sota/dtube logos

I decided to give D.Tube a try last night, and here's a brief overview of the process I went through. I ran into a few problems, but ultimately I was able to upload some video. I'm hoping to stream in the near future, but we shall see.

Here's what ultimately worked

transcoded the video from the gigantic captured MPG format to h264 via Handbrake using the Universal setting
image thumbnail had to be reduced in size (converted from PNG to JPG)

Here's how I got there

The setup

custom-built pc -- it's an old, but runs Linux Ubuntu 18 for games)
AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable (LGP)
Logitech G930 wireless headset

My computer is just barely powerful enough to play the game and capture the video at the same time, but the quality has to be greatly reduced in order for the PC to keep up and not lag the game. Since I have access to an AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable I opted to use that instead.

Cutting to the chase, you can't use the LGP under Linux to do live streaming, and if you want to capture content, it has to go to the SD card. And when you wire the thing up, you can't use both the audio in and the HDMI audio in on the device in order to simplify voice capture along with the video capture.

So, I was stuck capturing to the SD card and then copying that over to my desktop after. And to be able to capture the headset mic and the game audio simultaneously, I had to create two new loopback audio devices. The first loopback device was needed to monitor audio coming in through the microphone so that could be played out over the HDMI, and the second loopback was to capture audio going out the HDMI and play it over the headset.

This way I could hear the game audio over the headset and the capture device on the HDMI line would be able to hear my voice. Unfortunately, this also meant I could hear my own voice and this distracted the hell out of me. So I ended up muting the headphones once I was done testing and when I finally started the capture I was playing without being able to hear the game at all.

This lead to me not realizing that the game audio was a little too quiet and it wasn't drowning out the background of fans, AC, and other random environmental noises (e.g., me breathing.)

The upload

The first attempt at uploading a screenshot failed, I guess the PNG compression leaves something to be desired. I had to convert my thumbnail to JPG, and then DTube took it cheerfully. Though, confusingly, it does NOT display the newly uploaded image, it wont update that icon until you actually start some video upload.

The capture produced a 4GB file in MPEG format. D.Tube doesn't limit the upload size, nor does the FAQ say anything about the actual file type, or naming restrictions, but if you don't make your video name end in something like MPG it will refuse to upload it.

After several hours of waiting, going to sleep, getting up, and checking the progress, there was an obscure error message about the file not actually containing video content. I tried quite a few invocations of FFMPEG to get it produce something that didn't result in this error message. Finally, I loaded up GHB (the GUI for Handbrake) and started with their presets. The very first one I tried, the Universal one produced a video format that D.Tube would take.

The first time I uploaded it I was missing the last 20 minutes or so which had saved to a new file. I've since concatenated the files, re-encoded at 720p, and re-uploaded.

Later on I'll figure out what the settings were so I can get better quality videos, but for now, the damn thing has uploaded, so I'm happy with that. That's what the D is for, right? Ducks? I hear sending people Duck-pics is pretty popular...

Here's the result

So, here's an updated link to the posted content using my @not-a-gamer alt.

~~ Thanks for Reading ~~

Media for the image was from the Shroud of the Avatar Fan Site Kit, available here. For posterity, I should probably mention that Shroud of the Avatar is copyright by Portalarium, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks shown are property of their respective owners.