By now we've accepted that we'll never receive a letter from Hogwarts, but Intel has the next best thing with the Easy Streaming Wizard, a new program meant to simplify the Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) setup process. It's still not quite the swish-and-flick of a simple charm, but Intel claimed the Easy Streaming Wizard could save streamers hours of fiddling with OBS to ensure the highest quality broadcast their systems can support.
OBS is to streaming like Word is to word processing and Excel is to spreadsheets. There are plenty of similar programs, but OBS is essentially the default option for people streaming on services like Twitch for the first time. While its many settings can be daunting at first--especially since the user interface isn't particularly welcoming--OBS was the first app to give PC gamers a relatively straightforward way to capture their gameplay.
Here are the benefits Intel claimed the Easy Streaming Wizard could provide:
- It helps to set up a PC for streaming in minutes, not hours or days.
- It automatically configures and tunes the streaming service (Twitch, YouTube, Mixer) within the wizard.
- It optimizes Intel Core processor for encoding, sound, bandwidth and other features to determine the best streaming quality possible.
- It scales with more cores and threads to improve quality of the livestream.
The first point seems like an exaggeration, but properly configuring OBS often involves a lot of trial and error. Continuing with the Harry Potter metaphor, setting up OBS is like finding a wand, in the sense that everyone needs something different. Streamers use a variety of hardware, play different games and broadcast to disparate platforms. There isn't a one-setting-fits-all OBS configuration that can perfectly serve all those functions.
Introducing the Easy Streaming Wizard also gives Intel another way to market its processors to streamers. The company already touts its gaming performance, and last year it partnered with Streamlabs on classifying some PCs as being ready to stream. Helping people set up OBS--so long as they own an Intel processor and use Windows 10--makes it that much easier to convince first-time streamers not to buy their processors from AMD.
The Easy Streaming Wizard is available now via Intel's website. In addition to requiring Windows 10 and supported Intel processors, a full list of which is available on the program's download page, it also requires at least 8GB of memory and some kind of GPU. Intel said the program supports Twitch, YouTube and Mixer; anyone hoping to stream to other platforms will have to find their own wand. Erm, we mean, set up OBS by themselves.
