Category Archives: Streaming
A Guide to Streaming: Part 2
Originally Posted at http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/1644834
A Guide to Streaming: Part 2
Stop what you are doing! If you haven’t already read Part 1, make sure you go back and do so. It covers the end user mind-set as well as many of the core technical aspects of the streaming software we will be using in this article.
For the second part and final in this series, we are going to go over why you should transition to OBS studio and a rundown of that process, as well as some extra tools to help you achieve that extra level of personalization.
OBS Studio
This first part of the guide introduced you to the streaming software, Open Broadcast Software (OBS) Classic. Rather than jumping straight into OBS Studio, the Classic version is a great piece of software that provides a straight forward look at the options available to you. This allows you to better understand what’s going on and makes the transition to OBS Studio more smoothly.
Once you have a strong grasp of what’s going on, you will definitely want to move over to OBS Studio. Not only has all development been swapped over to it, it’s being built up from the ground up with the experience gained from the Classic version in order to create the best streaming program available and improve overall performance, all while remaining free. Please note that at this guide was written using OBS Studio version 18.0.0.
As we did with Part 1, we will cover the changes to the core settings to start with, followed by any changes made to the process of setting up your overlay. Don’t panic at first glance, while the overall interface may look different, many things are handled very similarly to OBS Classic. The majority of the options we will cover have been explained in the first part, and if they haven’t, we got you covered with a solid explanation.
If you are just looking for the most crucial recommended settings, you’ll find a recap of them at the bottom of the next section, Settings.
Settings
Before we dive into this, there are some key changes that twitch have made in terms of accessibility and quality. In a recent twitch blog they announced that they are increasing ingest bitrates up to a maximum of 6 megabits/s, or 6,000 kb/s. In the same article they also announced that they are rolling out a new set of quality options (otherwise known as transcoding) so viewers have more quality choices. This means that the bitrate you set (which is covered a bit further down) has less of an impact on your viewers as they can tailor their viewing experience to the connection speed they have.
This is great news! It means you are able to stream at a higher maximum bitrate, while not negatively impacting the viewer’s experience as they can adjust quality more freely on their side if necessary. We’ll reflect these changes in our bitrate recommendations in the settings below!
Profile and General
Setting up and managing different profiles has been moved out of the General section of the settings. Instead you will find it at the top of the main window of OBS. Here you can setup a new profile, duplicate, rename, remove (only when you have one selected), import and export. This is also the place you swap between different profiles.
With the General tab of the settings you’ll very quickly notice a few additions. Not only do you have the ability to swap between a wide variety of languages, you also have the option of using a Dark Theme if you prefer. A lovely additional for us night-owls!
Further down, the output area allows you to enable confirmation dialog when starting and stopping streams to help you avoid some unfortunate miss clicks, automatically record while stream (make sure you have enough hard drive space as a 30 minute recording with the recommended settings will be around 2gb) or continue recording when the stream starts, and starting a reply buffer when streaming.
The next part related to Source Alignment Snapping is an awesome little addition. Snapping the edges of your different sources can make your life easier in some cases, but also a complete pain in others. Now you have the option to enable it, adjust the sensitivity, snap sources to other sources, and snap on both horizontal and vertical axis if you want!
We don’t need to worry about the projectors section and at the very bottom you’ll find the System Tray area that allows you to add that extra level of comfort in regards to how OBS studio behaves with the system tray. Yes, they have gone to that level of customization.
Stream
The stream section is very similar to the “Broadcast Settings” section in OBS Classic. All you need to do is have Streaming Services selected as the “Stream Type” in the drop down menu at the top, select the appropriate service, choose the best server based on your location, and then enter your unique stream key for your channel. To get your stream key from Twitch, follow the link to the dashboard at the top of this page.
Output
The output section of the settings is a combination of some of the options you will find in the “Broadcast Settings” and “Advanced” settings in OBS Classic.
For the basic overview of options, you can leave the Output Mode dropdown on Simple. Putting it on advanced splits up the options into three sections, automatically shows the options available by checking the “Enable Advanced Encoder Settings”, and allows you to change the audio bitrates for different tracks.
Since we will keep it in simple mode, you’ll quickly notice a few very similar options. Video and audio bitrate are the same options that were present in the “Encoding” section in OBS Classic. With the announcement of higher bitrate support that we covered earlier, we’ll follow the official twitch recommendation of setting the Video Bitrate value between 3,000 – 6,000, and an audio bitrate no higher than 128. Keep in mind that the video bitrate you set also greatly depends on your upload speed. To reiterate what we said in part 1 of this stream guide, do not set your bitrate value higher than 75% of your connection’s upload speed.
From here, make sure the “Encoder” option is set to Software (x264) and tick the “Enable Advanced Encoder Settings”. If you want to leave the “Enforce streaming server bitrate limits” checked you can, our recommendations remain within the predetermined limits. Ticking this box will remove the warnings and allows you to set higher values. Finally, we recommend setting your Encoder Preset to “veryfast”. A more detailed explanation about this setting can be found in the advanced settings section in first part of the guide.
