Live Streaming AmigaOne X1000

Sorry for the long wait for another blog post. Today I wanted to look at the setup I have done recently which allows me to live stream the output of the AmigaOne X1000 with AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 to the internet via Twitch!

The last month has been very difficult for me to say the least. 

Work was very busy with the company being taken over, and then finding out that all the IT operations would be moved to Queensland. I was made redundant in the middle of the Coronavirus pandemic last week with many of my colleagues. This is like many others globally too I know. 

Unlike many others affected in Australia by this, I am unable to get government financial assistance as the company I worked for was not impacted much by COVID-19, making me ineligible for government help...great.

Fortunately I saved money for a rainy day, and now it is here. I will be ok for a bit, while looking for a new job. With the market right now being very tough job-wise, I don't expect to find anything for a while.

This of course means I have some significant free time on my hands, for the first time in many many years.

I decided first to up skill in various IT I am weak in currently, and one of those areas was streaming technologies. I decided to learn more about how it works, what is needed to set it up, and try to weave my love of all things Amiga into it too by streaming some Amiga generated content out to the world live!

I was inspired watching some of my favourite F1 drivers live streaming their esports sim gaming (while motorsports are all stopped) to keep their skills sharp. It was a great way to get to know their real personalities better too outside the cockpit.

To say there was a lot of work to do to get this working was an understatement. But getting it working and live streaming the X1000 on the internet was very satisfying.

I enjoy gaming too, and in addition to the AmigaOne X1000 I was keen to connect my PC, Nintendo Switch and PS4 to stream as well.

To do this I needed a lot of things. Fortunately I had most of them already, and for things I didn't have (like a dedicated webcam) I found an innovative solution from Newtek (remember them?) to use my iPad as a dedicated webcam.

For the capture of the HDMI output from the X1000, I needed a game capture card. Because I plan to use my Mac as the streaming machine (to keep the load off the PC and other devices), I needed to get an external game capture device.

Previously I had purchased a Game Capture HD device for this purpose, but didn't get far with it, as it is limited to using it's own software on the Mac for streaming, which didn't allow me much freedom with how I wanted to stream content. Also, it couldn't stream 1080p, only 720p due to limits of USB2. (it will though pass through 1080p to your screen)

The newer devices are sold out worldwide, and so I found one (Elgato HD60S) second hand, and still boxed, on Ebay. After a thorough cleaning after arrival, I could get to work setting it up.

These Elgato capture devices work by taking an input HDMI source (like PS4, PC, Switch, etc), and passing through the signal to HDMI out port to your normal screen.

They have a USB cable connection to your streaming PC running the software to grab that HDMI data and give it to the PC to process, either to record to the local disk, or stream live to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook live and more.

I then use a HDMI switch box to take multiple HDMI inputs (PC, Switch, X1000), and output to this HD60S.

Something to keep in mind is that this capture device is limited to 1080p60 pass through, so no 4K HDMI connections are possible. The newer HD60s+ model supports this I believe, but I was unable to find one. In any case, most of the systems I am currently using (apart from my PC) are outputting 1080p anyway, so it is not such a big hassle. I changed the PC to output 1080p for now.

One obvious hassle I knew I would hit early on is the audio from the X1000. Unlike the PS4, Switch, PC, etc, the AmigaOne X1000 does not output audio via its HDMI output. Instead it uses a standard line out phono plug via the onboard HDAudio.

So I needed to think outside the box on how to fix this and merge the audio into the HDMI output somehow, before it reaches the capture card.

There is an audio in phono port on the HD60S (unlike the Game Capture HD I was using before), but it is intended to be used for the chatlink function of the PS4, so that audio from the PS4 controller audio input is spliced into the HDMI output. I don't want to use that, since I intended to use it for that purpose later on, and also it is annoying and expensive to buy another set of RCA audio switch box setups and more cables to accomodate different inbound streams in a convenient manner.

The Radeon Southern Island card installed in the X1000 has DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, as below.

I purchased a VGA to HDMI converter from Jaycar Electronics, which has VGA and RCA audio input, with HDMI blended video + audio output. It uses a USB power source.

I then used a DVI to VGA converter to connect the X1000 to the converter. I then ran a phono to RCA audio cable from the X1000 HDAudio out to the converter.

