 Okay. So first of all, welcome to the Avacon Grid. We're really happy to have you all here. It's wonderful to have a hybrid safari come through and visit. And today what we're going to do is talk about something called Open Broadcaster Studio. And it's a tool for either recording your desktop or a window on your computer. And it also lets you live stream to services like YouTube or Twitch. I do have slides in just in case anybody hasn't noticed. But yeah, Open Broadcaster is a free and open source program that has been in development for many years. And it's still under active development. It is a very stable, very good piece of software. And although the interface isn't necessarily as friendly as some of the more commercial offerings, it still is pretty close in terms of feature parity to some of the more expensive options. It is cross-platform, so it is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. And for the most part, they all work in exactly the same way. But the only notable exception is that Windows has a game capture mode, whereas I don't believe Mac and Linux does. Open Broadcaster allows you to live stream to services like YouTube, Twitch, or Facebook. I personally recommend YouTube as that's simply the easiest option. And it allows you, if you desire, to stream for free, ad free, which is something that most other services don't offer. And if you're not into live streaming, you can also use it to record things. Whether it's a meeting or an event or machinima, it can be very useful for filming machinima. Pretty much anything that you want. Mal here does his weekly news shows and Open Broadcaster is used for that. He both streams and records those using Open Broadcaster with the help of James. James at Loud. So along with Open Broadcaster, if you're especially if you're going into live stream or do something like an event or a news show, there's some things that are useful to have. Some extra hardware that's useful to have. And one of those is a headset. And of course, we all use voice in world, so we all know how important a good headset can be to prevent things like feedback and to get the best audio quality. Your other option is, especially if it's going to be recording as opposed to something live taking place in world, is to do something like use a dynamic microphone, a good solid microphone. And one of the cheaper ones, but still quite good, and it's what I use, is the blue snowball USB microphone. Doing a search online will easily turn that up. Amazon sells it, I believe it's around $30 US. The other thing you might want to look at is if you'd like to stream yourself. You know, let's say you're doing a tutorial or you're reviewing hardware or something like that and you'd like to stream yourself, you're going to want a good webcam. And a webcam that comes with your laptop is probably reasonably good, but a really nice one and it's a favorite of many streamers is the Logitech HD Pro C920. Again, this is what I have and it does a high definition 1080p video very well and it works well under many lighting conditions and, again, it's not expensive. Another thing that can be very useful, especially if I find for live events or things like that, is a 3D mouse and, of course, the most popular one used with the viewer because the viewer has support built-in port is a 3D connection space navigator. And this is very good for providing smooth camera movement, crane shots, or if somebody's doing more or less a show and tell type of presentation, it can be very useful. And finally, this is not hardware, this is software and that is a camera HUD. And what a camera HUD does is it lets you set and store camera positions. So if you use either your camera control window, your keyboard and mouse, or your fly cam and you move your camera into position, you can store that position into the HUD. And the HUD will have a bunch of buttons for presets for those positions and then you can just simply click on one of those presets and your camera will instantly move to it. So that can be very useful and there is one here that we're giving away in the box right in front of the podium. It does have instructions in its contents. So if you want to pick that up and play with it, and if you think you'll find it useful, by all means do, it is Creative Commons licensed and so pretty much open source. The other things to consider when, especially when streaming, not so much recording but especially for streaming is that you have good upload bandwidth. If you're going to do a high definition stream of 720p, you're going to want at least 2.5 megabits of upload speed and that's different from your download speed which is the number of most internet service providers tend to advertise. So to find out what your upload speed actually is, you're going to want to run a speed test and up in the slide I have the URL to the one I usually use which is speedtest.net. And at 2.5 megabytes per second, you can do a reasonable 720p stream. If you have less than 2.5 megabits, you can still stream, but you'll have to go to a lower, more standard definition resolution like 480p. And if you have 3 megabits, 4 or 5, then you can definitely do very high quality streaming, 1080p at even like 60 frames per second. And of course, the higher your screen resolution, the higher the screen resolution you're broadcasting at, the more bandwidth you need. You also need to be aware that streaming needs your upload, needs a lot of your upload pipes. So you need to close any applications that use your upload pipes. You need to accommodate for that. For example, In World Voice uses upload, Skype uses upload. If you're running something like Google Drive or Dropbox, you want to make sure that they're not going to