Under the recording section make sure you have your recording path set to an area that has an appropriate amount of space to save the large files and adjust the quality and format if you would like to.
Finally, if you want to use the Replay Buffer feature, tick the box and adjust the replay time. As you will notice, you need to set a hotkey for it in the hotkey section.
Audio
There are a few extra options bundled into the Audio settings. Set your Sample Rate and keep the “Channels” option on Stereo, similar to how it was setup with OBS Classic. Below those options you will quickly notice that you have the option to add multiple Desktop Audio and Mic/Auxiliary Audio devices. You’ll most likely only have use for a single Desktop Audio Device and Mic/Auxiliary Audio, so many sure you add your correct devices in the dropdown options. Each different source of audio you add will have its own adjustable volume that we will cover later on!
Right below the different device options you will see different options for Push-to-mute and Push-to-talk. As in OBS Classic, you can enable Push-to-talk for both your Mic and Desktop audio with your preferred delay amount. OBS Studio also gives you the option to Push-to-mute, allowing you to stop audio from going through to the stream for short periods, or however long you decide to keep the button pressed! Note that you will need to set the hotkey for these two options in the Hotkeys settings.
Video
The video sections is extremely similar to the options available in OBS Classic. Set your “Base Resolution” to be the same as your screen’s resolution and the “Output Resolution” that you want the stream to receive. We recommend that the Output Resolution be set to 1280×720 and your FPS to 60 for a smooth stream.
The new option OBS Studio has added is the “Downscale Filter”. This is an extra quality option that will impact how sharp the image is that you output. The best option is Lanczos, but is also the more demanding in terms of your hardware. The performance differences should be minimal, but important to keep them in mind. We recommend going with the Bicubic option and only using the Lanczos if you have the hardware for it.
Hotkeys
This section is nice and simple because it behaves exactly the same as it does in OBS Classic. You can set different hotkeys for different actions within OBS for the ultimate “mouse free” experience.
The only major change to these settings is that you can add multiple keybindings for the same action!
Advanced
Similar to OBS Classic, don’t be overwhelmed with what you see! A lot of it is pretty straight forward or options you won’t need to mess with it.
Process Priority behaves the same way as it does with OBS Classic. It gives you the option to tell your computer that OBS should be given a higher or lower priority in terms of processing power (CPU). Note that setting it to a higher priority can negatively impact the games you are running.
Within the Video section, we recommend you leave everything at default.
“Audio Monitoring Device” allows you to select the device that the monitoring sound will be output to. We will cover how to use the Monitoring option later when we cover adjusting your sound levels.
Below that, the Recording section lets you adjust the naming format for the recording file that is created.
Continuing on, Stream delay is well, a delay you can put on your stream for a given amount of time. On most streaming platform there will be an inherit delay of anywhere between 5-30 seconds, but through this you can add to that delay if you would like.
Finally, you can setup an auto reconnect should your stream cut out at any moment.
To recap, here’s a list of the most important setting recommendations:
Stream
- Select the server located nearest to you.
Output
- Video Bitrate set between 3,000-6,000 kb/s
- Audio Bitrate set to 128
- Enable Advanced Encoder Settings checked
- Encoder Preset set to “veryfast”
Audio
- Your main audio device as Desktop Audio Device
- Your main Microphone input as the Mic/Auxiliary Audio Device
Video
- Base resolution set to your screen resolution
- Output resolution set to 1280×720
- Downscale filter set to Bicubic
- Common FPS value set to 60
Advanced
- Process Priorty set to Normal
Scenes and Overlays
The process overall is very similar to OBS Classic when it comes to setting up scenes and adding things to your sources. In fact, the process of adding a new Scene or Source is exactly the same, simply right click in the area or hit the + icon! You’ll also notice that as you add new scenes and sources that they are instantly available to preview, rather than needing to “Preview Stream” as you did with OBS Classic. Quickly hiding or showing different sources can be done by clicking the little eye icon to the left of the source’s name!
OBS Studio has also added an abundance of additional sources you can chose from. We’ll briefly go through each one of them below.
Audio Input Capture
You can select and add a specific Audio Input Device, for example a microphone, which will be active within this scene.
Audio Output Capture
Similar to the source above, this allows you to select a specific output device that will be active on the selected scene.
Browser Source
The Browser source is essentially taking the browser link that you enter and placing it on the stream. There are a lot of really cool things you can do with this that we will cover a bit later on in the article!
Display Capture
A nice a simple capture of a specific display/screen you have. Note that everything on that screen will be shown on stream if you use this source.
Game Capture
As it was with OBS Classic, you can specifically capture a game through this source. There are a few extra options that have been added with OBS Studio, namely the “Mode”.
Capture any fullscreen application: Anything that you are running at fullscreen (most likely the game you are playing) will be captured.
Capture a specific window: You will be most familiar with this option if you used Game Capture in OBS Classic. You can select a specific window to capture in the drop down right below Mode and it will only show that one to the stream.
