Genvid SDK 1.5.0

Welcome to Genvid Technologies SDK 1.5.0. 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.

  • C++ API with a C# wrapper
  • 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
  • Sample Unity Tutorial
  • Exhaustive documentation
  • Local deployment tools and scripts
  • Cloud deployment tools and scripts (still in beta)
  • REST API to control the services (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

  • New encoding pipeline, more robust and precise. Most services reset themself in case of disconnection.
  • New CSharp wrapper for the SDK.
  • New Unity Sample with pre-fab.

Minor changes and other fixes

  • [web] Add stream information to /disco/stream/join. You can now join a stream directly without calling the /disco/stream/info API.
  • [settings] vbitrate and abitrate settings in genvid/encode/output now take an integer. Unit suffixes are deprecated.
  • [settings] We fix the audio delay problem. The videodelay options in genvid/encode/output is no longer used.
  • [cluster-api] Validate that the services job is not running in order to set the settings and logs.
  • [scripts] The configuration is no longer shown after loading. Call show-config to see it.
  • [genvid-ui] Do not show the spinner when the update job is dead.
  • [documentation] New documentation for cluster-api, disco-api and command-api using swagger.
  • [cloud] The configuration now seperated the encoding workers from the internal worker, for better monitoring and future scalability.

Known bugs

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

The default WASAPI interface doesn’t set the audio input format properly

Right now, the input format isn’t set properly with the WASAPI interface. To circumvent this, we force the audio format on the cloud for the one of our default interface. You must do the same locally to match your machine settings, if you don’t want to hear pops during the playback. Future versions will adapt automatically to the input format instead of being a fixed configuration settings.

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.

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 will get an error. We recommend for now to run the stack only when your application is built as an executable file. Though, we did add an option to deactivate the Genvid SDK in the editor for our Unity sample via a simple click.

Small hang can be noticed when losing Unity application focus

If you are running your Unity application with the stack and decide to proceed to a different window, 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.