Are you a Linux gamer looking to stream gameplay to Twitch? For the longest time, it’s been very hard to do on the Linux platform. Until now. Enter Castawesome – a FFMPEG frontend designed for use with Twitch (and even a few others). This program makes streaming very easy. Just a little configuration and you can broadcast your gameplay to your very own Twitch channel.
Building Castawesome
Since Castawesome is not very well known, it’s not available in any software repositories for any Linux distributions. This means the source code needs to be downloaded and built for it to run. Don’t worry, it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds.
First, download the source code here.
Note: If you use Arch Linux, Castawesome is available in the Arch User Repository. Use your AUR client of choice and install it.
Dependencies
Before Castawesome can be made, its dependencies need to be met. Install the following packages by following the instructions below.
Ubuntu
Open a terminal window and enter the command below. Doing so will install all dependencies needed to build Castawesome.
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec-extra-53 libgtk-3-0 python2 |
Other Linux Distributions
The packages should be called something similar to the Ubuntu dependency packages. Just open your package management tool of choice and search for ffmpeg, libavcodec-extra-53, libgtk-3-0 and python2.
Making
Now that the required dependencies have been satisfied, we can run the make file and install Castawesome. Open a terminal window and navigate to the directory where you extracted the program.
cd /place/where/you/extracted/castawesome |
Now it’s time to run the make file.
sudo make install |
Running make install with the sudo command installs Castawesome to the system. Whenever you want to run it, all you really need to do is type castawesome into the terminal. Alternatively, you can go to the folder in which the program was extracted and run “castawesome.py”.
Open Castawesome, click on the settings window (it opens when you launch it) and move on to the next part.
Streaming
In order to stream to Twitch, two things need to be done. First, you’ll need to create a Twitch account (if you don’t have one already). Secondly, log into your Twitch account and get your stream key. The stream key is important, as you will not be able to use Twitch without it. You can find your key here in the dashboard.
After grabbing the stream key, input it into Castawesome. Do this by clicking the “Reset Stream Key” button.
Doing so will bring up a prompt. Paste your stream key into the prompt.
Click the OK button and Castawesome will use your stream key. Be sure to click the “Apply” button to save it.
When all settings are configured, close the settings window and navigate to the main Castawesome window. Click the slider from the OFF position to the ON position. Once on, you should be able to see your own stream on your Twitch profile.
Other Stream Settings
With the stream key applied, gameplay can now be streamed outright. However, other settings can be configured inside the Castawesome settings window (which, besides opening on startup can be found by clicking the Properties button on the main window). These settings inclue frames per second (FPS), input and output resolution, bitrate, threads, x/y offset, compression and even applying a watermark to your stream.
These settings are easy to change and should be self explanatory. Just change the text in the boxes, and your new settings should autosave.
Conclusion
For the longest time, no program has existed that made streaming gameplay on Twitch via Linux easy. Before this program, the only real way was to use the command line and FFMPEG. While not perfect, Castawesome is a huge step forward for Linux gamers.
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