I then hooked it up and connected to my HDMI switchbox, which then allowed me to see the output on my screen to confirm the normal output was working

I checked the audio output was working using the VGA converter to HDMI and pleased to say it worked perfectly:

Naturally I soon got distracted and tested the audio in a game or two...

With that done, I turned my attention to the streaming part of this setup, which is connected to my "Trashcan" 2013 Mac Pro.

I bought this system second hand from Ebay a few years ago (for a fraction of the price of it new) to replace my similarly ageing 2013 MacBook Pro, which was necessary as the battery had ballooned and made the system unusable. The quote to replace the battery was ridiculous so I replaced with a second hand system instead.

This system is still running Mojave, rather than the newer Catalina. The reason for this is because Catalina dropped 32bit application support, and I still have a number of applications and games that are 32 bit and will not run on Catalina. Including AmiKit XE...I am looking forward to the upgrade for that soon please...

The software provided by Elgato is functional for basic streaming, but I really wanted to use all the cool features that the freeware OBS Studio makes available for streaming.

There is an open source variant of this called Streamlabs, which is the software I wanted to use for streaming, and is based on OBS with some other features added to make streaming easier. It allows to use of themes and programming different inputs and screen layouts to make the stream more professional.

This needed the HD60S device in order to work on MacOS, due to the need to use OBS Link software to connect the game capture device to OBS running under Streamlabs. The older Game Capture HD device doesn't work with OBS Link.

With that working now with Streamlabs (as above), I turned my attention to the webcam so people can see me when streaming.

As you may know quality webcams are in high demand due to the working from home happening globally due to the Coronavirus pandemic. In Australia, it is basically impossible to buy one that support 720p or 1080p streaming right now.

In addition, many countries are simply not shipping to Australia now due to the removal of most flights to/from Australia. This further limits my options!

I do have an Apple Thunderbolt display, and yes, I could use the 720p webcam on that, but I can't easily re-position the screen in the right place while I am streaming, and since it contains the streaming software too, it would be distracting to look at it while streaming live. I don't want to have to move it every time.

I know that I could buy an Elgato Camlink to take a camera input, but that would mean spending more money, which in my current position I don't want to do for obvious reasons.

So, I did some research and found out you can connect iPads and iPhones as webcams over WiFi in Streamlabs using NDI software from Newtek (yep, the Amiga guys) on the iPad! This month Newtek is offering the NDI app on the App store for free so I took full advantage of it.

This meant I could get an easily movable webcam solution without spending any money! Awesome.

Here is the setup, showing the X1000, iPad, PC, Xbox One, with the Mac out of shot on the left.

For those eagle-eyed people, I also tried using the MIST (Pictured) on this setup too, but the resolution outputted is a problem it seems for the capture card to feed correctly. I'll try it again soon.

In the meantime I have working output from the X1000 with audio, ready to stream to the world.

I did this stream on the 13th May 2020 via Twitch. My Twitch profile is here:

http://twitch.tv/EpsilonAUS

If you follow me on Twitch you can be advised when I go live with new streams to view, listen and chat live, or just view the older broadcasts if you miss the live streams. There are some C64 Max and PC gaming streams you can still view too.

You can see the broadcast for another 14 days from when I wrote this blog post - from this link: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/619530703

In case you missed that, I also recorded this particular stream locally, and uploaded it to YouTube. You can view it below but recommend you click the link instead: https://youtu.be/GsYZiXf7AlI

Despite my best efforts, I will soon have to mute sections of the YouTube video audio since YouTube are annoying when it comes to copyright claims. The audio they claim copyright is from Supertuxkart and Prototype games when I was playing them. Seriously? freeware games?

This is why people use Twitch and not Youtube for live streaming. Anyway..

It was fun doing this, and I have a new high respect for the excellent work of Bill Borsari doing the live streams from AMIWest every year. It is a lot more difficult and involved to setup a professional stream than people think - thanks Bill for your hard work to make that happen.

I learnt a lot more now about the technologies involved in live internet streaming, and finally getting my AmigaOne X1000 live streaming to the world. I am sure there will be more to follow.

I hope you enjoy the stream and future ones too!

