Words of wisdom for giving your rig and experience the performance & personality…

Streaming 201: From Set-up to Suit-up

The guide to providing the brawn and the beauty to your gaming and streaming experience.

Streaming involves a lot of aspects when it comes to function, construction, and decoration.

Quick Recap: In Streaming 101, we covered the prerequisite information on streaming. In brief, we covered various aspects of streaming, such as economic, social, psychological, and technical.

Moving on…….

So, you know the platform of your choice, and you have the gaming setup as well. The only obstacle to overcome is your overall setup, which will include the solution for your streaming problems and your overall attire-based-on-attitude problem. Having a complete setup doesn’t just mean that you have fulfilled the technical requirements and the overall looks to suit you and your personality.

A gamer is as good as the skills and rig he owns, but a streamer is as good as the skills, the rig, the overall beauty of the setup, and, most importantly, being true to yourself. But before you work on your style quotient, let’s get you revved up with the technical quotient: the streaming setup.

The installation and maintenance of a streaming setup may be as easy as playing with Lego nowadays. Still, only some people are as technically sound as those who consider the setup process like playing with Lego.

For the ones that aren’t aware that there are specific parameters to be considered when working on your streaming setup, well, guess what, wake time, sleepyheads, the class is in session!! Now let’s get back to business. There are a lot of parameters to be considered when taking into account a streaming setup. Of course, you must make a whole new system for streaming.

It will have a graphics card to help you stream games at various limited resolution options (minimum resolution = 1080p, the sweet spot = 1440p aka 2K, maximum resolution = 2160p aka 4K); this is for PC and Console fanboys. Only mobile game streaming has 1080p as the maximum resolution, although 1440p is now stepping in. Other parameters besides resolution involve cost, connectivity, peripherals, and software. We’ll be considering each parameter in terms of the choice of platform.

1. PC and Console

Although this is a setup for PC gaming, the exact instructions apply to Consoles.

Things will get hot in your pockets for the PC and Console fam, but you can choose budget alternatives. You can either go for the cliché method consisting of a streaming PC/Laptop, capture card, USB cables, a webcam/smartphone, a microphone, lighting, streaming software, and your streaming deck or phone for stream management purposes.

But if you want something better and budget-friendly, you can try Lightstream and integrate Rainmaker to enhance your streaming experience.

2. Mobile

Surprisingly, this is what you need for mobile gaming and live streaming.

Now let’s talk about the underdog alphas of the gaming community, the mobile players. Let’s face it, without the undisputed kings of this alley, such as PUBG Mobile (‘PUBG: New State’ for India), Call of Duty Mobile, Free Fire Max, and Apex Legends Mobile, the constant rise of mobile gaming esports wouldn’t have been possible. But that’s just for the praises, now comes the fun part.

Like PC and Consoles, you can go for a full-fledged streaming setup which I still consider overkill because why do you need hundreds of thousands of bucks when you can get LIVE with your phone gameplay right away from that same phone of yours!! Crazy, isn’t it?! But as crazy as it sounds, it’s simple and realistic.

There are streaming apps like Lightstream Mobilecast, Omlet Arcade, Loco, and my favorite, Turnip. Using one of these apps, you can Livestream your phone gameplay without any streaming setup. All you have to do is sign up using your YouTube, Facebook, or Twitch account, select the desired resolution, type in the stream title and description, insert a thumbnail for your video stream, configure audio and let your stream begin!! Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy!!

But still, if you want to go for the cliché method, all you need is just a good setup consisting of a streaming PC/Laptop, streaming software, a capture card, USB cables, a webcam/smartphone, a microphone, lighting, and your streaming deck or phone for the stream management.

NOTE: For NVIDIA GPU owners, use the NVIDIA ENCODER (NVENC) for encoding optimal system impact. For AMD Radeon GPU owners, use the AMF, or the AMD ReLive live streaming feature. And if you use a dual-PC setup, you may use the x264 encoder.

This was just the setup. Now comes the suit-up part. Your whole setup should be a reflection of you. It shouldn’t be too flashy, but it shouldn’t be too subtle. Theme up your setup according to your liking.

If you like Hello Kitty, make it pinky and jolly. If you like anime, you can decorate it with action figures of famous anime characters, manga posters, etc. You can try to make your setup attractive yet organized in nature. And speaking of nature, do consider putting some artificial or natural plants around your setup. Plants are known to provide positive vibes.

Some extras like ambient lighting and speakers playing Lo-Fi beats will assist in soothing your mind and body. This may provide your soul the warmth it needs, but the body isn’t something to be ignored. Your body is like your computer. Maintain it well, and it’ll do wonders. Do anything stupid, and you end up in your doom. So, to keep that body healthy, we need to bring in ergonomic gaming-centric products. An ergonomic gaming chair or just an ergonomic office chair would be great.

This is what your typical gaming and live-streaming setup should look like — a perfect example of beauty with brawn.

You should check out more ideas on organizing your gaming and streaming setup, themes, and accessories from sources like Pinterest and YouTube. Many YouTubers like ProdiJay help provide ideas for gaming peripherals to decorate your overall setup.

So that’s all for the Streaming 102 class. This is what you need to know to be geeky yet gracious. Now you have some preliminary knowledge of streaming, and that too at the beginner level.

Time to level up your game with the next checkpoint: Streaming 301: Practices, practices, and practices.