Streaming!

So I've been spending the past week wrestling with all possible troubles you run into when trying to set up a stream. Finally, I got it to work properly, but it took a lot of energy.

Destiny's streaming guide was a bit of a help, but not enough, as most of it wasn't really news to me.

This is my rig, just to give you an idea of why I was so bewildered when I saw all these crappy results at first:

intel i7 2600k
Asus Radeon HD 6950
8GB G.skill DDR3
10Mbit internet connection

Act I. XSplit and USTREAM
Apparently, some people recommend Xsplit because it requires almost no knowledge or setup - instant streaming! Well, almost. I installed it, ran a few tests... and the quality was bad, my FPS was terrible and I got stuttering all over the place. I set aside the project for a while, until I heard that XSplit was going to cost money. Well, I thought, time to look into the high-brow programs.

Act II. Multicam and USTREAM
On one of TL's many many pages where people give advice on how to stream I found XSplit's precursor, tried it... but found out it works just as badly if not worse than XSplit. It messed up everything and didn't work with FMLE at all.

Act III. R1CH
So I went and read R1CH's phenomenal guide to high quality streaming downloaded SCFH and tried that. Surprisingly, it went really well and the quality was far superior to what I got with XSplit. Still, the picture went mushy when scrolling and the FPS was still bad when playing in fullscreen mode - and it's a bit annoying to play in windowed mode. How did my stream look at the time? http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/15245625 like that. Just to throw it in here, before I move on: R1CH wrote a nifty program you can use to hide stuff from your screencap program (if it's set to not show layered windows) - very nice indeed. I also switched to justin.tv, because everyone else seemed to have done so. Turns out it's pretty sweet.

Act IV. DXtory and FML(E)
I tried this briefly, found out it didn't improve my results at all (though it does have a few cool features SCFH does not have) and quickly abandoned this approach.

Act V. The last straw
Windows rule of thumb #712 - see if you got the latest version... so I downloaded FMLE 3.2 (I had been using 3.0 and briefly experimented with 2.5 but both gave me unsatisfactory results) and voilá - much better quality, less stuttering. Nice, all I had to do now was to improve my ingame FPS, which, for some reason, was still not that great (aruond 30) so I used Dankmids' guide to higher FPS. I don't know how much that helped, but now I can stream pretty much everything it seems. - I tested a few games and the result can be seen on my justin.tv channel

http://www.justin.tv/satirical

I'd be happy about some constructive feedback - what do you think about the quality, what do you think would make for an interesting stream program (I am a lousy player)? I'm still pondering my options.