[GUIDE] How to stream

LoL is awesome fun. Awesome fun you should be sharing with the world! This guide will get you started on streaming your games to the internet.

Before I go any further, I need to give credit. I'm a total noob at these things, and there would have been no stream for the group phase games and the semi-finals at all had it not been for clgaming.net's Vodoo. So give the man a round of applause. I'm only repeating what he taught me here. All mistakes are my own, though. Rather proud of my mistakes.

1) Necessary software

We are going to use two programs for streaming: SCFH DSF and Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder.

SCFH DSF
This nifty little tool takes part of your video output (what you see on your screen) and turns it into something that looks like a webcam feed to programs which expect one. Here's a guide on how to install it:

http://koitsu.wordpress.com/2009/09/...-use-scfh-dsf/

Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder
And this is how we encode and stream that fake webcam feed. Get it here:

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashm...hmediaencoder/

I'll let you figure out how to install this yourselves (hint: run the installer).

2) Choose your streamer

Now you need to figure out what streaming service to use. What follows is NOT a Riot-recommendation; it just happens to be the service I picked at semi-random.

I have been using ustream.tv and have been very happy with it so far. It's very easy to set up an account, so I'll let you figure that out yourselves as well.

3) Your first stream

Launch your software (I don't think the order matters, but try Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder first and then SCFH DSF). Select AFMLE in SCFH DSF and hit OK. Your screen will go black for a second and when it comes back, Windows 7 (assuming that's what you're running) will have switched to a simpler Aero theme.

Next we need to configure Flash Media Encoder. This is where you get to do a lot of trial and error. The best setup for this is to have a friend on a different internet connection watching the stream while you experiment with settings, but in a pinch you can watch your own stream.

We're going to start with the Output settings, since we can get those into Flash Media Live Encoder automatically.

Go to your ustream dashboard: http://www.ustream.tv/dashboard (make sure you're logged in, obviously). Using the button on the right hand side, create a show (don't worry too much about this--you can change all the details of the show or create new ones lateron). Having done this, reload your dashboard. Go for "Manage Your Shows" -> "Settings" -> "Advanced Settings" -> "Download the Flash Media Encoder XML file"

Save this somewhere. Back to AFMLE. File -> Open. Load the XML file you just saved. Et voila: your FMS URL and Stream should be filled out. Click "Connect" and make sure you see "Connected" in the lower left hand corner to verify these are the right settings.

One last thing to do in output. Check "Auto Adjust" and select "Degrade Quality".

(See that Save to File option underneath? It does just what it says on the tin--resulting in a neat .flv file that you can upload to Youtube or do whatever else you please with. This is a very straightforward function, so I'll leave it for you to figure out as well)

Next, the video and audio settings. These are the settings I used to stream the group phase games of the WCG (and I was streaming those from two laptops with ****ty graphics cards, so they're rather cautious).

VIDEO:
Device: SCFH DSF
Format: H.264
Frame Rate: 24.00 fps
Input Size: 1024x576
[ ] (UNCHECK) Maintain Aspect Ratio
Bit Rate: 800 Kbps
Output Size: 1024x576

AUDIO:
Device: Stereo Mix*
Format: Mp3
Channels: Stereo
Sample Rate: 44100 Hz
Bit Rate: 96 Kbps

* Stereo Mix may not exist right away for you. You may have to first go into recording devices and enable it, or hypothetically speaking if you were to use a laptop whose manufacturer decided it would be fun to hide stereo mix, you may need to hunt down and install outdated drivers for your onboard sound that re-enable stereo mix. Completely hypothetically speaking. Not that this happened to me hours before we were set to stream or anything. Good luck!

Now launch League of Legends! I suggest you start a tutorial for this, well, tutorial, as you can always start a tutorial by yourself. Inside the tutorial, adjust the video settings of LoL. Now as far as I know, you must play LoL in windowed mode in order to stream it. I lowered the video settings of my LoL client somewhat at the WCG to make sure the stream was as smooth as it could be. I think it's important that you have the same aspect ratio between your LoL video resolution and what you choose as input resolution, but I'm not sure. I used 1280x720 for the WCG I think, but like I said, that was overly cautious. You may be fine running LoL at whatever resolution fills your screen.

Last step! Bring SCFH DSF to the foreground. I'm assuming you're in the tutorial at this point. Click on the Drag Here button and keep your mouse button down. Drag onto the League of Legends screen. Let go!

If you have a fancy two screen setup with AFMLE running on the other screen, you can instantly see that you were successful. Input and Output should now show LoL. Yay!

If you hit the Start button, you'll, well, start streaming. Okay, so I lied, there's another step.

If you hit the Start button, you start streaming TO ustream.tv, but ustream.tv does not automatically start streaming your show to the internet. You need to tell it to do so.

Go to ustream.tv. Be logged in. Click broadcast. I'm assuming you've hit START on AFMLE at this point. In the popup, wait for the lower half to load, then hit the big green START BROADCAST button.

You're now streaming.

Remember to do the drag here thingie every time you start a new game. If you want to broadcast your PVP.net client in between games, you'll need to select it with the drag here function in SCFH DSF as well.

Next, we need someone to collect all user streams and post them in a sticky. Xuno to the rescue!