I never post on this thing enough really. Just going to do two things with this post. First, give an update from the Jan post about content creation. Second, some folks have asked about pictures and such of my home tech setup. Figured I’d do that too.

So first, I mostly ditched the YouTube idea. It wasn’t really working out for me. I still post stuff on there and I still plan on editing some videos and posting stuff there. However, it isn’t my focus. I’ll probably post like one or two videos from my stream there a week. Maybe 1 edited video a week. Mostly I’ve gone back to streaming on a solid schedule. I’ve given myself a bit of leeway but also determine to stick to the schedule. I’ve been doing pretty good with that so far.

As an additive, I’m still mostly focused on playing shooters right now. Not much else out right now that I care about. I’ll probably stream Persona 5 and Final Fantasy 15 when those release. That is about it though. Once May 24th hits I’ll be streaming Overwatch a vast majority of the time. Right now I’m just streaming random stuff. I’ve been posting the ‘game’ schedule on my channel feed when I’ve got a definite schedule of what I’m playing what night. For the next week though I’ll probably randomly be streaming Uncharted 4 (until I beat it), DOOM Multiplayer, CS:GO, Dirty Bomb, Unreal Tournament, and Rainbow Six: Siege.

So here is the current schedule that I’ve been running for a few weeks now:

• Monday: 6PM – 10PM
• Tuesday: 6PM – 10PM
• Wednesday: 6PM – 10PM
• Thursday: Random
• Friday: Random
• Saturday 5PM – X
• Sunday: Random

On to my tech setup. Since I stream, I’ve had to do a few elaborate things in order to make my whole set up work. It involves several very long cords, 1 HDMI 5-in-1-out switch, and 3 HDMI 1-in-2-out splitters. I don’t think you see much of the splitters in any of the pictures I took though.

This is just the entertainment center’s setup. The angle looks a little funny but I promise it is straight. I took the picture from an angle to get the controller basket and such in the same picture. So all the consoles on the entertainment center. Sound bar’s subwoofer to the left, then the controller basket, and fight sticks. Behind the controller basket are the power cables and everything.

This is a tiny bit messy, but it was a million times worse when I was first putting it together. I didn’t have any cords zip tied or anything. It was an apocalypse. Now I’ve got power cables and such grouped together and tagged with a color and abbreviation. The thing on top of the subwoofer is the 5-in-1-out HDMI Switch.

This gal is the central nervous system of the console setup. Without this thing it would be a real pain in the ass to stream from any of the consoles.Some of the stickers are falling off, I should fix that. The colors are coordinated to input and also on the controller that switches the channel (didn’t take a picture of that). So this takes 5 consoles (not counting the 360, which is plugged into the Xbone) and sends the output goes around behind the couch (to the left) over to the computer in the study area on the other side of the room and plugs into the capture card.

Didn’t take a picture of the back of the computer where everything plugs in, but this is the computer station. Looking at this picture I realized the right 2 monitors weren’t aligned right, so I fixed that :). Not much else to say here. Can’t see the green screen too well, but it is right there. PC Tower is on top of a file cabinet. So the HDMI switch’s out is plugged into my Avermedia internal capture card on the PC, then another output is sent back around from the capture card and one is also sent from my video card. So the HDMI Switch’s output eventually gets to an HDMI channel on the TV, and another HDMI channel on the TV can act as a 4th monitor (mostly used to watch ESports tournaments).

Moving on to that, I’ve got to do something a little special in order to stream to the PS4 and for the stream to hear my friend’s voices while we’re playing.

Sorry for the dust 🙂 The left most USB cord is the controller with a chain of 2 6ft USB extension cables that plug into a 4ft Mini-USB cord that plugs into the PS4 controller (Sometimes I don’t need this, but I forget to charge my controller a lot >.>). The right cable is 1 6ft USB that plugs into a 10 ft Micro-USB cord that plugs into my Astro Mixamp. The cord not plugged into the front of the PS4 is an optical audio cable. This is a 20 ft cable that also plugs into the Mixamp.

The 2 cables on the right are the previously mentioned Micro-USB and Optical cables. Cable on the left goes to my Astro A40 headset that I use for the consoles. I use a Logitech G633 for the PC.

Things not in the pictures:

The PS3 and PSTV both have their outputs plugged into an HDMI splitter, then that HDMI splitter is plugged into the Switch. The reason you have to do this is so you can strip HDCP from the output. Otherwise you can’t stream from either machine because they don’t have a setting to turn off HDCP like the PS4 does.

The final HDMI splitter is actually right before I plug the switch into the capture card. I split again, but I send one output to my middle monitor and one output to the capture card. This is so that when I want to stream console games I can still sit at my desk and utilize my Cam/Mic/Green Screen. Prior to this I was moving my mic and my webcam to the couch and it just became a huge hassle. It killed my motivation to stream on some days. Which is a bit silly, but it did.

Some other random details:

• I use an Audio-Technica AT2020 microphone. It has been great.
• The webcam is a Logitech C920. I’ve had to fight with it a little bit, but it has worked out in the long run.
• The DXRacer chair is fairly new. I do enjoy it, but for the cost I’m not entirely sure if it was worth it. I did end up getting a 25% discount due to it having a defect, but it is barely noticeable so I took the discount instead of sending the chair back.

Alrighty, that is it for this post. Right now I’m watching the CS:GO ESL Pro League finals. It is round 20/30 at map 5 in the series! Pretty hype games between G2 and Luminosity. I’ll be streaming some Uncharted 4 once this is over. Probably like 30 min? 🙂