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A picture of Seth Bling

Seth Bling

Game hacker, streamer, speedrunner

in game, video, windows

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Seth, but on the Internet I go by Sethbling. I run a gaming-centric YouTube channel, particularly focused on Mario games and Minecraft. My channel is all about engineering and deconstructing games. My channel grew popular through my Minecraft recreations of other games, things like Splatoon, agar.io, and Team Fortress 2. I've since branched out into speedrunning, and creating my own Minecraft maps and Mario Maker levels, as well as venturing into the world of livestreaming on Twitch.

I really like to find out how a game works at a deep level, and see how I can use that knowledge to really break the game wide open. People watch my videos to see the wacky ways I've been able to do unexpected things in video games, and to learn about how those exploits work.

What hardware do you use?

My computer is a custom laptop build from Malibal. It's got an i7 desktop CPU and high end mobile video card, and weighs something like 10 pounds. The power brick is similarly heavy. I do all my work, including video rendering and livestreaming on this laptop, with the idea that if I travel I can pack my work computer and bring it with me, and my entire setup will be exactly the same.

I use a Blue Yeti mic and a Logitech C920 webcam for recording. I play Super Mario World on SNES and Super Mario Maker on Wii U, so I use an XCAPTURE-1 HD capture card, as well as an XRGB-mini Framemeister hardware upscaler to convert SNES to 720p. I have two ASUS monitors that I plug into my laptop, as well as an external keyboard and wireless mouse, which makes it basically feel like a desktop.

And what software?

I use Dxtory to record DirectX games, and XSplit to screen capture, as well as for livestreaming. I use Vegas Movie Studio for editing, it's a relatively cheap and full-featured piece of video editing software. I occasionally use Handbrake to transcode video. Sometimes I use Audacity to record audio snippets. When collaborating, I use a variety of voice software, from Skype to Discord to Mumble to TeamSpeak. I play Minecraft, and often use MCEdit to edit my Minecraft worlds. I also use the Bizhawk SNES emulator to help me do glitch hunting and exploit/speedrun routing for Super Mario World.

What would be your dream setup?

I'm generally pretty happy with my current setup. I always wondered what it would be like to have a 3x3 grid of monitors, but that does seem a bit impractical. Someday I might switch to an XLR audio setup, including a hardware compressor - I think it would improve my audio quality. And get a better facecam for my livestreams. If we're really dreaming, it'd be nice if everything was wireless; my desk is kind of a mess with wires.