MorphOS 3.13 and Iris Beta 71 Email on X5000

First off I must apologise for the slowness of blog updates this month. I have been quite ill for the past two weeks (especially the last week) with some kind of bad flu thingy. And no, I haven't travelled anywhere overseas or even Australia recently...I am still recovering, so I have been isolating and working from home (just in case) to protect work colleagues and family.

Despite this, I have still been doing some Amiga stuff this month.

Before I start on MorphOS 3.13, one thing I have been enjoying on weekends and evenings while being sick at home has been playing Worthy, Blood Money, Pinball Illusions and Simulcra on Classic Amiga 1200 and 500, as part of a monthly gaming high score competition being held on the amigaretro.com forum, run out of Brisbane, Australia for Australian (and other) Amiga users!

I didn't win, but did finish second in Worthy and Pinball Illusions (Babewatch table) high score competitions last month:

This month's ECS high score game is Simulcra, and I am leading the high scores so far :-)

My high score on Simulcra is 25725 - can you do better?

Feel free to join in on amigaretro.com forums if you want to take part too.

With the Coronavirus forcing a lot of people locally and globally to be at home, I am hoping more people will try to beat the high scores on their Amiga systems!

One other thing I have sorted out last week is my new NBN internet access. Since moving to my new home in January last year, I have been waiting for NBN to be available at this address, and using mobile 4GX internet in the meantime.

For those not in Australia, NBN (National Broadband Network) is Australia's new crappy internet to replace the even crappier ADSL we used before. Hand crafted by the best accountants in Canberra, the final version of the NBN supplied to most households is a mishmash of shitty technologies, resulting in far from optimal performance. For IT people like myself, it is incredibly frustrating to see the final crappy resulting internet rolled out to many homes (including mine).

Now it is available and it is installed in my house. I now have the maximum available NBN 100Mbps download speed (theoretically) to my house. In reality it is around 90Mbps during peak evening usage, but a big improvement on 16Mbps variable internet performance under 4GX and 8Mbps under ADSL I had before...so, it is better. My AmigaOne X5000, X1000 and other Classic Amiga systems can all use it too:

In reality, in the global scheme of Internet, Australia's internet speed is still awful. Truly awful. I had 1Gbps fibre internet direct to my apartment when living in Tokyo 10 years ago. 10Gbps is the standard now, with 100Gbps trials underway in Tokyo for the next phase...we are soo far behind.

Anyway, it is what it is. Here I now have 100Mbps download speed via Hybrid Fibre Coaxial Connection (Coaxial Cable from the nearest fibre node to my house) with 20Mbps upload. This makes doing blog posts much easier now for image uploading. On ADSL at my old place I have been uploading at 512kbps!! It took so long to upload photos for a single blog entry for years and years, but now no more!

Let's move onto MorphOS 3.13, released recently as a bug fixed version of MorphOS 3.12 released late last year.

We now have our first 2020 NG Amiga OS released which is exciting! I burned off the CD-R ISO image from the MorphOS team website to load onto my AmigaOne X5000.

I covered MorphOS 3.12 installation in some detail on my blog here in January, so I am not going into the same detail again here as I am just upgrading it to the new version.

The CD live booted into 3.13 and I started the installation process:

The installation prompts to upgrade the existing installation or start a new installation. I want to upgrade my current MorphOS 3.12 so I select that option:

The setup detects my 3.12 installation on the X5000, which I can select and then click on Update:

The copy then gets underway - time for a coffee and more fix me up pills...

Setup completed successfully:

With MorphOS 3.13 now installed I rebooted the AmigaOne X5000 to boot into the new environment. The main visual change is the window frame theme has been changed from the MorphOS original translucent gradient blue frames to the flat blue (more Workbench 3.1 looking) theme. I like the new theme actually, feels more Amiga now:

Because my purchased registration file is already installed on the system, the upgrade OS is already fully activated and works without any restrictions. It runs well.

I also took the opportunity to upgrade my Powerbook G4 15" to the latest 3.13 MorphOS release, which worked perfectly as well:

 I returned to my AmigaOne X5000 to download and try out the new Iris email program (Beta 71) under MorphOS 3.13. I am pleased to report it works very well with Gmail, supporting HTML format emails, embedded images in emails, and more.