start syncing in the middle of while you're streaming. And to improve performance, you want to make sure to close any programs in the background that you don't need. You don't want heavy programs like Adobe Photoshop or Acrobat or Blender running in the background while you're trying to stream. As much as possible, you just want to have your viewer going and open broadcast or going. And finally, on this slide, a wired connection is really quite important for streaming. A Wi-Fi connection just is not going to be dependable. You're going to wind up with a stream that is not smooth. And it's going to provide a less optimal experience for your audience. So you can stream. Open Broadcaster has presets built in for a lot of streaming services. And I've got them all up here on the slide. YouTube, Twitch, Hitbox, Beam, Daily Motion, all of those. And like I said before, this presentation is going to pretty much focus on YouTube. YouTube is unlike other services. Most services want you to pay, whether it's for being able to broadcast at high definition or to an unlimited number of users or to stream ad-free. They want you to have to pay for those things. And YouTube does not do that. YouTube, you can stream absolutely free. And as long as you don't monetize your channel, it will be ad-free as well. Of course, if you want to, you can monetize your channel and run ads. That's your choice. The one thing YouTube does require is a verified account. And that means that you need to go through a process where YouTube verifies that you're an actual person. You say who you are, who you say you are. And then you can start streaming. And of course, that's a downside if anonymity is especially important to you. So that's something to keep in mind. I've got links on the slide to, the first one is to the live dashboard. That's actually what, that's where you stream from. It's a page that's dedicated to streaming. It has a little preview of your stream in there and all the information you need to stream. And the second link is to a help page that tells you how to verify your YouTube account. Which usually involves either, I believe if I remember correctly, a phone call or an SMS message. So finally, OBS itself, Open Broadcaster Studio. You can get that at the URL on the current slide, which is obsproject.com. And if you just click, the download link is very prominent. You click on that, it'll ask you what operating system you have. It'll take you right to the right downloading. Just get the one that's correct for your operating system. As I said before, it is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. And then you just need to install it. And once it's installed, and you open it up, you'll see a window that looks like this. And it's, as I said before, it's not as intuitive as a commercial program might be. But it's still, once you know what each part does, it is not that difficult to use, honestly. And I'm going to walk you through some of that. And basically, in this tutorial or in this presentation, I've been shooting video tutorials, so I keep using that word a lot. In this presentation, we're going to basically just cover the basics. There's a lot of advanced things you can do with OBS. It actually is very powerful. But we're going to just stick to the basics on how to stream from your viewer and get it on YouTube. And try to do it in a pretty way as possible. So the first thing you'd want to do when you install and open up OBS is click, there's a settings button down in the lower right-hand corner. And you'd want to click that. And a new window will pop up, and it'll look like this. And as you can see down the left side, there's a number of tabbed options, much like the viewer preferences tab, viewer preferences window. And in the general tab, there's not a whole lot you really have to worry about. It does support multiple languages, so if you're not a native English speaker, you might want to choose German or Dutch or what have you. The other thing, two other things I'd probably highlight on this screen, and that is that you can change the theme. I personally really like the dark theme. If any of you have used recent content tools like Photoshop or Blender or Maya, you may, you know, recently the trend has been that they have a dark interface so that it focuses on the content. And that's what I prefer for OBS as well. This presentation shows everything in light mode, but there's a nice dark mode that's available. The other thing I'd notice on this screen is there's a checkbox that says, automatically record when streaming. And that can be very handy if you're, especially if you're doing things like events or meetings or news shows or things like that and you want to have a local copy, a local recording of whatever you're filming. There are, on the main screen, let me go back to that real quick. On the main screen, there are two buttons, one that says start streaming and start recording. And what that checkbox does is when you hit start streaming, it automatically starts recording. And believe me, and I've done this so many times, it is so easy to forget to hit both of them. Sometimes I've started to streaming, I'm like, oh no, I've forgotten to hit record. So that is a wonderful checkbox to use. Let me see here. The next slide, it goes to the next tab on the left, which is the stream tab. And this is where you choose where you're going to stream to. And this is where it has all of the streaming services you can choose. This slide shows YouTube, but they all work very much the same. On most streaming services, you simply have to choose what service you want. And then that service, once you've signed up for it, on its dashboard or its streaming page, it'll have what's called