- Going live on YouTube these days
really isn't as complicated as you would think.
- [Man] vidIQ.
- [Woman] vidIQ.
- [Man] vidIQ.com
(funky music)
- So in this video, we're gonna discuss a few things.
I'm gonna go over hardware that you need to stream.
I'm going to go over software that you need to stream,
and I will also show you how to set up your broadcast
within YouTube itself.
Hello, I'm Dan, and welcome back to vidIQ.
We are the YouTube tool academy and channel
that help to educate you along your YouTube journey.
Now as always with me,
I like to give things a gaming focus,
so I am going to be using video games as an example,
but in this case,
all of this advice
should apply to any type of YouTube channel
looking to learn how to livestream.
Since we're on the subject today of livestreams,
I wanna know from you,
how often do you watch streams on YouTube?
I know I myself watch a lot more videos than livestreams,
but how about you, what are your viewing habits?
(funky music)
Streaming these days has gotten a lot easier
when it comes to the hardware you're going to need to do so.
Instead of making an hour long video of about
exactly what would give you the best quality stream
for the best price,
I'm going to explain to you what I'm using to stream
from my own computer when I play games,
and hopefully that gives you a good base line
as to what you could be doing.
More importantly than what I'm already using though,
is going to be your internet.
This is going to be the biggest bottleneck
that you're going to face while livestreaming.
Internet is so important because in some areas of the world,
you just can't control what kind of speed you're gonna get
when you sign up for your internet plan.
The best thing I can recommend
is no less than five megabits per second upload
when you're trying to stream on YouTube.
Personally, I have 10 megabits per second
for my upload speed,
and it allows me to push a better quality livestream.
Five is of course just my personal recommendation,
I think any less,
and you're going to struggle when it comes to quality.
As for the type of computer you need to play a game
and then livestream it at the same time,
I have a GTX 1060, three gigabyte.
I have 16 gigabytes of RAM,
and I'm using an older AMD Ryzen 7 processor.
These items allow me to stream
with 10 megabits per second upload.
I can play Minecraft at 1080p with 30 frames a second,
or I can play it at 720p with 60 frames a second.
If I try to push it any higher than that,
the game performance drops,
the stream quality drops,
and it's just not a good situation.
The bottom line is that hardware just gets really tricky,
but with software coming as far along as it has lately,
it may not be so bad if you have a lesser computer,
and going into software, I'll explain why.
(funky music)
When we talk about software for livestreaming,
we're actually speaking of encoders.
Anything you've used to livestream is an encoder,
and I'm gonna be teaching you with Streamlabs OBS.
There are a lot of encoders out there,
and if you check the link in the description below,
it actually goes to YouTube's own page
that has all these encoders it recommends,
some of them free, some of them not,
and I would recommend you check it out.
Thanks to how powerful these encoders have gotten,
using something like Streamlabs OBS
allows you to stream a game on your computer
at a much higher quality than ever before,
using a computer that doesn't have to break the bank.
Before we dive in head first,
I will warn you this set-up can get very technical,
and I'm gonna cover it very briefly,
and in the most basic way possible,
just to get you started.
All of the things I'm showing you
are going to depend on you,
at the end of the day,
running test streams on your own channel,
maybe even getting feedback from viewers
on different testing streams you do,
and then, going from there.
Really quick, we'll jump over to Streamlabs,
and I'll show you how to get it set up.
So once you have Streamlabs OBS opened up,
go to the bottom left, click this little arrow here.
It's log in, and you wanna log into your YouTube channel.
Follow all the prompts
to connect your YouTube channel to Streamlabs.
I don't need to log in, so I'm gonna hit skip for now,
and we'll come back to this main window.
Let's get something on the screen here
so you guys can have some context.
Right now, if we went live, this is what people would see.
So I'm gonna go down to sources,
I'm gonna click the add button here
and I'm going to add a game capture.
Click game capture and hit add source.
Let's call it Minecraft, hit add source,
and it's actually going to look for a game
to capture on your system.
