With just 5 days to go, it’s time to delve a little deeper into some of the other more technical areas of how the show works. There are lots of other shows and podcasts out there that do things far more efficiently that is done at TigerTails Radio, but as the show is made from years of equipment building off equipment, I figured it was time to explain just how some of it works. This episode will concentrate on the PCs used.
There are 3 PCs that go into make the show run. This is because the machines we run are old, and therefore can’t do the multi-tasking required to cover it all in one. Plus there’s software issues that would require us to have a minimum of 2 anyway. The first machine is an old Windows XP machine, which sends the audio over to the TigerTails Radio shoutcast servers. It runs XP as the broadcast software (which also records the podcast) won’t run on anything higher. The XP machine is also where the podcast gets uploaded into the archives for the website, so if regular listeners wonder why TK goes quiet on Discord immediately after the show, now you know – He’s working on a different PC.
The Discord PC (as it’s known) is TK’s main PC where all the chat happens, and where Xavier dials in from his remote studio. The YouTube feed is also monitored from this PC, to make sure it’s all displaying okay. The YouTube comments and Discord channels are watched over from here, as well as Telegram, even though there’s no official TigerTails Radio room there yet (let TK know if you want one). The feed from the microphones goes into the Discord PC so Xavier knows what’s being said, and then it outputs his voice to the mixing equipment – which will be covered in another post.
Finally there is the YouTube broadcasting PC. This takes the video output from the camera/games and feeds it into an AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable capture device where is it mixed with the audio from the mixers. This is then fed into OBS (Open Broadcast Software), which is where all the magic happens. The video broadcast PC is also where a lot of the graphics for the show are generated. OBS is then used to switch between the main video feed, music credit, and the game screens. However, with the forthcoming test show, that could be changing.
The countdown continues…
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