a streaming, a stream key. And all you need to do is copy and paste that into OBS. And that basically authorizes you to broadcast to your account on that service. And that's really it for this screen. Again, there's fancier stuff. If you install and play with this, you'll see that there's a custom option, which is, again, an advanced option, but it's there just so you know. And it lets you do things like stream to your own private server, for example, if you're very tech savvy and you're willing to set up your own streaming server, you can do that with OBS. But most people, I think, are just going to want to stick with the regular services. That's just the easiest. Now, let's see. Next slide. We're going to talk about output. And this is what's on this screen. At the top, you'll see there's an output mode. And for most of you, I recommend that you just keep it simple. That's the default. Again, there's an advanced one, but unless you're very familiar with what encoders are, decoders, and what all their settings are, and how they work, I recommend you don't mess around with that. And you just use the defaults. The defaults for Open Broadcaster are very good. And they'll do the job very well. The only thing you may want to adjust on this screen is probably the streaming video bit rate. So for example, you'll see on the slide, it is set at 2,500 kilobytes per second, which is around 2.5 megabits per second. So if you had, for example, four available to you, four megabits per second, you would put 4,000 in there. And if you had less, of course, you'd dial that down. Let's say you only had one megabit per second, you'd put 1,000 in there. And if you need to save even more bandwidth, you can always change the audio bit rate as well. The audio bit rate adds to your stream. And if you're doing something like we're doing today, which is primarily voice-based, you can easily go as low as 64 kilobits per second for the audio bit rate. If there's going to be music, I recommend, or other kinds of more dynamic audio, I recommend that you don't go any lower than 96. Otherwise, it's going to wind up kind of garbled and chirpy. And then below the streaming section, there's the recording section. And again, you can leave most of this alone. The one thing that matters is where your recordings go. And by default, on Windows, that's going to be your video library folder. And on Linux, that's going to be the video folder in your home directory. Not sure where it is at Mac, but I'm assuming it's a similar deal. And you just want to make sure that, especially if you're recording at high quality, that you want to have enough disk space wherever that recording is going to be stored. That's the thing to consider there. So the next tab we have to worry about is the audio tab. And this is the tab. These settings determine, I beg your pardon. Hi, I'm Marcus. Just to interject on that last point. For people who do have fairly low bandwidth and therefore have to choose a lower uplink rate, on that last tab, they still have the option of keeping the offline recording in much bigger, better quality. So if people are stressed for their bandwidth, it's not actually going to stop them keeping an offline copy that's high resolution. That is absolutely true. And that is an option that becomes accessible if you switch out of simple mode and go to the advanced mode, which unfortunately I don't have a slide for. But yes, it is. You absolutely can record at one at very high quality while streaming at a lower quality or vice versa. So yes, that it definitely is. Thank you, Mal. That is a very, very good point. And yes, yeah, this is a very, thank you, Thurza. This is a very powerful program. It really is. You can do so much with it. You don't have to. You can keep it simple. But yeah, you can do a whole lot with it. And getting back to the slides, on the audio settings, this determines what sound OBS is going to pull in. So by default, it pretty much pulls in whatever sound comes out of your desktop speakers. If you wanted to capture in-world voice, for example, and you were using a headset, you can see on this slide, it's set to my headset earphones. So all the voice audio is going to come in through my headset. And then OBS is going to capture only what's coming in through my headset. So any other little things or bongs from Skype or whatever won't get recorded. And you can, as you can see here, you can set a whole bunch of different audio devices. You can get kind of complicated if you want. But the only one you really have to worry about is what your desktop audio device is set to. And maybe if you're going to have your own microphone, you might want to add a microphone. Otherwise, you really don't have to worry about much on this page. And the final tab, we're not going to cover hot keys or advanced. Those aren't essential. So we're just going to finish up with the settings with looking at the video tab. And this one's important because this tab determines what resolution you'll actually stream at. And the important one here is the second one down, which is the output scaled resolution. And as you can see, it defaults to 1280 by 720, which is a 720p high definition stream. And you can set that lower or you can certainly set that higher. I usually stream at 1080p myself. And if you have a very nice computer that's capable of, for example, 4K, you can stream to YouTube at 4K. But make sure you have the hardware to do it. I mean, that takes a pretty powerful computer. 720, I think, is going to be fine for most people. And that's a good way to go. And yes, absolutely, the higher, again, the higher your resolution, the more bandwidth you need. Thank you, France. So that's an important thing to consider. And the other thing you can change on here is your frames per second. 