Capture foreground window with hotkey: Set a hotkey (in the hotkeys setting) to display your most foreground window. This can allow you to quickly swap between different windows without changing scenes!Image
The same option that was present in OBS Classic and you will most likely use this source to setup an overlay.
Image Slide Show
A neat little source that allows you to add multiple images that change at a pace you set and with your preferred transition effects. This is awesome for rotating between different social media or information you want displayed.
Media Source
This allows you to capture different media, for example a video or audio clip that you want to show off to the stream.
Scene
Ever wanted to add an entire Scene inside of another Scene? Now you can because that is what this Source will do!
Text (GDI+)As with OBS Classic, this allows you to add text to your stream. The option “Read from file” is something we will cover later on when we go through some different personalization options!
Video Capture Device
The most likely use you will have for this source is to show off your beautiful face to your stream through a webcam!
Window Capture
Similar to how it was with OBS Classic, you can select a specific window you want to display to your stream.
Making Adjustments and Using Filters
With all those out of the way, adjusting the order the sources on a scene can be done by simply dragging them around or by using the arrows at the bottom of the source window. Remember that similar to OBS Studio, the order of the sources will decide which ones are “on top” of others.
Making adjustments in terms of sizes and cropping in OBS Studio is just as easy as it was in Classic. If you want to automatically fit a source to the screen, that wonderful “Control + F” hotkey will do that quickly, or you can right click on the Source, head down to transform, and manually click on “Fit to Screen”. If you want to move a source around, make sure it’s highlighted in the source list and simply drag it to where you want it to be placed. Similarly, if you want to adjust the overall size, select it in the source list, drag the corners, and adjust accordingly. Cropping can be done by holding down ALT and dragging the side that you want to crop.
Filters are a new addition to OBS Studio and allow you to do some cool things. To access the Filters, right click on your source and head down to filters. A new window will pop up and to access the list of filters, simply click on the + in the bottom.
Some sources, such as the media source displayed above, will have both Audio/Video filters as well as the effect filters. Simply click on the + icon to see the list and add a new filter, or press the – to remove one. Filters include more customization options such as enabling a Noise Gate (similar to OBS Classic), adjusting the Gain, setting up a video delay, adding a sharpening effect, crop/pad, and more. Explore the different options! Once you have them added, highlight them in the filter list and you will see the filter adjustment options appear to the right. OBS Studio has an awesome live preview section right next to the filter list so you can see what you are adjusting in real time.
Audio
There have been a few stellar audio changes made between OBS Classic and Studio. The one that you will quickly notice is the “Mixer” area with your different audio sources. OBS Studio has really streamlined the process of adjusting volumes for different outputs. If you have a media source for example, you can adjust that completely separately to all other audio right in the mixer without having to go into the source.
Adjust your volumes accordingly and make sure that your Mic/Aux audio volume is not drowned out by anything else!
Similar to how there were Filters for Sources, you will find Filters for the different audio sources by clicking on the cogwheel and going to Filters. In here you will find options for Gain, Noise Suppression, Noise Gate, and Compression that you can tweak to your liking.
In addition, you can press the cogwheel next to Mixer in order to open the Advanced Audio Properties window.
In here you can make more precise volume adjustments, pan your audio (which we do not recommend that you adjust), adjust the Sync Offset to add more or less delay to your audio, and turn on Audio Monitoring. Remember that setting in the Advanced tab that we said we would come back to? Well here it is! Audio Monitoring allows you to listen to the audio of a source and output that sound to the device you selected in the advanced tab. The three drop down items are explained below:
Monitor Off: Nothing is being monitored.
Monitor Only (mute output): Monitor the sound without outputting anything
Monitor and Output: Monitor the sound and output at the same time.The Main Window
Now it’s time to wrap up the transition to OBS Studio with a look back at the main window. To start with, you’ll see a familiar list of options on the lower right such as Start Streaming, Start Recording, Start Replay Buffer, Settings, and Exit. The one that you haven’t seen before is Studio Mode!
Enabling studio mode will split the main stream output area into two areas. The window on the right will be what is currently being output to the stream, while the left one is the preview of the scene you have selected.
This allows you to see what you are transitioning over to before you actually do it. In order to transition, all you need to do is hit the “Transition” button right in between the two windows. The preview window on the left will now become the live window on the right.
You’ll also notice the “Quick Transitions” option. Through this you can select a transition type when swapping scenes. By default only Fade and Cut will be enabled. If you want to have a few other options, go to the + icon in Scene Transitions and you can add a few more!
Play around with them and find one that you enjoy!
Moving into the toolbar at the top, you’ll find the quick navigation to your recordings folder under “File” and then going to “Show Recordings”. Similarly you will find a few of the option settings under Edit, most of which are covered above or are pretty straight forward!
Finally, under “Tools” you will find a few interesting options.
Automatic Scene Switcher
Referred to as Scene Switcher in OBS Classic, this tool functions in the same way. It allows you to automatically swap to a scene based on the window you have selected for a more “hands free” experience. To learn more about it, make sure you check out the first part of the guide!
Captions (Experimental)
As the tool itself mentions, this is currently an experimental feature. It automatically detects what you are saying through the Audio Source you have selected and outputs it as subtitles to your Current System Language.
