Genvid SDK 1.17.0

Welcome to Genvid SDK 1.17.0. This release is ready and stable for integration and can be used for local development and limited cloud deployment. We are still missing some features for a complete production deployment which can be provided through other software. Please contact us at support@genvidtech.com if you’re planning a production deployment.

We are still committed to a regular pace for our releases until we get all the features done for a comfortable production deployment. We always work to ensure a smooth upgrade between releases and provide as much backward compatibility support as possible. A complete list of our Known Issues and Workarounds is available to you in our Forum. Please contact us if you have any issues.

Current functionalities

Here is a summary of our current functionalities. See below for the list of new features in this release.

  • Windows C++ API with a C# wrapper.
  • D3D11 or raw frame video capture.
  • WASAPI audio capture.
  • Video encoding (H264 + AAC).
  • Video streaming to YouTube.
  • Video streaming to Twitch.
  • Multiple audiovisual and data streams coming from multiple instances.
  • Streaming additional arbitrary game events and notifications.
  • Scalable event messaging system.
  • JavaScript SDK for embedded webpage.
  • Automatic synchronisation between video and game data streams.
  • Multiple distributed source of A/V and Data (still beta).
  • Live video editing and basic composition effects (still in beta).
  • RTMP Ingest server (still in beta).
  • Unity3D integration (Game and Management).
  • Unreal Engine integration (Game and Management).
  • REST API to control the services (still in beta).
  • Tools and scripts for managing your local and remote clusters, with example scripts for AWS.
  • Metrics feed (still in beta).
  • Load testing library.
  • Extensive documentation.
  • Multiple integration samples.

More to come

Additionally, we are working on a full new feature pipeline to be released as soon as each is ready:

  • Remote management services for sharing your clusters with others.
  • SSL support for external APIs.
  • ACL support on Management APIs.
  • Hardware encoding.
  • Instant replay.
  • Better cluster-configuration management.
  • Many more improvements and features exposed in our UI (including the plugins).
  • Offline data-stream recording and playback.
  • Offline broadcast-session editing.
  • SDK Manager to help handling multiple SDK installations.

Major changes in this version

New packaging of Web API

The Web API has been repackaged. The CommonJS target has been removed and the Node target has been bundled with WebPack. See our upgrade notes for more information.

New SDK JPEG Encoder

We replaced our internal encoder with libjpeg-turbo which reduces the load of the game machine CPU, and help also to reduce the bandwidth. That is just a first step in our optimization efforts to improve the quality of the stream and allowing higher resolution.

New Events Page

We changed how the Events page displays captured event-data. Instead of a log of all triggered events, it is now a table which displays a summary of each event. You can also download the summaries in JSON format.

Better support for many clusters in Terraform page

We’ve added many improvements to help manage multiple clusters: a more responsive page, sorted clusters list, and enabling scrolling when too many clusters are present. More improvements are will be introduces once we get more projects published.