30 is the default. 30 is very standard for streaming online. Again, if you're strapped for bandwidth, you can lower that down to 20 or even 15. For example, most animation on television is shot at only 15 frames per second. And it still looks OK. Ideally, though, you want 30. And again, if you have a very powerful computer, YouTube will let you stream at 60 frames per second. So you can go all the way up to 60. And that's pretty much it for the settings. So once you've got your settings all straightened out, of course, what you want to do is broadcast something. And we're going to talk about broadcasting your viewer. And on the bottom of your main open broadcaster studio window, there are scenes and there are sources. And a scene contains sources. You can have a whole bunch of scenes, but for this presentation, we're going to keep it to just one scene. And that's going to contain just one source. And as you can see in this slide, that source is going to be a window capture. And what that's going to let us do is capture our viewer window. Ideally, your viewer window will be maximized. And, oh, that's something I really should have had on the other slide. It's a really good idea to have two monitors. I mean, you could simply switch between open broadcaster and your viewer, but it's going to be more painful if you have two monitors where you can have open broadcaster open on one monitor and then your viewer open on the other monitor. That's just so much nicer. And as I was saying, it's ideal to have your viewer window maximized. So if you have, for example, a 1080p monitor, it'll fill up the entire view. And yeah, what you'd need to do is just simply add a source. In this case, there's a plus sign in the source's pane. And you just click on Window Capture. And Window Capture is available across all of the platforms on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The other possibility here is if you're on Windows, you have the option of Game Capture. You can try Game Capture. It's going to depend on your hardware whether or not that works well. If it works, it works great. Game Capture directly hooks right into the viewer's rendering, OpenGL rendering, and it's going to give you the highest possible quality and the highest possible performance. But that's not an option for everybody. So Window Capture is guaranteed to work, and it's going to work on all platforms. So once you choose to add a Window Capture source, a new window will pop up, and that's the window on the slide that's to the left. And it's going to ask you to name the source, and you'll just name it viewer, or whatever you'd like really. I usually just call it viewer. Or if you'd like to be more specific, for example, if you're using Firestorm, you might name it Firestorm, et cetera. So once you click OK on that box, another window will pop up, and that's the window to the right on this slide. And this window is going to want to know what window you want to capture. And at the top, you'll get a preview, and this one is already showing the viewer in it. And below the preview, there's going to be a Dropbox, and that's going to show pretty much all of the programs that are running on your computer. And you want to choose whatever viewer you're using. In the slide, I'm using Alchemy Viewer, so I chose that. And the other thing you'll probably want to make a decision about on this window is whether or not you want to capture your cursor. Pretty much the only time I capture my cursor is when I actually need to use it as a pointer to show people things. For example, I'm shooting a series of video tutorials right now, and so I usually leave the cursor enabled when I'm actually showing what I'm teaching. But for things like intros or, you know, basically I'm saying hello or goodbye, I tend to disable the mouse cursor because that's just a distraction. I mean, they're supposed to be seeing me talking, and I suppose they don't want to see my mouse waving all over the window as I'm trying to get things done. Or switching between my camera HUD or switching between my viewer and open broadcaster. So that's just something to be aware of. And once you click OK on the Properties window for that source, it should show up right in the main window. And at the top of the open broadcaster's main window is, again, a preview area. And hopefully, once you've chosen your viewer as a source, it'll just show up in there. And that's great. I mean, once you've done this, you're most of the way there. You're ready to record or stream. And exactly what you see is what you get when it comes to the preview here. And yes, yes, these are all created using the open simulator community conference stage. Hopefully, many of you were attendees, and if so, we were so happy to have you. And you'll see that there's a few little issues here. For example, it's black across the bottom. And you probably don't want any black broadcast or recorded. You can see our viewer windows and our menus and our minimap. And you don't want any of that stuff to be broadcast. So there's tools that let you take care of this. And of course, the easiest thing to do is simply to close any windows you don't need. You'll see on here, for example, I have my chat window squished as thin as I can make it. So if I need my chat window, it's off to the side. But otherwise, if possible, you just want to close all the windows if you can. And you also may have, if you're using the camera HUD, that's going to show up too. And as Mal points out, it actually varies by viewer. But either, like for example, on Firestorm, if you hit Control, Alt, F1, it will hide the entire interface except for HUDs. And that includes name