The mystery of "Himmmm"

Heads up, I'm posting my plans for 2024 on both the general and the art Patreon. Check 'em out over there. Patrons get to see them sooner than the general public, so if you're impatient, join up!

Those of you who have been keeping track know that I recently had a laptop die. I say a laptop rather than the laptop, because I have an entire bin of them. Most of them are only minimally useful. 

The most recent one, a 2020 HP convertible, was actually the one that croaked. My misbegotten curiosity has broken a number of devices in my time, but the only two computers that have ever died without any intervention from me were that Pavilion x360 and an Ideapad, both of which had full 14" glass touchscreens. It's a neat idea, I suppose? It's awkward as fuck to poke the screen in laptop configuration, and the HP was just stupid heavy to use as a tablet. Between that and the fact that those things seem to break if you look at them funny, I've filled the role of "large fancy-looking tablet" with a 10" Kindle Fire on clearance, and decided I'm not going to take any more fingerprint collectors until someone invents one that doesn't self-destruct.

The thing about this pile of equipment, is that each of the devices in it has a very specific job. I do a lot of scattershot, weird things with computers, and I don't do it all at home. I could probably spec out a single laptop that did most of what I needed, but it would be pricey -- I'd be looking at something in the Alienware range -- and there would still be a lot of compromises. 

The obvious one is size versus bulk. You know how Sanrio says that Hello Kitty is "three apples tall"? The maximum amount of computer I'm willing to lug around is about "two rats heavy". Somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-3.5 lbs. (I raise me up some chonky little boogers.) It's pretty hard to find that with a large screen, never mind a full-size keyboard and a long-running battery. The computer I'm typing this on right now is a hand-me-down Acer Aspire E5-576 that I kept for all three of those things, but this motherfucker weighs about five and a half pounds. The farthest I'm willing to carry it is the laundromat, conveniently located three doors down from my house.

The other thing I care about pretty passionately is, surprisingly, the graphics hardware. Normally people who care about real-time rendering are doing a lot of graphically-intense gaming. I'm not, but what I am trying to do right now is capture clean gameplay footage for a video project. In order to do that, you need one computer that can:

1. Render the game to the screen cleanly, without hitching or stuttering, at a steady framerate and reasonable resolution;
2. Take that rendered output and re-encode it to write to the hard drive in real time, at a framerate and resolution that may or may not match that of the original game;
3. Run the screen capture software, providing a usable interface for setting up and running the capture; and
4. Render a preview window at or below the capture resolution to a second monitor, so you can see what the hell you're recording.

This is all way more CPU-hungry than the actual editing process. Real-time video editing suites look super complicated, but the brainiest thing they actually have to do is render a rough preview so can see what you're doing. The only other thing it's doing in the background is keeping a list of assets and a cue sheet of where they go and when. The final render does require a lot of number-crunching, but that doesn't need to happen in real time -- the computer can grind away at the output for as long as it likes, or at least as long as the owner is willing to wait.

The issue I ran into when the Pavilion went belly-up was that all of the other computers I had available either didn't have enough RAM to cope with recording, or were chugging along with an onboard Intel graphics chipset that could just about handle having the extra monitors plugged in if I didn't breathe on them too hard, or they were still using a mechanical HDD that didn't appreciate having to scribble down HD video for 90 minutes at a time. All of those machines are still perfectly usable as computers, they just weren't quite usable for that specific task. 

A part of me feels very dumb for having that problem. I first started learning how all of this worked twenty years ago, when none of it was even remotely doable at home. I use a program for a lot of this called OBS (Open Broadcast Software). It is well-maintained, pretty reasonable to use, and totally free. It takes the place of what would previously have been 3-4 rack mounted pieces of electronics, each costing tens of thousands of dollars, plus a couple of studio monitors, and it is designed to be operated live on the air by one lone yahoo who is also simultaneously reading the chat, talking to the camera, and getting gibbed by a 12-year-old in Fortnite. 

The games in question run only on Windows, and the only other viable candidate computer was not in super hot shape. The brains are fine, but some of the pieces are showing their age. It's a work computer, and in order to take it from "live event streaming on Zoom" to "game capture" optimized, I'd have to change virtually every single setting in OBS, and I'm still not sure it would be up to the task. It's working off of a 5400 RPM platter hard drive -- if you don't speak tech geek, sold state drives are best for heavy video work, and if you must go with a mechanical one, you want to shoot for at least 7200 RPM -- that is starting to go chugga-chugga, either because it has 8GB of RAM and Windows is stashing everything in the swap file, or because the drive is a mediocre Hitachi and just hates life. (It survives Zoom because Zoom hard-caps video at 1080p whether you like it or not, and will record your meeting to the cloud without dumping the raw file onto your hard drive first.) I have an SSD and a RAM upgrade on the Work Supplies list, but it technically works okay now, so that has to wait for money.

Fortunately, a very generous soul has helped me sort out the video capture computer problem, and I am now hard at work on the thing I was trying to do two months ago. Observe:

Current OpenShot window.

I get to dump all the trivia I know about these games into a letsplay, and it will finally exit my head. The internal monologue just goes 'round and 'round until I manage to externalize it somewhere, you see. Hence the blog. Otherwise my friends have to suffer through this, and it's hard to click away and browse another tab when I'm sitting right in front of them.

If you're one of the mad fandom people who's actually interested in this, I expect to post part 1 sometime this weekend. I'm not sure I can keep up a weekly schedule -- the segments are pretty long and really title-heavy -- but two weeks seems doable, if I try to work ahead.