

Yeah that makes sense. I was thinking that the two computer setup was also something they did to keep their streaming stuff completely separate from the rest of their life, to not accidentally doxx themselves on-stream and to not accidentally execute malware on the same host they do their email and banking etc on.

Additionally, running on a different computer allows for eg adjusting scenes in OBS or moderating Twitch, without losing focus from the running app/game.

i think the setup you describe is used primarily to offload video encoding to a second pc, not something programming streamers (not running graphically intensive games) probably need not concern themselves with it

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