tags, the voice visualizer, hover text. Everything goes away. On other viewers, it might be Control, Shift, F1. I believe it's that on Alchemy, for example. But besides taking those steps, Open Broadcaster also lets you adjust the source in the preview window. You can drag it around, you can scale it, or you can crop it. And to drag it around, all you have to do is take your mouse pointer, click on it, and hold your left mouse button. And when you move your mouse, the whole source will move. And if you want to scale it, it's hard to see in this slide. But once you see it in person, there will be little handles on each corner of the source and on each side, and top and bottom. And if you click and hold on those handles, you can stretch or scale the source. And perhaps most importantly, at least it's one I use an awful lot. And this is what you're going to need to do to crop out things like a HUD or if you need to keep a chat window open. If you left click and hold your Alt key, you can actually use the handles on the right, left, top, and bottom to crop in the view. So you can drag those in and crop out things like a chat window or your HUD. And then once you've cropped, you just need to make sure things are properly centered so that they fit in the window so you don't have any black around any of the edges or anything like that. And once you've done this, you really are ready to go. All you have to do is hit Start Streaming or Start Recording. And boom, you're recording or streaming whatever you see in Open Broadcaster and your viewer. And yeah, it should pretty much look something like this once you've got done setting it up. Just a very neat, clean view. It really isn't that much to say about this. Let's see. Let me look at this here. If you look at the main screen, we've already said that there are scenes and sources. But next to that, you also have an audio mixer. And any audio devices that you enabled in the audio settings will show up here. They have a volume slider that you can use to make your audio sources louder or more quiet. And there's also a green bar that will show the volume level as audio is playing. And there's a little speaker icon that you can also use to mute it if you'd like to mute the audio. And next to that speaker icon, there's also a little gear icon. And that icon lets you do things like insert filters for your audio. For example, if you're doing a tutorial, for example, or a news show, and you have, let's say, your computer fan. You don't want your computer fan heard in the background. You can add an audio filter that will reduce background noise. So that's a nifty thing it has. It's got a number of filters that you can use, and you can explore those on your own. And then next to that, you'll see that you can transition. You can either simply fade or cut between scenes. And the way that works is if you have multiple scenes set up and you switch between them while streaming or recording, it will either fade smoothly, transition as a fade from one scene to the next scene, or it will simply cut. It'll be one and then bam, be the new one. And of course, there's the button, stop streaming, start streaming, start recording, stop recording. There's also a studio mode. And what studio mode lets you do is it will open up two previews on the top. And that'll let you play with your scenes behind the scenes while you're streaming. So you can make sure that what you're about to broadcast is ready to go and set up like you'd like it. If you hit a transition button, it'll transfer over to the live feed or the live recording. And of course, the settings button, which we've been over plenty now. And of course, an exit button, which is pretty self-explanatory. And yeah, I mean, these are all the basics. This is what you need to get started. And if you'd like to learn more, here's a bunch of links. These are all included in the note card that's in the box in the front of this podium. They're all in there. I will take this opportunity to talk about the different streaming services, rather. Like I said, I highly recommend YouTube. That's just my favorite. I find it's easiest. It works at such high quality. It's got a large audience already there. And it's free. Can't beat free. You can schedule events on YouTube, all for free. You can have multiple cameras if you know what you're doing. There's lots of help documentation on YouTube to help you figure that out. But if you don't want to use YouTube, there's a lot of other services here. Twitch is a famous one. I'm sure many of you have heard of Twitch. And that's geared mostly for gaming. Many of these sites are. And Twitch, again, requires you to either pay or be a special partner to avoid things like advertising. So that's something to keep in mind. And they also are kind of aggressive about things like streaming Second Life. They may not allow you to do that. Hitbox, again, very much like Twitch. It's geared towards gaming. Beam is also geared towards gaming. Beam's main virtue is that it's low latency. When you stream to most other services, what people see is going to be anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds behind what you're actually doing live. Beam, on the other hand, has much lower latency. You'll find it has anywhere from three to five seconds of delay, which is much lower than the other services. So Beam is geared towards gaming, but it doesn't currently do any advertising. It's currently free, and it's very low latency. The only downside to Beam that I've found is that servers can be a little unstable sometimes. I think that situation is improving. Beam was recently acquired by Microsoft, and of course Microsoft has tons of resources to throw at something like Beam. So hopefully