Desktop Broadcasting using VH ScreenCap

From Jtvcommunity

This guide is to teach you how to broadcast your Windows Desktop to Justin.TV using Flash Media Live Encoder 3.0 (FME) and VH Screen Capture Driver. The screen captures may be different than yours, I am currently using Windows 7 Home Premium.

Contents 1 Essential Downloads 2 Installation Steps 3 Setting up FME 4 Setting up VH Screen Capture Driver

Essential Downloads

32bit or 64bit? If you are unsure whether you are using a 32-bit or a 64-bit Operating System, Click Start, Control Panel, then System.

Windows 7

Start, control panel then go to System and Security and then System and under the Windows edition Header.

1. Flash Media Live Encoder 3.0 Sign up for an account to download it.
2. VH Screen Capture Driver

Installation Steps

1. Install the VH Screen Capture Driver first. It may or may not require you to restart for it to work.
2. Install Flash Media Live Encoder 3.0 (Alternative can be Version 2.5, some say it is less resource intensive but for the sake of this guide everything will be for Version 3.0)

Setting up FME

1. After your installation are done, proceed to get your XML file from Justin.TV. Push the Broadcast button in Justin.TV website located on the upper right. Under no circumstance are you to give this XML to anyone. This file have the information to broadcast into your channel.
2. When you clicked on the broadcast button, the following window will pop-up. Click "Allow" and you can ignore it and click on the "More" Tab.
3. In this Window, under Flash Media Encoder, click on "Learn More".
4. Here you can click on the link to download FME, which you should have already. Click on the link following "FMLE 3.0", and save it to somewhere you can find it easily.
5. Run Flash Media Live Encoder 3.0, and the following Window should closely resemble what you should have.
6. Click on File, Open Profile then locate the XML file I told you to download from Justin.TV.
7. After it is opened and loaded successfully you will see some numbers and letters in the right Panel. Ignore those, Don't touch it. It should say "rtmp://live.justin.tv/app" on "FMS URL:" at least.
8. On the left "Video" panel, change the "Device" to "VHScrCap".
9. On the left as well, you can change the "Format" to "VP6" or "H.264". The difference in the encoding lies with Single-Core CPU versus Multi-Core. VP6 only utilize single core system while H264 can make use of your multi-core CPU. For High Quality streaming, most uses H264 because it's better in performance.
10. The "Frame Rate" settings vary on different games. You should start off with 15 to see how well your computer perform while playing and streaming.
11. The "Input Size" also varies on games and computer. If you computer is top notch you can set this to a higher setting to around 1280x720 or higher like 1920x1080. Note that when your game begins to slow down and fps drop, this is one of the reason why it does that. Your computer can't handle the resolution so lower it. Most often 1280x720 should suffice.
12. Bit rate. This determines the quality and blurriness of your stream. If you have a bad upload like me (Tatazilla) don't bother trying to tweak out your quality settings, it just won't happen. To determine what this should be, first head to SpeedTest.net and check out how fast you can "Upload". Anything around 600 Kbps (600 Kilobits per second) is considered HD. If the test shows that you have like 0.5MBps, then you should put the bit rate to 400kbps. You will need to play around with this to see how you like it. If you have a high upload speed like around 4-5MBps, setting this to 1000 to 2000 is enough, it might even be too much for some viewers here.
13. The "Output Size" is what others will see your resolution at. It doesn't need to be the same as your "Input Size" but you can for quality purpose. Just so you know, computer resolution in widescreen is different than what Justin.TV can handle. Justin.TV uses 16:9 ratio, while most computer uses ratio like 16:10 (1680x1050, 1440x900, etc).
14. The "Crop" section is to get rid of unwanted black spaces so it fits neatly in the streaming window.
15. For the "Audio" section, it may be a bit complicated. I believe there are other guides out there in JTV Wiki that may help you. What you need to do to stream your desktop audio is to select the device to "What U Hear" (for Sound Blaster Audio Cards) or "Stereo Mix". Remember to change the volume bar on the bottom to very low since there's a slight bug where it will stream the audio very loud. If you want to talk on top of your audio with a headset or another mic, you can do that as well. Goto your Sound Devices and check the Levels of your Speaker. On the list there should be "Microphone" and a bar to set how loud it is. Enable the device there if it is muted.
16. On the right panel, check "Auto Adjust" and "Degrade Quality". What this does is it will degrade the bitrate so the quality will be reduce instead of skipping frames.

Setting up VH Screen Capture Driver

1. Click on "Start", "Programs", "Hmelyoff Labs", "VHScrCap", and then "Config".
2. It will take you to the instance selection. Be sure to select the one that have "FlashMediaLiveEncoder.exe" in it. Click Select.
3. Click on the "Capture". If you want to select a specific window, click on select and target a window. It will have a box around the targeted window. If you want a selection, click on select then click and drag a selection.
4. Click on "Settings". The frame rate should be the same as the one on FME. If not, change it so it is the same. Keep these settings the same as in this image. Do you see the Magenta color (Purple) box? Change that to black, that way when you stream the excess space will be black instead of magenta.
5. Close this window by clicking X and then on the preview in FME, you should see the window there. If not, re-select the window again like on step 3 of Setting up VH Screen Capture Driver.

Click "Start" in FME and you should have it running! --Tatazilla 19:37, 3 January 2010 (UTC)