XSplit Broadcaster 3.8 Features

So far we’ve managed to keep up with our release schedule of a major release every two months with PTR releases in between. We’ve just released 3.8 into the wild where everyone now has access to the brand new in-game HUD amongst other features. The purpose of 3.8 was to bring something new to the table whilst also adding additional features that have been asked for. Oh and did I mention? Resize source hotkeys are back!

The in-game HUD allows you to both control XSplit Broadcaster from inside your game (similar to XSplit Gamecaster) but also allows you to manage your stream. You’re able to see chat and stream events whilst you play in the form of pinned widgets without the need for a second monitor. Widgets that you pin will only be visible to you and won’t be visible on your stream or recording when using Game Capture. That means you have complete freedom on how you position them without affecting viewer experience. We hope to expand on the HUD functionality overtime and provide even more functionality.

Whilst the HUD takes most of the limelight, we’ve added additional features such as the Scene source which allows you to add one scene to another. At first you might not necessarily see the point but if you think of a scene like a block that you can build and then add across as many scenes as you want, you create a really easy way to add repeatable elements to a scene and only have to edit it in one place. That’s not the only use case for this feature and I’ve seen many creative uses of it so give it a try and see how it can make your life easier or increase creativity.

Not sure what just happened? Replay Source allows you to play back what just happened on stream for a short period of time. We created the replay source to allow flexibility in how you use it. You can use it on an already existing scene as picture in picture and then use a hotkey to trigger it. Alternatively you can dedicate an entire scene to it and then have it automatically play when you switch to that scene. Once again, this is just the initial implementation and I think there’s a lot more we can do such as storing the replays to playback at a later point or even just saving them to disk in general.

Noise Suppression is another highly requested feature and is great for those who have microphones that have more background noise than they should. Right now it’s a very generic and aggressive implementation which means while it’s supposed to serve as a one size fits all, it might not get you the results you desire, more so for those with higher end microphones. With that being said, it’s a great way to clean up unwanted noise.

So, those are the bulk of the updates in 3.8 not including the vast amount of bug fixes and improvements. What about 3.9? Our focus for the next upcoming version is primarily on putting in the ground work to better improve our audio. This means actual decibel (dB) values that you can use to balance out your audio properly. We’ll be shipping a simple audio mixer extension that will allow you to monitor audio much more easily and make adjustments as you see fit. On top of that, we’ll also be adding some monitoring in to the audio settings themselves which means you can make sure the right device is selected before closing the settings.

For those that pride themselves on organisation, we’ll be implementing source grouping in to the mix. This means that on a given scene, you’ll be able to select multiple sources, group them and then move them together. On top of that, you can also rename groups and collapse them which means being able to have some separation of concerns. This is great for things like webcam with frames and some text. Now you’ll be able to place them in a group and move them together without needing to move each individual item one by one.

A brand new feature called Scene Presets will be making its way in to the next version too. By name it doesn’t mean too much but the general idea is that you can make variations of the same scene without needing to dedicate an entirely new scene to it. An example of this could be having the webcam in a different position, having chroma key on or off or using 3D transforms in one preset and not in another. However, the most powerful part of this is that you can set a transition time between these presets which means when you switch between them, we’ll automatically animate based on the properties changed. This means if you have the opacity of an item set to 0 on one preset and 100 on another, it will look like a fading effect when you switch presets with a transition time set.

We’ll also be making a bunch of under the hood changes that you might not necessarily notice immediately but will improve the experience as a whole when using our plugins for the various streaming services. We’re tying it all together so that if you’ve ever linked your Twitch account to XSplit, adding Twitch plugins will just work out of the box. We’re aiming to apply this philosophy across the board meaning minimal setup from your end and hopefully an easier experience.

So these are the main items on the board for the next major release but that isn’t to say they’re the only features we’re working on. There are tonnes of things in the pipeline that are being worked on by the team and we’ll be sure to let you know what they are when we’re ready. In the meantime, remember you can suggest and vote for ideas you like by using our feature vote page. On top of that you can get involved in the conversation by joining our discord server or follow us on Twitter.