that'll get better. Dealing motion isn't one I've ever used. My understanding, I don't even really know much about it. My understanding it's basically a European equivalent of YouTube. I believe it's based in France, but they do allow live streaming, and it is a preset in open broadcaster. Live coding, this is an odd duck right here. Believe it or not, there's an audience for people who want to watch other people do programming. That's what live stream is for, or live coding is for. If you're a programmer or a coder or a scripter and you want to show off your coding skills, then live coding is an option for you. There's Facebook. I haven't really used Facebook much because in the past they were very focused on streaming from mobile. But you can, by all means, use open broadcaster to stream from your desktop and set up an event to broadcast on your Facebook page. It does do ads, so that's something to keep in mind. And then the last one on this list is re-streaming. Re-stream is special in that as the name kind of implies, what it does is it allows you to broadcast to multiple services at once. It's a middleman service. So if you'd like to be on Twitch and YouTube and Facebook all at the same time, re-stream automates that for you. There are other ways to do that, but they take a lot of technical expertise to do on your own, so re-stream offers that as a service for you. Let's see. Other than that, there's some tutorials and guides. OBS, the open broadcaster studio website, has a lot of resources on it. I definitely recommend that you dive into the resources that they have on the website. And another thing they have on the website is you may wonder, is my computer, you may say I have this kind of computer and this kind of internet connection. Just how well can I stream? And open broadcasters website actually has a page that'll help you estimate the best settings for your computer's configuration. And finally on that list, there's a site called the Helping Squad. And that's a good one if, again, if you're a more techy person, they cover a lot of the more technical and advanced aspects of streaming. So for example, if you wanted to set up your own streaming server, Helping Squad has some tutorials and things on their blog to help you accomplish tasks like that. And I haven't used Xsplit. I actually do have it and it came free with a laptop I bought a while ago. And I just never really, since OBS does everything I need it to do, and Xsplit, the free copy, it comes with a one-year free thing, and then you have to start paying for Xsplit. So I've just ever bothered with it, but I do hear good things about Xsplit. There are a lot of game streamers that use it, a lot of other streamers that use it, and it works quite well from what I hear, but you do have to pay for it. And yeah, by all means, everybody, that's really the end of the formal presentation. If I've now is the time to ask any questions and I'm happy to answer them. You know, I may have forgotten something or glossed over something or you may have a question about something more advanced. Feel free to ask. Oh, thank you so much. I'm glad you guys liked it. I was hoping it would be. This is such a technical topic, you know, and it's, you know, some people, you know, talking about technical nerdy things, it's like, oh goodness, that's such a snore. You know, so hopefully I wasn't like too technical and hopefully I was, you know, kept things to nomenclature to a minimum and you guys were able to understand everything. So I'll just I'll just read a little bit just in case anybody's typing any questions. Right, I'm putting my voice on again and scrolling back because there's a couple of points on me. Oh, yeah, there's, if you Google something called System Explorer, it's not a it's not a file browser, it's called System Explorer. But it's a little thing in your trade that will allow you to control background processes very easily. There's there's another one called Processor Asu, but I think that it's not expensive, but I think you pay for that. It simply means that if you're about to go live and you've got, say, Skype running for voice, maybe, and open broadcast to running and your virtual world running, then you can actually go to this thing in your train, kill any other processes that are running that are eating up, you know, the processing you need for broadcasting. But I think, Marcus, you know this, there are problems with the new Windows 10 with its wonderful, well, not so wonderful game mode. That's a good point. Thank you for bringing that up. Windows 10 Creators Edition has got this, I think it is Beam, isn't it, or something, but... Yeah, they've been right into it. Yeah, typical with Microsoft, they built it into the system. The only problem is their game mode, which does the same kind of thing as System Explorer to kill processes, is a bit indiscriminate. And it also, it also effectively kills OBS itself because it's a separate process from what you're filming. Yeah, let me just explain what that is and what it does. Game mode is something that's, it's part of Windows 10 and the Creator Update, which is currently rolling out now. Many of you may not have gotten it, I think only like 10% of people have gotten it so far. But it's rolling out now. And they've added a thing to the game mode where you can have games or programs like the viewer run at a special priority. And what it does is it prioritizes your viewers so that all other processes kind of take a backseat. And depending on your hardware, that will either do nothing. For example, if you already have a good gaming desktop, you're not going to see any real performance improvements. But for other people, perhaps on a laptop with an Intel graphics