Minor changes and other fixes

  • [installer] Replaced Visual Studio Build Tools Installer with the one with C++ support. Allow to compile the C++ samples.
  • [sdk] Fixed the audio client initialization when the audio engine mixer format is not supported by the audio endpoint device.
  • [sdk] Fixed a race condition in the composed operation that freezes the game loop.
  • [wingame-ami] Fixed a problem with the framerate of the game when the remote screen goes into sleep mode after fifteen minutes.
  • [terraform] Replace the AWS VPC Module in the basic_cluster module that required Git to be installed. We are now using a standard module that can be fetched directly from Terraform Registry.
  • [cluster-api] Fixed a condition where the Cluster API were using the wrong Consul and Vault, leading to initialization problems and lost configuration.
  • [cluster-ui/bastion-ui] The modal window in Job setting is widened for better readability.
  • [cluster-ui] Node status is now hidden on single node cluster.
  • [cluster-ui] Tooltips are re-integrated to the input labels in Genvid Settings page.
  • [studio] Alerts and messages are added to inform users the state of their actions
  • [studio] A cut button and the option for automatically cut to another scene are implemented in Scene Widget.
  • [studio] The automatic audio follow mode is now saved in scenes.
  • [ingest] Exposed extradelay and ntp.server parameters in the Ingest template. This allows to compensate correctly for the encoding delay or clock-drift of the source.
  • [ue4-plugin] Added the Unreal Engine 4.20.1 compatibility to the Genvid Module.
  • [ue4-plugin] Fixed a compilation error with FGenvidTimecode on two templated functions of the deprecated GenvidSteamer class.
  • [ue4-plugin] Added an option in the Blueprint to set the Game framerate and the Genvid video stream framerate.
  • [ue4-plugin] Renamed gamedata as gameData for any function and parameter to be consistent with the format.
  • [unity-plugin] Fixed a problem in the Genvid Window Editor when a user clicks a button and nothing happens.
  • [loadtester] Update consul package and ensure we connect to the nearest statsd in a healthy state. Improve performance and metrics build up in the clients.

Known bugs

Twitch Extension Developer Rig not working

The Twitch Extension Developer Rig doesn’t provide any real player or video stream to synchronize the data. For this reason, our web client isn’t able to playback any data.

Compose window isn’t available if behind a proxy

Future versions of Bastion will have a remote server to allow access from different machines. The current version has limited support for this and is likely to encounter some problems if the Bastion host lives behind a cluster firewall (like on a Amazon EC2 machine). The workaround is creating VPN connections to the Bastion machine so that the local IP of the machine is accessible from the client machine.

The application doesn’t work properly after Windows comes back from sleep

Nomad has some difficulties with sleeping jobs, including itself. This is unlikely to get fixed in Nomad, but shouldn’t happen in a production environment. The best workaround at present is to not allow Windows to go to sleep when you are running the service, or simply to restart the service with a genvid-bastion reinstall. (Unfortunately, genvid-bastion restart is not sufficient).

The YouTube stream isn’t properly reset after a gvencode restart

If you stop and quickly restart the services, the YouTube streaming service considers it part of the same streaming session. Although this may be desirable most of the time, this could lead to showing up as the previous session due to the long latency between the services and the actual view which can create some delay in the stream. A future version will provide a proper way to request a new stream. Until then, you can either reset your stream key from the YouTube dashboard or simply wait a little longer (about 5 minutes should be enough) before restarting the service.

Audio captures microphone or infinitely loops

When using the WASAPI audio auto-capture mode, every sound going through the machine’s default audio-device gets captured. This includes system alerts and microphone input, as well as your web browser. When test-viewing your game stream using the same local machine running the game, the game will also capture its own audio stream with ~10s of latency. This yields some echo with progressively worse sound quality since it is compressed every time it is streamed.

You can disable audio in 2 ways:

  • Set settings.encode.input.silent to true in your configuration. (The default setting.)
  • Use our raw audio-capture, which is now the default setting in Unity.

Standalone player with Firefox

The readable streams must be enabled in Firefox for the standalone player to work properly. You must set dom.streams.enabled and javascript.options.streams preferences to true from the about:config URL.

Auto-cut checkbox state is stored locally only

In Studio, the state of the auto-cut checkbox in Scene Widget is only stored in local storage and the input from user will be cleared when the browser cache is cleared. In the case where auto-cut is turned “on” before the Studio session ended, it will be set back to “off” by default when you start the Studio session again.

Studio can not take inputs of the same control from multiple windows

If Studio is opened in more than one browser windows and inputs are received from different sources to one contorl, the final value will then bounce between the different inputs instead of updating it to the latest one. For example, in Audio Mixer Widget, if a user change the slider of Master Gain to 20 db and another user then change it to 0 db, the slider handle will bounce between 20 db and 0 db instead of being set to 0 db. Inputs from different windows to one control is not recommended until we resolve the issue.