The Incredibly Inconsistent Blaze Streamhog

Who Dat?

I’m BlazeHedgehog, and I’ve technically been livestreaming since 2008, way back when all we had was livestream.com. As the rest of the world evolved and streaming became a big deal, I was still stuck on a sub-1mbps upload rate and my stream frequency dropped summarily. My major claim to streaming fame was a Sonic 2006 Endurance Race for Charity. We raised $1000, which was considerably more than I expected given the buzz we had. As of about a month ago, my upstream was finally boosted to a more respectable 5mbps, allowing me to broadcast reliably at 720p, and I’ve been streaming considerably more often as a result. As for what I stream, I tend to like platformers, racing games, and shooters, though I’m down for a lot more than that.

Where Dat?

I mainly stream from my twitch channel, twitch.tv/blazehedgehog. I also have a Hitbox account, and I’ve wondered if I should re-investigate Youtube’s livestreaming, but Twitch seems to be treating me alright for now. We’re a long way from the latency problems they were having a few years ago.

When Dat?

I do not currently have a stream schedule. At best, I try to stick to weekends, but really, seeing others stream basically whenever the hell they want to, I’ve been trying to break myself of the mentality that people would only be willing to watch a stream on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday (it’s an old habit from the Livestream.com days, if you can believe it).

Archives?

If I put in enough effort for a stream to qualify, it will be archived on my Youtube channel. That being said, given I run a Youtube channel that is not entirely Let’s-Play-focused (I like producing edited content), I’ve recently started keeping some of my stream archives unlisted and dumping them in this playlist. This prevents them from flooding my subscribers’ feeds, but since the playlist itself is public, my viewers can still find the archives if they really want to watch them. As of this writing, more than half that playlist is from the pre-720p days, so be warned.

Any feedback on how to improve the quality of my streams is welcome. Despite doing this in some form for 9 years, I still basically have no idea what I’m doing. Part of that is because I only started doing commentary over my streams somewhat recently, and I know I’m not the best at commentary (on top of the fact some people have told me I have a weird voice…)

So I’m testing out this Restream.io service that will take one stream and relay it out to Twitch, Hitbox, Youtube and a bunch of other places, so I dunno what this quality is going to be like

But if y’all want to watch me try Bug! for the Sega Saturn (assuming I can actually get it to not lag, Saturn emulation can be kind of system intensive), I’ll be doing that here:

youtube.com/watch?v=EkHFVxJG0Tc
twitch.tv/blazehedgehog
hitbox.tv/blazehedgehog

I don’t have the Restream.io chat app setup (which will let me see all chats I am connected to) so I can only see Twitch chat currently. I also don’t know how long that Youtube link will work? I am super new to this.

Edit: Archive here. I think Saturn emulation’s high CPU requirements is responsible for the occasional stuttering present (it wasn’t anything I ever saw during recording, personally). I wrote this on my blog about my experience with Restream.io:

In general Restream.io seems fine, I guess. I don’t know if I just got lucky or what, but there seems to be very little additional latency versus just streaming directly to Twitch. That being said, users watching on Youtube apparently complained that the stream itself was skipping. Not sure if they meant the stuttering or if Restream has bandwidth problems piping out to Youtube.

The second problem is that, obviously, I like to have chat pop up during the video, but KapChat only supports Twitch. Restream.io has a chat app for Windows that will combine all active chats in to one, but that’s not compatible with KapChat and blending all of the chats together like that wouldn’t be very fun for anyone but me to read anyway. I think I might stick to just Twitch by itself, unless I have a really big, important stream to do.

I’m going to be streaming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, just like about a quarter of everyone you know on the internet probably is. The links above will help you find my twitch and hitbox channels, but here’s the updated Youtube link. Gonna give Restream.io another shot.

Edit: Here’s the stream archives. Had to split it in two because the stream was almost six hours (!) and Twitch was having trouble pushing the archive out to Youtube.

PART 1: youtube.com/watch?v=vJShhtj41ws
PART 2: youtube.com/watch?v=IhTdXxgZvM0

I haven’t streamed that long in a single sitting in a very, very long time.

I forgot to post about tonight’s stream here, but I did link it on the Discord. Here are the archives for tonight:

Parappa the Rapper (1hr, 4min): youtube.com/watch?v=_Q2iYbnA-bQ
Crash Bandicoot (49min): youtube.com/watch?v=3YS2PvizegY
Sonic Rush (1hr, 15min): youtube.com/watch?v=BPEhlpBgbOI

Not pictured: me failing the first stage in Umjammer Lammy for like 30-45 minutes. Somehow I forgot how to play that game, but I still breezed through Parappa.