Now, Minecraft is on in the background,
but it seems to be having trouble finding it,
which happens, so we'll hit the drop down.
I'm going to capture a specific window,
and that specific window is going to be Minecraft 1.15.2.
Once we click it and hit done, Minecraft should pop up,
and you'll notice it's actually being cut off significantly.
So you may want to adjust that.
I have a 4K monitor and this window is 1920x1080.
So just go ahead and adjust the screen
so it fills out perfectly,
there's no black bars showing or anything like that.
And now, we have Minecraft.
And this is what people will see when they jump in.
Now that our viewers have something to see,
I'm going to very briefly go over
some of the more technical aspects of livestreaming.
Bottom left, hit the settings cog,
and let's start by hitting stream.
If you didn't log into YouTube,
you'll need to go grab your stream key,
and I'll show you where this is in a moment.
But you already logged into YouTube hopefully,
so none of this window will matter to you,
or even look the same.
If we visit the output section, we can choose our encoder.
So right now, it's set to software x264,
this is going to use my CPU to do all of my encoding for me,
but if you want,
you can change it to NVENC or the new version of that.
This uses your graphics card to encode.
Depending on what you're doing,
the game you're playing,
or the broadcast, the type of broadcast you're having,
this will vary,
and you know your broadcast better than I do.
Personally, I prefer using NVENC when I'm streaming,
so I'm gonna go ahead and select that.
And I'm gonna do a bit rate of about 5,000
because I already kinda know my system,
and I know I can handle that.
Like I said before,
this is going to take testing on your part,
so maybe 2,500 is a good place for you to start,
and you can go from there.
For the sake of not getting too technical,
I'm gonna move on to the video tab.
You'll notice the base canvas resolution is 1920x1080.
I would leave it at that.
I don't wanna change that.
That's gonna be the size of this window right here.
And I did already have to resize Minecraft.
In theory,
I should probably raise the base canvas resolution,
but that's okay.
I just got this 4K monitor,
and I don't feel like re-sizing all my different elements
that I have on my normal livestream,
so I'm gonna leave it at 1080,
but the output scale
is what's going to directly impact your broadcast,
and I'm broadcasting at 720.
These days, when people watch livestreams,
they watch them on a variety of devices,
including phones and laptops.
So this screen being a little more compact,
being squashed down to 720,
is probably gonna give you a higher quality livestream
at little to no impact on the viewer.
And if you lower that resolution,
it's going to get you closer
to being able to stream at 60 frames a second,
which will impact everybody who's watching,
regardless if it's a nice, big TV or a phone.
So because I like high frame rates when I'm playing games,
I'm going to leave it at 720,
but if you have a super awesome computer,
maybe you can try 1080 at 60 frames.
That's all up to you.
The last recommended setting I'm gonna give you
is under advanced.
You can scroll down and find
dynamically change bitrate
when dropping frames while streaming.
A dropped frame is basically when
the stream can't really keep up
and starts skipping those frames.
You just got a nice 60 frame stream going,
but now, they're being dropped little by little.
So if the software detects that,
it will change your bitrate to keep up.
So this might take
some of the sharpness away from the image,
but the frame rate will stay high,
which is what you want.
To save your changes,
go ahead and click done.
And from there,
you should be ready to click go live,
but there's one more thing we need to do,
and that's set it up on the YouTube end.
(upbeat electronic music)
Setting up a live broadcast
is a lot like setting up a regular video.
You still need an impactful title,
a good description, some tags,
and a good thumbnail.
Let's jump in.
So as you're in the YouTube Studio,
go up to create,
and then, hit go live.
If you've already streamed before,
you're going to need a prompt
that tells you that you can copy all the settings,
the thumbnail, the description, everything,
from a previous stream,
or you can go ahead and set up a new stream.
So I've gone ahead and clicked new stream,
and now, I'm going to set up everything I need
for the livestream.
I can put a title in.