Output Timer
These timer options allow you to set an automatic timer that stops your stream or a recording after a certain amount of time. Setup the desired amount and it will display the time left until the stream/recording is stopped below.
Extra Level of Customization
As an Open Source tool there are a lot of really smart and awesome people developing features for OBS Studio based on their own experience as streamers or requests from the streaming community. In fact, you can see different pull requests right here! Additionally, if you are looking for a bit more than what we cover below, visit the OBS forums and check out what people are talking about.
We are going to cover three different extras you can add to your stream. Timers/now playing using Snaz, new followers list, and setting up different alerts!
Snaz Timers and Now Playing
Snaz is a neat little program that allows you to display a variety of different text on your stream. Everything from showing current time, date, countdowns to specific times, countdowns, traditional timer, and playing now! In this guide we are going to show you how to use the tools available in the “Time, date, and countdown”, “Chrono’s”, and “Playing Now” sections!
Time, Date, and Countdown
Kicking it off, we’ll start with the first tab. The process for setting up all three of the options is the same, you will only need to change the link to the text file itself in OBS studio and change the formatting/timing in Snaz.
Let’s start by setting up a “Countdown to a specific time” timer. Adjust the output format to your preference and select the time you want the timer to countdown to and you should be ready to go! Hit the “Copy Patch to Clipboard” button and you now have the link that we will input to OBS. If the file patch isn’t showing up, sometimes you need to hit start for it to show up.
The Source “Text (GDI+)” is what will be used for setting up anything that Snaz uses. Head into OBS and create this source. When the window is open, make sure you tick the box “Read from file” and in the “Text File (UTF-8)” box, put in that link to the countdown timer. It should look something like this:
From here, adjust the front, color, opacity, and any of the other options available to you. In order to activate the timer itself, you need to hit “Start” button on snaz under the timer you are using (in this case Countdown to specific timer). Note that Snaz needs to be running while the countdown is. If you close it, the timer will disappear. You’ll immediately see a countdown start both in Snaz and on your stream preview! The final result should look something like this:
Pretty simple right? That’s the basics of setting up anything involving a timer on OBS. As mentioned before, the only things that need to be changed is the formatting, link to the file OBS will read in the text source, and the placement on stream. For each new timer you want running simultaneously, you will need to add a new text source.
Chrono’s
Chrono’s timers allow you to set a timer length that counts down or up from a starting point, rather than an ending point as the example above does.
Chrono down is simply a countdown that starts at the time you specify in the “Down from” box that will end with the message you include in the “Msg when done” area. As we did before, grab the file path and put it into the text source in OBS!
Additionally, you can use the Chrono Up to, for example, show how long you have been live for! You can even have the Chrono Up timer begin when the Chrono Down timer ends by ticking the box “Auto Start when Chrono Down ends”. Below you will find an example with a Chrono Up timer showing how long you’ve been live for (subject to your own formatting preferences of course):
Playing Now
Like to listen to music while you stream and want to show everyone what song is currently playing? This is the place for you then!
Firstly, make sure the player you use is supported by Snaz by checking the “Player:” list. From there, all you need to do is as always, adjust the format to your preferences and add the path to the text source of OBS!If everything works out, you should have something like the following on your preview:
Please keep in mind that some music is protected by copyright, which can lead to your VOD being muted/claimed on some streaming platforms.
List of New Followers
For both a list of new followers and alerts, we will be using tools provided by Streamlabs. All you need to do is link your twitch account when logging in and we are good to go!
To setup a new followers list, you want to visit the Event List Widget. From here, you will immediately see the Widget URL section that you will need to click in order to show. This is the link that you will add to a Browser Source within OBS.For now, let’s talk about the customization available. There are a number of themes available and for those of you that are familiar with CSS, you can even create your own! Select your preferred theme and theme color to start with. Note that there is a live preview directly above so you can see what you are changing as we go!
Next you will see the Enable Events options where you have a number of options. For followers you will of course want to check the box next to Followers. Select the max amount of events (followers on the list) that you want to appear, which we recommend anywhere between 3-6 depending on the overall size.
The rest of the options are up to your own preference, set the background color, text color, font, font size, animation for when a new event appears and goes away, speed the animation plays, and even flipping them!
Once you have the layout you want, press save changes and copy your “Widget URL”. This is a unique link to this widget that is linked to your account. So for example, if you gave this link to someone else, they would actually have your followers appear on their stream.
Under your sources on OBS, add a BrowserSource. Enter the Widget URL into the “URL” section to start with. Then set the width, height, and FPS to match your stream output values. CSS can remain as default as it was handled by the customizations you did on streamlabs.
Once that is all done, hit OK and you should have the list now appearing in your OBS like below:
Adjust size and positioning accordingly!
Alerts
As mentioned above, we’ll continue to use streamlabs to setup alerts! Head over to the Alertbox in the Widget list to get started.
Start by selecting what alerts you want from the available options at the top. For now, this example will stick to follows.
