Hey all,

Finally have our stream mostly perfected and wanted to show it off a little bit. Mainly because I have literally cried in the research and development of this project, and VMix and NDI were my heros!

The challenge:

The family wants to stream MineCraft together.
There are 5 of us and we want our viewers to see and hear all 5 of us at the same time.
We also want our viewers to decide which perspective is the larger, highlighted, perspective.
Using interactive features, we want our viewers to be able to control when special sounds are played during the broadcast.

After many attempts using various solutions, none of them came close to the power of VMix, along with the usage of NDI.

We use NDI to bring in all 5 desktops, then 5 cameras are iPhones with the NDI app (Paid for by our viewers!!!). We have a field mixer that connects via USB to the vmix system for audio and mics (Mics also paid for by our viewers!!).

We are using 21 of the max 25 overlays, all 5 multi-views in use on 5 inputs, each with 3 overlays. 61 inputs and overlays, on screen graphics, goals, alerts, and other cool sounds, 100% hands off operation once we go live.

The streaming platform we use has a unique SDK that allows me to build interactive buttons for the channel. Then using node to connect to the API, we convert button clicks on the channel to mouse clicks on our "Interactive" laptop which has the VMIX shortcuts page up.

People come into our channel, seeing 5 screens, with cameras, and then start clicking buttons. They decide which of us they want to watch! With a click of a button, the viewers can make a screen the largest. We call it "You Produce" because YOU the viewer are the producer of the show.

We are pioneering the interactive game streams and turning heads. If you'd like to see our setup, I made a Behind the Scenes video on our YouTube channel, and you can watch a replay of us a family streaming here - https://beam.pro/r5familycraft?vod=1173565 (This stream we had some audio issues, but I figured it out. No stream is PERFECT! lol)

I'd love to have some constructive criticism and feedback from all you pros out there. We stream as a family on Friday evenings EST. Sometimes we start at 5pm, sometimes we start at 6pm.

As for Martin and the team, THANK YOU for saving us. Without you, I'd have no hair left, and my tear ducts would be bone dry.

Jon
R5FamilyCraft

The interactive buttons only show up when we are live, not on the VODs, sorry I didn't say that. You'll have to check us out when we are live to see them in action.

We use a "combiner" system that runs VMix. It pulls all the desktops in before streaming out to beam. Only one stream leaves the house.

The individuals each have their desktops configured differently. I'm only capturing the java window for minecraft. If a kid puts something over MC, the viewers see that.

The VMix desktop apps run on each system allowing me to bring in whatever window is open on their systems, including sounds. Sometimes it's choppy, but when you consider the fact that we are running 10 NDI sources, it's amazing we have it working at all!

I am running 19 beta, the multivew section still only shows 5 available, if 10 is allowed, how? Do I need to do some nested overlays?

The YouTube videos, if you go to LiveStream Replays playlist, you can watch our first stream. It completely sucked! I cried it was so horrible. I was using two raspberry pi as RTMP servers, then pulled those streams down into OBS. The mics were direct, so a kid would say something, and 15-20 seconds later you would see it on stream!

It's amazing how far we came in such a short time.

Thanks for checking us out!

Jon
R5FamilyCraft