So it's going to be, let's say, "Minecraft LIVE!"
Don't make that your title.
That's very basic.
You can set it to private, public, unlisted,
just like a normal video.
If you want it to be private for a bit
just so you can keep tweaking the description and stuff,
go ahead and do that,
but if you want people to know
that you're gonna stream at some point,
go ahead and make it public.
And then, just go in and fill all this out
like you would for any other video.
Add a description.
Add a title for your game,
that's really important to help categorize you
for the game itself.
So if you are playing Minecraft,
then start typing it.
There you go, Minecraft from 2009.
Click that, it'll fill it in,
and now, you will be categorized under Minecraft
while you're live.
These obviously come up
because I'm under the gaming option,
but if we did something such as howto and style,
that goes away
because those are not categorized the same way as games.
From there,
you're gonna wanna come down and schedule for later.
I would highly recommend this.
A livestream is an event,
and you want people to know when it's going to happen.
So scheduling for later
will allow you to set the date and the time
that you're gonna go live,
and everyone will know exactly when to come to your stream.
And then, of course,
uploading a custom thumbnail is always crazy important,
no matter if it's a video or a livestream.
You want that thumbnail to be clickable because,
just like anything,
people are going to see it,
and they're going to judge a book by its cover,
and if that cover's clickable,
they're going to click on it.
Make sure you go into detail about COPPA here,
if the video is made for kids or if it's not.
Select what's appropriate.
And if you want to restrict it
for viewers that are 18 or over,
this will basically tell people before they come in,
"Hey, just so you know, this stream might be pretty crass.
"So if you're under 18, go away.
"Don't watch."
Now, I'm not actually doing this livestream,
so I'm not going to make this public or anything like that,
but you'd want to hit create stream
once all that's filled out.
Once you've created the stream,
you'll get this dashboard,
and the dashboard will come to life while you're live.
You can keep this dashboard on while you stream.
You can pop out the chat and watch it.
All that stuff is kinda done through Streamlabs too,
your viewer count and your chat are in Streamlabs,
so you don't necessarily need to pop this out.
It's kinda up to you
if you wanna watch this stuff as you're streaming.
But the thing we can pay attention to right now
is all of this information down in the bottom left.
Basically, what normal latency does
is it takes the broadcast and it renders a bit,
buffers it a little bit,
for the audience.
They're gonna get a higher quality broadcast,
but they're also gonna see a higher delay
based on when their chat message goes out
and the time you read it
and maybe say it out loud and answer their question.
So people will kind of pick up on that.
Doing low-latency or ultra low-latency
will cut down on that buffering time,
but you risk
the quality of your stream being lower, obviously,
because there's not enough time
for that buffer to kinda build up.
Because you've already logged into YouTube on Streamlabs,
you shouldn't need to worry about this,
but if you're using a different encoder,
not Streamlabs OBS,
you will need to grab the stream key,
and like it says, paste it into your encoder,
in that section in Streamlabs that we saw earlier.
Sharing your stream key will, of course,
let people take over your channel
and stream whatever they want on it,
and you probably don't want that.
After you're done streaming,
you can go ahead and come back to this page
and check out the analytics,
your viewer activity,
your stream health.
Do all of that data analysis that you would normally do
after you upload a video.
We're not gonna worry about
any of this right now, of course,
because we're gonna be talking about streaming strategies
in a future video.
To edit the tags on your livestream,
you can actually go back through the Dashboard,
click the live tab,
and then, go your new broadcast.
Click on the pencil,
and you'll notice this is almost exactly what it looks like
when you upload a video to YouTube and go to edit it.
Scroll down, and you have a tag section.
you can even add your livestream to a playlist from here.
Whether you play video games, go fishing, do a daily vlog,
I hope that this video was helpful to you
for setting up your first YouTube livestream.
Don't forget to subscribe
because I have more videos on livestreams coming very soon,
including one about when to do one.
Thank you so much for watching.
I'll look forward to seeing you in the next one.
Have a great day.