Without doubt the most requested feature for us to add has been streaming and we’ve been promising that we’d do it for what seems like an eternity. There’s a lot of work for us still to do on it to get it to where it fulfils our expectations of what you will want from it. But rather than continuing to keep you hanging on, we’ve decided to get a barebones version of it out in to the wild so you guys can start making the most of the work that we’ve been tinkering away on.
What is now available
So for the time being you will be able to connect FBX to your Twitch, Mixer or YouTube accounts to stream to those. Or you can use the custom stream settings to stream to any other service – you’ll just need to retrieve your stream key and server URL yourself and enter those into FBX.
Tailor your stream to suit your internet connection using the Bitrate options. Either fix it at a constant bitrate of up to 7000 kbps (Twitch recommend using 4500 – 6000 kbps for 1080p 60 fps streams so this should be plenty high enough) or use the Adaptive option to allow FBX to vary the bitrate to maintain a nice, constant stream by varying the quality of the image in response to your internet conditions.
If you want to save a copy of your stream for posterities sake or, more likely, because you want to make some awesome clips from it, you can save a copy of it to your hard drive while you stream. The saved recording will simply be an exact copy of what you are sending to your chosen stream service.
To avoid those pesky stream snipers, you can add a delay to your broadcast or if you are streaming to Mixer, you can take advantage of their FTL protocol to broadcast with the minimum delay possible. (Just be aware that FTL streams can be extremely sensitive to unstable and slow internet connections when choosing whether to enable that or not)
For the future
We appreciate that many of you will want to use overlays and scenes for your broadcasts and those are very much in our thinking. We’d also like to allow things like our stickers to be applied in real-time while you play. However, we’re not currently able to say when they may be available so we don’t want to make any promises about timeframe.
Besides that, if there are other popular streaming services that you like to broadcast on (other than Twitch, Mixer or YouTube) and you want FBX to support connecting to your account for those, let us know. We are open to adding more services but we just need to hear that there is demand for them.