Similarly to how you did for your followers, you’ll find the Widget URL right below that you will need for the BrowserSource. Next head down into the specific settings for the alerts you enabled at the start. For this example, that means we are headed into the follows tab. Make sure that it’s first of all enabled. Again, from this point is a lot of your personal preference. Select your layout, alert animation in and out, the message template, and text animation.
Below that, you have the option of adding a customized image/animation as well as sound for each time the alert appears. Adjust the sound volume, duration, and text delay to your preference and the only thing left to do is open up the font settings and play around with those!
Hit “Save Settings” at the bottom, grab that Widget URL and stick it into a browser source just like we did for the follower list. To make sure everything is up and running, hit the “TEST FOLLOW” button at the top see how it looks on OBS!
With that, we hope these two guides provided you with enough base knowledge of streaming so you can start your path to becoming internet famous! We want to take the opportunity to reiterate that the best way to build up a loyal viewership base is to stick to a consistent schedule, interact with your chat, and most importantly, HAVE FUN.
Good luck and happy streaming!
A Guide to Streaming (part 1)
This article was originally posted at http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/1570820-A-Stream-Guide-to-Become-Internet-Famous-Part-1
A Guide to Streaming: Part 1
Streaming is quickly becoming a huge source of entertainment and a great way to build a community around and with others that share the same passion as you. Twitch boasts an impressive 9.7 million daily active users with over 2 million unique streamers per month and has established itself as a source of income for content creators and personalities. Streaming is home to lets plays, Esports, talk shows, creative streams, and much, much more. I has rapidly become the go to entertainment for many and with large companies such as Amazon and YouTube investing in it, the future is bright.
This stream guide is the first in a two part series that will help you set up your own stream with the correct settings and a basic layout. The streaming software we have chosen to cover in this article is Open Broadcast Software (OBS) Classic, which can be downloaded by following this link, as it is open source and available for free.
There is a range of other options when it comes to streaming, but we have chosen OBS as it is readily available and used by everyone from home-based amateurs to professional production studios.
You can find a recap of our most crucial setting recommendations at the bottom of this guide!
The End User and you
Accessibility. Let this be a mantra remaining at the forefront of your thoughts as you setup your stream. For the end user, this means having the ability to comfortably watch a stream at the quality you want. As the streamer, this means your stream is available to more people and potentially opening the flood gates of viewership numbers! They, your viewers, are the most important factor you need to consider. Putting together a stream that caters to both accessibility and quality is your ultimate goal.
Twitch has 5 different quality settings, starting with Source and followed in order by High, Medium, Low, and Mobile. Until recently, the option for the viewer to change the quality settings was unavailable on unpartnered streams. To improve accessibility site wide, Twitch is rolling out these options out to more and more streamers as they increase their capacity to do so. Twitch’s emphasis on accessibility is great news for smaller streamers that are just getting started!
Our first step towards a highly accessible streaming setup will be going through and (partially) understanding all the various features you’ll find in OBS, starting off with the settings. Everything covered here takes into consideration your viewers in order to provide the best quality to as many people as possible.
There’s going to be a lot of technical jargon going ahead, do not let that scare you away. After you’ve followed this guide and got your stream running you don’t need to worry about most of these things or grasp them at any deeper level.
Settings
General
Not a lot is going on in the General settings, but if you want to run OBS in a different language this is the place to be. You can also create profiles, ensuring that setting management between different users is easy.
Encoding
It’s time to jump into the fun stuff. To start things off we’ll take a look at the Encoding section. Firstly, make sure you have the x264 encoder selected. From here, check the boxes next to “Use CBR” and “Enable CBR padding”.
CBR stands for constant bitrate. By enabling these you are ensuring your stream will go out at the bitrate you specify. This results in a stream that has consistent quality that in many cases, is easier for your viewers to watch.
The other option is going for a variable bit rate by leaving “Use CBR” unchecked and using the “Quality Balance”. While this may be less strain on your bandwidth (the bit rate will drop when there is less movement happening), it can create a lot of bit rate spikes that may negatively impact the viewing experience. We recommend using the CBR options.
With that, it’s time to set your bit rate. Since we are using a CBR, the only value you need to adjust is the Max Bitrate (kb/s). This option is going to be determined by your upload speed. A general rule of thumb is to set this to 75% of your maximum upload speed. If you are unsure of what that is, you can use simple online tools such as http://www.speedtest.net/ to find out. That being said, if you have 100mb/s upload, you don’t want to set your Max Bitrate to 75,000 as there aren’t any platforms out there capable of handling that and very, very few viewers that would be able to watch it. With accessibility and quality for the end user in mind, we recommend you set your Max Bitrate anywhere between 3,000-3,500 kb/s if your upload speed is capable of handling that. Checking your “dropped frames” is usually the quickest way to see if your upload speed could be set to high. Dropped frames occur when your connection to the server you have selected (covered in the broadcast settings below) is unstable and is compensating by skipping video frames. From the viewer’s perspective, dropping frames causes the stream to stutter and freeze as the frames are skipped.