There are some great developments going on for MorphOS like Iris, and provided at no cost for MorphOS users to get more value from their systems!

Some of the features of Iris email client are:

• Extensive IMAP support based on VMime, including local storage and folder management
• OAuth2 authentication support for GMail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail
• Support for all common authentication and security methods
• Support for custom / self-signed server certificates
• Encryption of passwords and authentication keys via cryptostorage.library
• Email account autoconfiguration
• Multiple accounts
• HTML email support within the application thanks to inclusion of WebKit
• Rich text email editing, including a spell checker
• Attachments including embedding images in emails
• Full Unicode support, everywhere in the application
• Massive multithreading for all of networking and I/O operations
• Read-only offline mode
• Support for OpenURL
• PDF export of emails

This is an exciting step forward for Email clients on NG Amiga.

The big feature for me with Iris is the ability to work with Gmail accounts (and others) using IMAP connections, rather than the older fiddly to configure POP3 connections required before.

Note that I originally did some screenshots below from 3.12 MorphOS on the X5000, which uses the older window frame theme. Iris functionality is unchanged under 3.13, it just uses a different window theme now as the default.

There is a nice wizard that walks you through the process to add your Gmail account to Iris:

After putting in your Gmail credentials, you are automatically redirected using Odyssey to Google to login using your Google account and allow the Iris email program to access your emails.

You need to allow Iris to access your Google account for the email functionality to work:

Once done, you are prompted to close the Odyssey web browser window:

The setup was completed successfully in Iris:

It then populates the mailbox view with the Gmail content using IMAP:

Under 3.13 MorphOS it still works just as well, now with the new window theme.

Using Iris under MorphOS 3.13 I sent a test email from the X5000 to validate Iris sends email successfully from Gmail - I embedded an image in the email to test that too:

The email sent successfully and received in Iris (as I sent it to myself), so I can could see the HTML format email displays correctly with the embedded image in it. Success!

In the Iris settings, you can adjust the appearance of the columns, default font and spell check:

Under Accounts option in the Iris title bar menus, you can adjust the Gmail settings, and also your Email signature to use when composing emails, so you can tell everyone you are emailing them from your AmigaOne X5000! Spread the word!

Having now got Iris working well under MorphOS 3.13, I then relaxed listening to a MorphOS music disk demo from Uprough called Saturday at Joes EP - an oldie but a goodie:

That's it for today - I hope you enjoy playing around with MorphOS 3.13 on your AmigaOne X5000, Sam 460 or the other supported older PowerPC Mac systems!

Amiga Retro Brisbane December 2019 meeting

Happy New Year 2020 to all. I hope you had a great Xmas and New Years!

I got to visit the Amiga Retro Brisbane group meeting on Dec 30, 2019 while I was on holiday in Brisbane over the new year period.

It was great to meet everyone there, enjoy the Amiga systems on display and I was invited to do a presentation about NG Amiga systems too.

I include a few pictures from the meeting here - please visit the Amiga Retro Brisbane Group page for more photos from this and other Amiga events they host!

Amiberry running on a PS One mini:

Amiga CD32 with SX-1 expansion and playstation controller converter:

Specially made Amiga 500 PCB from scratch - Red Keg Technologies! A working Amiga 500 using the PCB was also at the meeting! Awesome work:

The working Amiga 500 PCB running:

Presentation of the Red Keg A500 board - so much work done and very impressive result.

Busy meeting and much Amiga chatter, just how I like it:

Amiga 2000, a little unhappy but got some TLC during the meeting:

Lemmings on Amiga 1200 using the new black Amiga 1200 case -  I did a full build using the new case last year here.

 Custom arcade cabinet built locally with a Raspberry Pi and emulation station installed, running Amiga emulation with Blood Money:

AmiKit XE running Amiga AGA demos like TBL's awesome demos under emulation on my Surface Go at the meeting:

If you get a chance to attend a Amiga Retro Brisbane event, please do so - it was a great night!

Also, I visited the new AmigaRetro.com Australian Amiga forum website, started by the Amiga Retro Brisbane group members.

I am glad to be part of a new forum focused on Amiga in Australia. If you are in Australia (or even elsewhere) please sign up today!