The camera viewfinder gives you a quick-glance over the state of your video source. It is only available on screens with a large enough display, so if you are streaming off a mobile device, chances are this does not apply to you.
This is not available on most mobile phones as the screen size is typically too small.
Hide/Present the Viewfinder
Open and close the viewfinder with this button. You may wish to dismiss it if you are not capturing video on this device, or want to provide more screen space to the scoring interface.
Video View
The video view will draw the feed coming of your camera.
This is the live unedited video from your source, it has not actually been sent to the server yet. If the video is stuttering here, chances are there is something wrong with the feed from the camera.
As a convenience, the overlay is drawn over this video so you can simulate what your audience will see. You can disable this in the match settings dialog if you want the viewfinder to be "clean".
Finally, if you are not the video streaming device, this will instead render the complete video that your audience will see.
Read more about the video source of a match here.
Stream Status
A simplified stream connection status is displayed underneath the video source.
This only displays if you have selected a video source on this device and is only local to you (other users can't see this/will have their own readout).
This information shows:
-
Name of the video device being used (e.g. "Screen recording").
- This will typically be the name of your camera/capture card or in this case the screen recording interface.
-
The quality the video device is being captured at (e.g. "1920x1080 @ 6000kbps").
- This affects the overall picture sent to the server and on to viewers. Higher numbers typically produce a better quality image, but take more bandwidth to do so. When the system attempts to drop the picture quality in poor network conditions, these numbers change accordingly. You can read more about how this works here.
- The codec being used is is also displayed back here (e.g. "H.264"). Typically, you don't need to worry about this, but you can override and control it from the match settings dialog. This will vary by device, more modern codecs will allow you to stream in better quality, more reliably, using less data (but will usually default to an older H.264 standard).
-
Internet connection quality test (e.g. "Internet Good (41.03mbps, 215ms)").
- This is a stripped down version of the diagnostics dialog that displays the app's opinion of the network condition, the value is rechecked at least once every 30s. This shows the network upload speed (high numbers better) and the ping back to the server (low numbers better). You can read more about how this works and why it matters here.
Audio Source
The attached audio source is presented along with a drop down selector at the bottom of the viewfinder next to the camera/video selector.
If your device/video source has an audio input available, you can quickly toggle this by clicking on this input.
Toggle between available inputs, or set to "None (muted)" to remove audio. You may wish to if in high wind conditions or ambient crowd chatter is (potentially) inappropriate to pick up.
The visual dots will illuminate when your audio device is picking up sound.
Camera Controls
The attached video source is presented along with a drop down selector at the bottom of the viewfinder next to the audio selector.
If your device/video source has an audio input available, you can quickly toggle this by clicking on this input.
You can read more about the camera selector here.