processor, it can actually boost your speed a lot. So that could be tempting to use. But as Mal has pointed out, it's not a good idea to use it if you're going to stream or record. And Mal and I found this out the hard way. I covered for, I filmed one of Mal's new shows, the Metaverse Weekend Review, I believe it is. And we did the whole thing and I could see the live stream was not good. And when I looked at the recording, it was like looking at a slideshow. And it was, I felt so awful and it turned out it was because I had game mode enabled. So yeah, make sure that's off. It's just safest if you make sure. By default, it should not be enabled for the viewer, but you may be tempted to turn it on. And when you're just going around, whether it's open simulator or hypergrid or second life, it can provide a good performance boost. I saw my laptop, it gave me an extra 10 frames per second in some instances. But if you're going to stream or record, you want to make sure that you want to definitely make sure that that's disabled. Were there any other questions like back in the backlog that I might have missed? Oh, first, of course, you, I probably say something about that and I completely forget. I was so, you know how it is. While you're on the broadcasting point of view, just before you start that Marcus, the other thing we've experienced, of course, as we know from conferences and stuff like that is that you don't, for example, mention live streamers streaming services. Even though it's good for some things. You really, if you want to stream something and you want to have it rebroadcasting world, you know, on a print kind of thing. So say you're in a studio somewhere on one region and you're broadcasting it to an auditorium on another region. You do have to make a kind of decision as to whether it's HTML5 or whether it is flash. Live stream, of course, is still all flash. And there is currently, especially for us in OpenSim, a bit of a problem because if you're in Second Life, they use HTML5 now and VLC media plugin and that's supported by Freistorm. But most OpenSim viewers other than Freistorm still use Second Life's old media service, which used to read flash. And you'll find, I am, for example, an Alchemy, but I could equally be in Singularity or something. If something is streaming in flash, I can probably see it, but it has to do with modern HTML streaming. Whereas if you're in something like the Second Life View, if you're in Second Life or Freistorm, if you're in OpenSim, you will actually get HTML5 stream instead and it actually blocks flash. So there is, in some occasions, if you're doing that kind of thing like you mentioned Jesse, you need to know a bit about what viewer your audience is actually using in World. Because the NP4 from Shoutcast, for example, may play and world in one browser using HTML5, whereas it may not play in another browser because that one is still used to things like flash. So it's a difficult point at the moment because the OpenSim viewers in particular are way behind the HTML5 technology and the fact that flash is really used now. Yeah, that's a good point. HTML5, services that have HTML5 players are ideal if you're going to also have your broadcast set up on a prem in World. But like Mal said, not all viewers have quite. Lyndon Lab made some code changes. They transitioned from using, I believe it was, WebKit to media to having, using the VLCs stuff to do that. And I know Alchemy and Singularity have recently been updated, but I don't know if that's one of the things that they have updated. Firestorm is really the safest viewer to use if you're going to be doing something like streaming HTML5 video in World. But of course, the alternative is to simply make sure that you have the link to your stream on hand to give out to people, then they can always just watch it on a browser. I think MP3 is no real problem, Jesse, especially if you load it as part of the parcel stream. It's really media on a prem, but it's kind of tankerous at the moment. Yeah, yeah, those are definitely two separate things. And Therza wanted me to talk a little bit about me. Are you taking off, Centris? Good night, Centris. Thanks for coming. I hope you enjoyed it. But yeah, Therza wanted me to talk a little bit about my background, and I started, I was aware of Second Life a long, long time ago, probably way back when it was still like Lyndon World. I didn't really join then. And once it became Second Life, they wanted a credit card, and I was much younger then, and I was very anti giving out my credit card just to use some service that I might not like. So I didn't actually join Second Life until they lifted the credit card restriction, and I joined back in 2007. And it didn't take me very long to start, and I quite like Second Life, and I really got into building and scripting, and I found that was a lot of fun content creation was very fun for me. And it didn't take me long to wonder because the viewer was open sourced not too long before that. And, you know, that was back when I think one of the first forks, or third party viewers I should say, was like the Nicholas viewer. And I started using that, and of course it occurred to me, well if someone has an open, if the viewer is open sourced, surely somebody out there has created an open source implementation of the server as well. And a bit of googling later I found open simulator, and oh yeah, Nicholas viewer goes way back. Goes way back. It was, like I said, it was probably one of the first, if not the first actual third party viewer. And I did find, after looking around I found open sim, and this was back when open sim was really had just started, a little after it had just started. And I downloaded it, and