Audio Encoding is fairly straight forward. The only value you will want to adjust is the Bitrate, which recommend leaving on the default 128. All the settings can be found in the screenshot below!
Broadcast Settings
The broadcast settings will depend a lot on the platform you intend to stream on. Make sure your file mode is “Live Stream” and you select your relative streaming service. In most cases, you will need some sort of streaming key/path which you will need to retrieve from the streaming platform’s website.
This key/path is unique to your channel and is what allows you to select which channel you are broadcasting on. Once you have the key, enter it and you may see some warnings in red text at the bottom of the settings. Don’t panic, it’s a normal thing to have happen as different platforms have different requirements. Luckily, OBS has an awesome “Optimize” button that lets you change your settings to the optimal ones at the click of a button. It will even tell you exactly what is being changed just to be sure!
Next is the FMS URL. This is where you are sending your stream to, and in most cases it will be displayed as the physical location. As a general rule, it’s best to select the one closest to you. If you do encounter issues it will normally be either problems connecting all together or dropping frames as a result of the poor connection. If you are certain the connection is fine on your side, simply try the next closest server and so on until you find one that is stable!
There are other settings you can tweak here as well, such as auto-reconnect in case you do get disconnected as well as a local recording option. Make sure you select a file path where you have a good amount of space, your stream recordings can get huge!
Pro tip: you can quickly access your recordings folder by going to “File” on the main OBS window and selecting “Open Recordings Folder”. If you want to enable online archiving, make sure it is active on the streaming platform itself. Note that not all streaming services offer permanent archiving and some will remove them after a period of time.
Replay buffer is a feature similar to Nvidia’s Shadowplay. It allows you to capture a certain portion of recent gameplay, up to the length of time you specify in the “Replay Buffer Length (seconds)” option. This is a great alternative if you want to capture small aspects of your gameplay as it doesn’t save anything locally until you tell it to and has minimal performance impact compared to recording.
Video
Again, we’ll start this part of with a reminder about the end user. Higher numbers may sound nice, but it won’t always be watchable.
The video settings we will cover below, combined with the encoding settings we discussed above are the two areas where any adjustments will have the biggest impact on both the quality of your stream and how accessible it is to a wide range of viewers.
To start we need to look at screen resolutions. You can either enter the custom resolution of your screen or simply select the monitor, but keep in mind that the base resolution value has to match the size of your screen. Without any changes, this is what you will output to the stream, however there is a bit more to the story than that.
We’ve talked a lot about the end users but it’s also important to remember your hardware’s capabilities. Streaming is a CPU intensive process and the higher the resolution and FPS (frames per second) you set it to, the more strenuous it will be. Dedicating more CPU power to streaming can take away what is being used to run the game, causing it to perform worse while playing and as a result, look worse on stream. A 1920×1080 resolution stream will also require a higher bit rate to take advantage of the more crisp video quality. In many cases, a 1280×720 resolution stream running at 60fps will look better than one that runs at 1920×1080 at 30fps.
Therefore we recommend that you set the Resolution Downscale to 1.5 (1280×720) and FPS to 60. This will provide you with a smooth stream that is both more accessible to your viewers and less stressful on your CPU.
Audio
Within the audio settings we need to ensure the correct devices are selected before we adjust any volumes. Start by making sure you know what your default Playback and Recording Devices are.
Once you have identified the correct ones, set your “Desktop Audio Device” to your default playback device. In the same way, make sure your “Microphone/auxiliary Device” is your default recording device. These devices are now what OBS will use to output the sound from your computer and your microphone to the stream.
In most cases you will want to leave the “Force Microphone/Auxiliary to Mono” unchecked as it will force your recording device to only use a single channel.
Push-to-talk-Delay allows you to adjust the length of time after releasing your Push-to-talk that your mic is still active. Setting your Push-to-talk will be covered in Hotkeys below.
Desktop Boost and Mic/Aux Boost allow you to increase your volume further if necessary. It’s essentially a multiple, where 1 = 100%, so moving up to 2 means you are doubling boost volume (200%). Keep in mind that increasing the boost may cause distortion and we recommend you leave the boost value at 1 for the clearest sound. However, if you need to, take advantage of the options OBS has made available!
Hotkeys
Hotkeys are a useful tool for a single PC setup to quickly enable or disable certain aspects of your stream. The options you can hotkey are fairly straight forward.
Within audio you can set a push-to-talk key to make sure that your mic audio will only go through to the stream when it’s pressed. You can also set keys to mute/unmute all audio that comes from your Microphone and desktop (your PC) here in case you have some sudden and very loud background noise for example.
The broadcast area you can set up hotkeys that Start or Stop your stream, Start or Stop local recordings, or Start, Stop, Save, or Record your Replay Buffer. These are great tools so that you don’t have to leave your game, just make sure you they aren’t keys you regularly use in games or you will have an interesting experience to say the least!
In addition to these settings, you can also hotkey each of the “Scenes” you have set up so you can easily swap between them. Simply right click on them and select “Set Hotkey”.
Advanced tab
The advanced tab may look intimidating, but there are only a few key things you need to consider in these settings.
