Live streaming is something that consumes a lot of system resources and can impact – and does impact – on gaming performance , so it is common for many streamers to consider broadcasting their games live using a dual PC configuration. However, the configuration when doing this technique is quite complicated, so in this article we are going to tell you what you need and how you should configure the streaming using a PC to broadcast and another to play.
The most popular game streaming platforms are undoubtedly Twitch and YouTube, but regardless of the platform you use, broadcasting live has a fairly significant impact on the performance of your PC, since you must be encoding video to broadcast it to it. time the game you play is rendered. For this reason, a configuration of two PCs for streaming is quite common, so that you can broadcast on one while the other takes care of giving you its best performance in games.
What do you need to do dual PC streaming?
Obviously, to start you will need two independent PCs, one gaming to run your games with good performance and another that may be somewhat more modest, but which must have a good processor for video encoding as a primary element.
- PC gaming to play.
- PC for broadcast.
- Video capturer (can be internal or external).
- An extra HDMI cable.
How to set up the hardware to stream with two PCs
The configuration of the transmission with two PCs consists of two parts: hardware and software. Obviously the first thing you should do is prepare the hardware, connecting everything where it should go, before proceeding with the software configuration. The idea is that the broadcast PC can capture the audio and video of the gaming PC, and to make your life as easy as possible, if you have several monitors you should also take this into account when counting how many cables you need.
- Connect the video recorder to the broadcasting PC via USB (or if it is internal, it must be connected to that PC).
- Connect an HDMI cable to the HDMI output of your gaming PC, and the other end to the input (INPUT) of the capturer.
- It is not necessary to connect the HDMI output of the capturer to a PC, but if you want to do it to have a visual of what is being captured, you can connect another monitor there.
There are really no higher requirements or configuration than this … everything else extra you want to put on it (microphone, camera, etc.), is up to you.
Software configuration
The rest of the setup is done at the software level on both PCs. First, you have to make sure that your gaming PC sends video and audio to the broadcast PC while still being able to hear and see what happens on the PC. PC (obviously, since otherwise you have not connected something well, but check the output of the screens already when connecting the capturer to the HDMI port of the graphic you may need to configure ” duplicate screens ” in the Windows configuration). You don’t have to do anything else on your gaming PC except play, all the rest of the configuration must be done on the transmission PC.
This configuration will depend on what software you use, the most popular being Open Broadcaster Software for being very complete and also free.
In your streaming software, you just have to make sure to create a scene in which the audio and video source is the HDMI input of the capturer connected by USB to the transmission PC; Only with this you will be able to broadcast the video and audio that the capturer is obtaining from your gaming PC. From here you will have to configure the rest of the usual parameters in these software, such as adding the microphone (ideally it is connected to the transmission PC), the webcam (the same), the scenes and others.