I ran it in stand alone mode. I just used it as a sandbox. OS grid was around at the time, but I was afraid to hook my region up. I didn't want to break anything. I was worried about breaking the rules or breaking their grid. So I spent like a year just learning how to use open sim in stand alone mode before I even touched grid mode. And then I finally got brave and I switched over to using OS grid, and I had many regions on OS grid since 2008. And that's where I've spent a lot of my time, mostly under the radar, mostly just doing my own thing. I love to learn about content creation and the tools, and I'm a very techy person. So I also really enjoyed learning about open sim itself and how to set it up. Open sim is very flexible software. There's all kinds of nifty tricks and things you can do to set it up in the back end. So I really enjoyed learning how open simulator worked. Once Mesh came out, I was mad to learn how to... I finally started to learn to use Blender properly and became pretty good at making Mesh content with Blender. I'm pretty much a jack of all trades and master of none. That pretty much describes me when it comes to open simulator. I love to do it all. At least a little bit. I at least get my toes wet. And I'm not always good at things like, for example, you don't want me making your animations. Trust me on that one. I'm horrible at animations. So yeah, and that brings me up to, back in 2014, I volunteered for the Open Simulator Community Conference. And that's when I started really becoming more of a visible person. And I actually didn't intend to volunteer for it. I've known, but I'm a Zoomie, who's a name known to many of you. I've known him for so long because of a West Grid. And I always hang out on the Open Sim IRC channels. And he came to me and he's like, we really, really need somebody, an extra streamer. Would you help us with that? And of course, I had never streamed before at that point. I had never done it. And I'm like, well, you know, if you... I knew I could probably handle it. So I tried it out. And I was so stressed. But afterwards, after that conference, Open Simulator Community Conference 2014, I enjoyed it so much. It was so much fun. And so I volunteered for 2015 and 2016 as well. And in 2016, I took more of an active role in terms of the more technical stuff for streaming. We actually had it set up so that I had my own streaming server. And all of our streamers came in via that server. And then I rebroadcast out on YouTube. And that's what enabled us. If any of you watched the OSCC live stream this year, it was one continuous broadcast. And that was because I was able to set up that little man streaming server and make that kind of stuff happen. And Joyce here asked me if I wanted to join Avocon. And I was thrilled. I was just thrilled. That was just, yay! I get to be part of an actual Open Sim organization. I love that. So I've joined Avocon. I'm a new staff member still, really, at Avocon. But now I'm with Avocon and I'm doing a lot of work with them. I'm trying to... I'm doing a lot of video tutorials right now. I'm also doing some building here and there to try to make content. Whether it's avatars or stuff you might have around your region or stuff like that. I do scripting, the camera HUD that we're giving away. I've done a lot of work on that. So, yeah, that's pretty much where I am now. And that's my whole history for... That's my great American story right there. Yeah. Yes, I am. Yes, we are working with students. Thank you, Sunbeam. We are working with students. And we have a group called CompiGirls that comes in here. And that's so much fun. We had back in... Oh, I forget when it was. Was it April or March? But we had a whole group. March, thank you, Joyce. We had a whole... What was it? 70 students come in. In two big batches. That was my first time seeing such a group of newcomers come in and go through orientation. And it was just a blast and such a joy and so gratifying. And they enjoyed it. They had so much fun. Yeah, it was fantastic. And they're coming back. They're coming back. There will be another batch coming in July of this year. And that's going to be... I'm so excited for it. It's going to be so much fun. So, Thursday's asking me, what would I say is the biggest virtue, I believe, of open sim? If I could magically get rid of just one open sim bug, what one would I remove for all of us? Wow. You know, that's a difficult question, partially because I've been using open sim so long that some things that are bugs are just things I've gotten used to. You know? I mean, it's just the way it is. So I've gotten... I've got... It's like you just learn to work around the bugs and then you forget that they're even there. Search. I think search is a big deal. I never, for example... I never use search to find places. I always, when I hit a grid, I open the map. And my map is really my primary search tool. That's not how it should be. It's really a shame that there isn't a cross-grid search platform that works, you know, with a module that... Any grid that wants to use it can use so that you can find content or places or people all across the hypergrid. That would be, I think... I could probably come up with something else, but just on the spot, I think that would be an awesome thing to have. So unless there's anything else, I'm gonna put a fork in this and say it's done. You guys are welcome to stick around. I believe you're hitting a new grid in about over 20 minutes or so. But you're welcome to explore the plaza or whatever you'd like or just hang out and talk. And I'm gonna get off my soapbox here, and thank you so much for coming. This has been a lot of fun, and I hope you got something out of it, so thanks.