To start with, you want to make sure that “Use Multithreaded Optimizations” is checked and that the “Process Priority Class” is set to Normal. Increasing this will ensure that OBS will receive CPU priority over other programs, which can have negative effects on the games you are running.
The next element and the most important one in the Advanced Tab is the “x264 CPU Preset”. This is the encoding level and can be adjusted to increase/decrease quality without impacting the accessibility of your stream. The slower (lower down) you set it, the more demanding on your CPU streaming will be, however selecting a slower preset is one way of increasing quality if you have low upload speed. Keep in mind that it will drastically increase OBS’s CPU usage and sometimes slower presents can negatively impact your stream’s output.
We recommend using the “veryfast” preset if you have adequate upload speed. If you want to put a bit more stress on your CPU rather than your connection, we recommend not going lower than “fast”.
The majority of the other settings will have already been altered through the “Optimize” button we pressed in the broadcast settings above. You can manually edit them here as an alternative.
Please note that we are skipping Quick Sync Encoder as well as Browser because they are not relevant to this guide.
Microphone Noise Gate
Noise gates allows you to set a threshold for when your microphone is enabled and disabled. This essentially means you can control at what volumes your microphone is broadcasting sounds to the stream. This can be great if you are trying to isolate a few annoying background sounds while not having to fully mute your mic, however it can make your stream sound unnaturally quiet and strange at times as your mic enables and disables itself around your voice.
To set it up, firstly make sure it is enabled by checking the “Enable noise gate” box. Now you will see three time settings. These values by default are acceptable, however if you want to change them, this is what you will be altering:
- Attack Time: The amount of time it takes for your mic to go from off to on when reaching open threshold.
- Hold Time: How long the mic will stay open after it falls below the close threshold.
- Release Time: The amount of time it takes for your mic to go from off to on when going below close threshold.
Now it’s time to setup these actual thresholds. OBS has an awesome build in preview system you can take advantage of and then make adjustments in real time. Whenever your input level is below the Close threshold, it will be muted. You therefore want to adjust the levels to fit your setup. In the exact opposite way, whenever your input level goes over the Open threshold level you set, it will be unmuted. Adjust this accordingly and make sure that you don’t run into any awkward situations where you are talking, but no one can hear you!
Scene Switcher
This was previously a plugin that has now been introduced to the base level of OBS classic. This allows you to set it up so that when you select a certain window title (applications such as the game you are playing, browser, video file, etc) it will automatically swap to the Scene you have setup for an even more “hands free” streaming experience.
To set them up, start by going to the Window Tile drop down and selecting the appropriate window tile you want to setup with the Scene Switcher.
Then select which Scene you want it to automatically swap to in the drop down menu on the right and press Add!
In the area below you can set a hotkey to toggle Scene Switcher. Note that it is not enabled by default and will need to be activated. You also have the option to tick the box that says “Start at launch if possible”, however it’s always good to make sure that it is actually working so you don’t end up showing your browser instead of gameplay!
If you select a window title that is not setup in the Scene Switcher, you can use the “When no window title matches” and select the “switch to:” option to have it automatically swap to a specific Scene in the drop down.
Scenes and Sources
As we move on to the next section, you can go ahead and close the settings tab because we are done with that!
Firstly we want to explain exactly what a Scene and a Source is. A Scene is a collection of “sources” that will have different purposes during the broadcast, for example a gameplay, webcam, or idle scene. Sources are the different aspects you want displayed on the scene, such as the game window, webcam, and overlay. Think of sources like “props” in a theatre stage show, where the scene is – obviously – the scene/stage itself.
Whilst a theatre needs to pull the curtains or cleverly layer their props to switch between scenes, a streamer has the privilege to set them all up in advance and change with a simple button press!
To setup the basics, we will make sure we have a working webcam, idle screen, and a simple overlay.
Webcam
Start by right clicking in the Scenes space and pressing add scene. From there you will be asked to enter a name. We’ll start by setting up a webcam scene, so name it appropriately. Once created it should look like this:
Now you will need to add the source for the webcam to the scene. Similarly, right click in the Source area and add a “Video Capture Device”. You then also have the option to name it something. Once named an options window should now be open. In here you can select the relevant options for your webcam. It’s important to make sure that the “Audio Input Device:” is disabled in the drop down menu. You can also configure your webcam’s resolution either through the Video options on the left side or by pressing configure and changing them in your webcam’s drivers.
To test if everything is working accordingly, you can go back to OBS and press “Preview Stream”.
Since this scene is just a full screen webcam, the most important thing will be to make sure that the webcam is filling the entire window. If it looks like the screenshot above, you can either use the short cut “Ctrl+F” or right click on the Source, then go to Position/Size and from there select Fit to Screen. Should you ever need to change anything with the webcam’s settings, you can right click on the Source you set up and Select Properties.
Idle/afk Scene
Next we’ll setup an Idle/AFK scene in case you need to briefly step away from the PC. In the exact same way we did for the webcam, right click in the Scene area and create a new Scene with an appropriate idle/AFK name.
