The last few days, I’ve been playing around with different apps to stream my screen to Twitch.TV.
Castawesome: It works really well, but it’s still kind of basic in its functionality. You can define a region of your screen, and that gets streamed to Twitch, along with an optional watermark image.
ScreenStudio: This one is also still pretty basic right now but seems to be improving rapidly – the author fixed a bug I pointed out and updated his downloads within only a couple of hours of my report. The interface is pretty, but could use more work – like a button for selecting the screen region instead of the current label. It does have a nice option to allow you to embed a webcam input into the stream.
I was unable to get ScreenStudio’s webcam feature to work, but it doesn’t appear to be the fault of that application. Neither avconv nor ffmpeg (both compiled from the current git) will capture from either of my webcams without hanging up… which is odd since mencoder and other apps seem to work fine with the webcams. After troubleshooting it a bit with the help of the ScreenStudio author (Patrick Balleux), I’ve opened a bug with the libav guys to see if they can help me figure out what’s going on.
It’s interesting to note that both of these programs are just GUIs that call the powerful libav or ffmpeg command line utilities behind the scenes. Castawesome is written in Python, while ScreenStudio is written in Java.