Genvid SDK 1.2.0

Welcome to Genvid Technologies SDK 1.2.0. While this release is not yet ready for production deployment, it is robust enough today to allow developers to start developing a full Genvid Streaming Experience into their existing projects.

We are hard at work, and a version of our SDK ready for production deployable builds are coming soon. We expect future releases will allow for a smooth transition. In the meantime, we recommend you start your integration today using our local development environment.

Current functionalities

We currently deliver core functionality which allows you to run your game and stream it to YouTube, along with extra game events and messaging to make it a true Genvid Streaming Experience.

  • D3D11 video capture
  • WASAPI audio capture
  • Video encoding (H264 + AAC)
  • Video streaming to YouTube
  • Streaming of additional arbitrary game events and notifications
  • Scalable event messaging system
  • Automatic synchronisation between video and game data streams
  • Native and Web SDK for easy integration
  • Sample tutorial project
  • Sample Unreal Engine 4 project
  • Exhaustive documentation
  • Local deployment tools and scripts
  • Cloud deployment tools and scripts (still in beta)
  • Unity engine integration with the Genvid SDK (still in beta)

More to come

Additionally, we are working on a full new feature pipeline to be released after the initial launch:

  • A bastion host to manage your clusters directly on the cloud
  • More secure handling of secret parameters
  • User authentication and validation
  • More video format support
  • Hardware encoding
  • Multi datacenter support
  • Multiple broadcast sessions management
  • Multiple audiovisual and data streams coming from the same or multiple instances
  • Support for audio/video streams coming from external sources
  • Instant replay
  • Live video edition and basic composition effects
  • Offline recording and playback of data streams
  • Offline broadcast session editing

Major changes in this version

Improved Windows Installer

The installer was improved with basic support to repair/modify your installation. Actually, it only supports repairing and adding new components, but will give you better control on what you want to install. Be aware that the installer still removes everything under the SDK installation, including local files. This will be fixed in a future version.

Compressed video stream between game and encoder

We are now using a compressed video stream between the game and the encoder. Although this required more CPU, this will greatly reduce the bandwidth between the game and the encoder on the cloud, paving the way for multiple input sources to come later.

Unity integration with the Genvid SDK

Warning

This feature is currently in beta. All the basic functionalities are present but some conveniences are missing and some API are likely to change in the future. Particularly, the capacity to run the sample from the Unity Editor is missing. Your feedback is welcome.

The Genvid SDK can now be integrated into your Unity project.

Minor changes and other fixes

  • [cloud] Add account id to bucket name for images to avoid global conflicts.
  • [cloud] Changes the ARTIFACTS_URL_TEMPLATE to use the bucket_domain_name output from terraform.
  • [cloud] Fix lookup of latest AMI (both game and server) in terraform for external account.
  • [cloud] Merge the Cloud Solution installer in the SDK installer.
  • [documentation] Add a missing section on upgrading from 1.0 to 1.1.
  • [installer] Update python to 3.5.3. This is not a mandatory update.
  • [local] Add logging for nomad and consul. Run local.py log nomad for example, to get them.
  • [broadcast] Check for out of bounds condition in broadcast that could lead to a broken stream.
  • [sdk] Fix the destroy/creation of a video stream leading to a broken stream.

Known bugs

We weren’t able to fix some bugs in time for this release, but we intend to fix them shortly.

The application doesn’t work properly after Windows comes back from sleep

Nomad has some difficulties with sleeping jobs, including itself. This is unlikely to get fixed in Nomad, but shouldn’t happen in production environment. The best workaround you could have for that is to not allow Windows to go to sleep when you are running the service, or simply to restart the service with a local.py reinstall (unfortunately, local.py restart is not sufficient).

The YouTube stream isn’t properly reset after a manual restart

If the services are stopped and restarted shortly after, the YouTube streaming service will consider it as part of the same streaming session. Although a desirable effect most of the time, this could lead to showing up the previous session due to the long latency between the services and the actual view. A future version will provide a proper way to request a new stream, but until then, you can either reset your stream key from the YouTube dashboard or simply wait a little longer (a few minutes should be enough) before restarting the service.

Audio captures microphone, or loops infinitely

Since we capture audio with a loopback device, every sound going through the machine running the game will get captured. This not only includes system alerts or microphone input, but it also includes your web browser. When viewing your game stream using the same machine which is running the game, the game will also capture its own audio stream with ~10s of latency, yielding some echo with progressively worse sound quality (since it is compressed every time it is streamed). The recommended workaround is to disable audio altogether (genvid.encode.input.silent = true in your config file), or to use a separate machine to observe the website. These issues are moot when the game is deployed in a cloud infrastructure.

Audio is out of sync

The audio might be out of sync by a slight margin. We intend to fix this in an upcoming release. In the meantime, you can add delay to the video by setting a video delay in your config file; the default value is genvid.encode.output.videodelay = "1250ms" (the format is a string ending with ms).

AWS servers are not working properly after a shutdown

If you shut down the servers, they lose their public IP addresses and the system fails to take the new addresses into account. You must reinstall the servers by doing a cloud.py reinstall which takes a very long time. We are currently working on a solution that will be available on the official release of the cloud support.

Video capture is not supported in Unity editor

If you are running the stack and are attempting to start the application inside the Unity editor, you might encounter some issues. We recommend for now to run the stack only when your application is built as an executable file.

Small hang can be noticed when losing Unity application focus early

If you are running your Unity application with the stack and decide to proceed to a different window during the splash screen, you are bound to get a small hang several seconds later. This hang disppears when moving the mouse. This hang doesn’t affect the video, audio and data capture. We recommend to stay focused on the window around ten seconds after the application is launched to avoid this issue.