Once that is done, right click in the Source area and select Image. A new window will pop up and the most important thing on this page is the Browse button. The Design of the Idle/AFK image is up to you, however make sure that it’s the same resolution you are streaming at, which if you followed the above recommendation means 1280 x 720.
Once added, you can again select Preview Stream to see how it looks. If it doesn’t fit the window, press “Ctrl+F” or right click on the Source, then go to Position/Size and from there select Fit to Screen as we did above (this will come up a few more times). Again, if you want to change the image you can right click on the Source and Select Properties.
Gameplay Scene
Finally we will cover the most important Scene of all, the gameplay one. Start by doing the same thing we did above, right click in the Scene area and creating a new one with an appropriate name.
For this we are going to setup a gameplay stream that has an overlay, webcam, and the game. Since we are dealing with multiple Sources now, it’s important to understand that the priority system OBS has. Within Sources, the one that will always be visually on top of everything is the one at the top of the list. This means that generally you will want the gameplay to be at the bottom so that the overlay and webcam will be placed on top of it.
We’ll start with how we will capture the game. There are a two options here, you can either use the Game Capture or Monitor Capture. Game Capture allows you to only capture a specific game, however you will need to add a unique Source for each game that you want OBS to capture. To do so, right click in the Source area and select Game Capture. Once in the settings for it, you can select the specific game you would like to capture. The only option which you should have ticked here is “Capture mouse cursor”.
Alternatively, you can use Monitor Capture. In the same way as the Game Capture, right click the Source area and select Monitor Capture. You can then select which monitor to capture. Keep in mind that if you use Monitor Capture viewers will be able to see exact what is going on within the monitor you selected. Again, make sure that “Capture mouse cursor” is ticked.
Once that is setup, test it out to see if the Scene is working through Preview Stream and if necessary, use “Ctrl+F” or right click on the Source, then go to Position/Size and from there select Fit to Screen.
Next we will setup an overlay image. Make sure that it is above the Monitor/Game Capture in the Source list to start with. The styling of it is again completely up to you, however there are a few important things to remember.
If you are making your own, make sure the background is transparent (save as Transparent PNG in Photoshop) and is made in the resolution you are outputting (1280 x 720 if you are following our recommendation). If the background isn’t transparent or empty, you will end up with an image that covers the gameplay since the overlay image will be above the gameplay in the Source list. Below you will find an example of a very minimalistic overlay. Please note that normally the image is transparent but has been filled in with a black background so the overlay can be clearly seen (white overlay on a white background might be difficult to see).
Make sure that it is fit to the screen (“Ctrl+F” or right click on the Source, then go to Position/Size and from there select Fit to Screen) and use Preview Stream to see how it looks!
Finally, let’s setup the webcam Source. Firstly, make sure that you have it at the top of the Source list. Use the instructions that are described in the Webcam Scene to create a webcam Source within the gameplay Scene. Once in there, you will need to edit the size to fit the area. You can do so by selecting Preview Stream (so you can see what you are changing), highlighting the Source, and then press Edit Scene.
The Source you have selected should now be outlined with a red box which signifies that you can adjust its size. If you want to crop the webcam (or any Source for that matter) to further adjust the size, you can do so by holding alt and adjusting the size as you did before. This will cut off that portion of the webcam source!
A lot of this will come down to personal preference and styling, however we recommend that you try to keep as little on the screen as possible and have the gameplay screen be focused on the game itself!
Volume Adjustments
With a single PC setup, adjusting volumes is fairly straight forward. You can use the red microphone and speaker volume settings on the main page of OBS.
Lowering/increasing these will only change the volume that is output to the stream, so it’s best to adjust the volume you want to hear and then adjust OBS accordingly. For easy testing you can use the Recording Feature to play back how it sounds. Make sure that your voice is never drowned out by the game!
To recap, you’ll find the most crucial setting recommendations below!
Encoding
- Encoder set to x264
- “Use CBR” checked
- “Enabled CBR padding” checked
- Max Bitrate set between 3,000-3,500 kb/s
- Audio encoding Bitrate set to default 128
Broadcast Settings
- Use the optimize button for the platform’s appropriate settings
- FMS URL set to the nearest physical location
Video
- Native screen or custom resolution set in the Base Resolution. Use the Resolution Downscale to output the stream at 1280×720
- 60 fps
Audio
- Default window capture devices selected
- Leave “Force Microphone/Auxiliary to mono” unchecked
- Keep the Mic/Aux Boost at 1 for the clearest sound
Advanced
- “Use Multithreaded Optimizations” box checked
- Process Priority Class set to “Normal”
- x264 CPU preset at “veryfast”
You should be all set to kick off a stream now so we’ll leave you with a few final words. Try to stick to a consistent schedule if you’re looking to acquire a loyal base of followers, and remember to always have fun. A schedule will increase the retention of your viewers as they will know when you are streaming, and well, having fun should be self-explanatory. If you aren’t enjoying it, it will be hard for those watching to do so as well!
In the second part, we’ll cover a few extra tools and addons you may want to include in your stream!
Good luck and happy streaming!
