Vidblaster & Windows Media Encoder

[mighty_honour_korea]

I use Windows Media Encoder to capture my screen and stream it in conjunction Octoshape technology, but overlay and editing plug-ins for WME are either non-existent, limited in their capabilities or incredibly expensive.

Is it possible to use WME to capture, stream and do just about everything else and just use Vidblaster as a plug-in of sorts for overlays and live editing?

If I try using Vidblaster as a capture device with WME I get an error, "Cannot find a valid output stream from the source.(0xC00D1b70)".

Any assistance would be much appreciated.

[Mike]

Why would you use WME to do screen capture and streaming, if both screen capture and WM streaming is already built into VidBlaster?

[mighty_honour_korea]

512 x 288 is the largest resolution available with this Vidblaster trial, I stream in 800x600.

[Mike]

VidBlaster Studio goes up to HD, use that.

[mighty_honour_korea]

All I need is the overlay function, which is why I was thinking maybe I'd buy VB home for a little bit more than what these plug-ins for WME cost, as Vidblaster is a little more versatile.

But 1000GPB just to be able to do everything I already do with WME, which is free, but with the inclusion of overlays seems a bit steep.

Though, if you ever create a WME plug-in to mirror Vidblaster's overlay functionality email me, I'll be the first in line.

[Mike]

You will be pleased to hear then that the new VB Home will also go up to HD. I hope to release it soon. So for tests, you can still use the (free) VidBlaster Studio trial edition as it is almost similar.

[mighty_honour_korea]

I done a bit of testing with the trial version. I have a few suggestions, if any of them are a feature, but not included in the trial version then let me know.

If I'm not mistaken, previewing what you're capturing or broadcasting eats up processor power. If you could turn off the video box in a module without getting rid of the module itself, or its function, you could save some processing power, right?

The option to select an area of the screen to capture seems to just black out that portion, as apposed to crop it. A crop feature would be pretty handy.

It seems as though if you want to broadcast a video you have to play the video first, then select to broadcast it. Is there a way to automatically play a video when you broadcast it?

When I'm playing a video I can hear it through my headphones, is there a way to turn that off?

There doesn't seem to be any option to control audio/video bitrate or to increase or decrease the quality of the video. I broadcast a video game, which, for some reason, seems to lag if the quality is up too high. I'm using a core i7 and all new hardware, so it's not a processor issue. Being able to control the quality would help.

Being able to choose any resolution instead of having a list to choose from would be pretty handy too.

Hopefully some of these make sense for the average VidBlaster user and not just me, I'd really like to see them implemented.