What's up guys, welcome back to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel. Today we
are going to be talking about the big news that hit last week that is that
Streamlabs, who developed some of the software that we've covered on this
channel such as the stream labels, the alert software that we've covered, they
have announced that they're releasing their own broadcasting software similar
to OBS and they called it Streamlabs OBS or SLOBS for short. It aims to combine
all of the streaming windows that you usually have open like your video
preview, your chat, your alerts all of these into one application and
supposedly it's got better video quality and lower CPU usage. In this video we're
going to be checking out some of the new features that SLOBS brings to the table,
some things we haven't seen in streaming applications before. We'll also be going
over some of the limitations and current bugs as well as looking at the
development roadmap to see what's coming in the future. So let's dive in!
So before we jump headfirst into the software it's worth quickly talking
about the differences and the relationship between OBS and Streamlabs
OBS, because there's some confusion in the name and some people were saying on
Twitter that they're affiliated with each other which isn't true but first we
have to discuss that OBS is an open source project and what that means is
that anybody could contribute to the codebase for OBS. If you had any
knowledge of C or C++ you could look at the codebase for OBS make changes to it
and then you can either keep those changes to yourself or as most people
did submit pull requests to the OBS team, they can check out what changes you've
done and if they're good enough and they approve of them then they'll make it
into the OBS software. So what Streamlabs have done is they have taken this
core OBS software and they have made loads of changes both to the UI as well
as adding some new functionality and they have released their version. So it still
has the core OBS functionality but they have made quite a lot of changes and
part of the OBS open-source license means that Streamlabs is also free, it's
also open source, so anybody can look at the codebase and anyone can submit code
changes or make changes and keep them for themselves. So I just wanted to echo
that they aren't developed by the same set of people, SLOBS is a fork of OBS so
it still has a lot of the same functionality but I imagine as these
projects grow they're going to be growing further and further apart. Enough
techno waffle, let's jump into the software! I've included a link in the
description of this video of where you need to go to download slobs but it is
worth mentioning that this video won't be a full set up and stream guide for
SLOBS, I'm going to be looking more at the features and some of the pros and
cons of the software and obviously if there's enough interest in a separate
tutorial series for SLOBS, I'll be creating that as well. So one of the
features that slobs mentions on the website is that it has a 60-second setup
and I've got to say this is one of the best onboarding experiences I've
ever had, especially within streaming software. They've managed to massively
simplify the setup process so all you really have to do is; firstly connect
your Twitch or YouTube account with SLOBS and authorize the application. Next
you'll have the option to import scenes and sources from our existing OBS
installation, so this is particularly handy if you've already got things set
up exactly as you want within OBS. Next they're giving you the option
to add what they're calling widgets to your stream so these are things like:
follower, subscriber, donation alerts, tip jars, chat boxes basically all of the
software that they used to have on the Streamlabs website, these are now called
widgets within SLOBS and you can add them here but you can also add them
later super easily so I'm just gonna skip this step. Finally you'll get to the
optimize screen which in my opinion is an absolute godsend, since it's by far
the most common thing that I get asked on my YouTube channel: What
bitrate should I stream at? What resolution should I stream at? What FPS?
Which server should I stream to? I get these questions all the time and this
optimize screen aims to take all of that guesswork out of it. It runs a
wizard which analyzes your internet connection and your computer hardware,
and then optimizes your settings so that they are suited to the exact setup and
connection that you have. Obviously this might not get your settings bang-on
perfect and it doesn't really do a long enough connection test to truly measure
your connection stability, but for the purpose of this video I think it'll do
just fine. Once it's finished you should see your main streaming window which
they've called Editor and it will look pretty familiar to what OBS looks like,
so if you're an OBS user it should all look pretty familiar. Now I found that
some of my OBS scenes may have imported slightly strangely, you know some things
just positioned wrong and I'm sure this is just a minor bug that they will be
fixing relatively quickly but it doesn't really take to long for me to go back in
and just reposition the odd source. One really great edition that Streamlabs
have brought in is found when you add a new source. To demonstrate this I'll
quickly remove my old alert source and then add it back in as a widget. Now this
might not seem like a big difference but in my opinion this new window will
massively help new streamers to understand what it is they're trying to
add. Clicking through any of the sources or widgets here shows a detailed
description and an image illustrating the type of sources that you have
selected. I'm just going to be re-adding the alert box back in. Now another
feature that Streamlabs have added in is the ability to test your alerts right
from within Streamlabs OBS. All you have to do is click this little test widgets
button and then choose the type of alert you wish to test. If you want to edit any
of those alerts all you have to do is go across to the Dashboard tab and you
should see that this is the exact same as the Streamlabs website dashboard,
you can then go down to the widget you want to edit and play around with the
text, the color, the size, the gif, the sounds, all of those settings there. If
you want more details on editing these alerts my video on Streamlabs alerts is
still pretty relevant which I'll link to in the top right YouTube card. The next
window we'll look at is the Library window, this is going to help so many new
streamers. I think one of the toughest things about starting a stream is
getting a good looking overlay and everything in position and this is a
library of supposedly 3000 different overlays and stream designs that you can
import for free. I believe currently there are only about
240 overlays available but they are constantly adding more. Down the
left-hand side you can filter them by color, whether you want an animated or
static overlay or even by which genre of game you are playing. If you find one you
like the look of you can click on it and view all of the different aspects of the
overlay that come included. Most of them come at least with a live scene a stream
starting scene and a be right back scene. Just click install overlay to add
it into your editors scenes. It will download and it should take you straight
into the editor. Everything is already set up: recent followers will show here,
chat will show here, everything is already set up, all you have to do is go
down to the background image, delete it, add your game capture instead, make sure
that's the bottom layer and you're ready to go live. Everything is set up. I can't
really emphasize how much time I think that's going to save new streamers that
just want to dive in and get going with streaming. Note that all of your
collection scenes are shown if you click this little drop-down arrow here, so if
you want to get back to one of the ones that you imported from OBS, you just
click the arrow here and select that one. The final and maybe the most important
window is the Live window. Now this is what they're talking about when they say
that you can have an all-in-one application, but before we even start to
admire it, let's make sure that we are seeing it in its full glory, click this
little arrow to show your stream chat on the right hand side and obviously if you
prefer this to be on the left hand side you can change that in the settings. Now
just look at all the info that you get in this window, this is the window that
you should have open on a second monitor if possible when you are streaming. It
shows all of your recent events like new followers, subscribers, donations with
easy options to skip alerts if you need to. It allows you to control which scene
is displaying on stream as well as all the sound control
so you can easily mute your mic or change the music volume as well as
showing you a stream preview of what's broadcasting live. It also shows you your
live stream chat, how many viewers you have and allows you to edit your stream
info all from one window. This, Streamlabs claims, helps save significant CPU
and RAM since it combines loads of windows that you used to have to have
open in different applications, all into one application. So you won't have to
have your browser open as well as all those other applications to monitor chat
and alerts. The last feature that we're going to be covering is what Streamlabs
is claiming is up to two times better video encoding, which i think is quite a
claim and maybe not entirely true but they have definitely made improvements.
Streamlabs have released a blog post detailing what exactly they mean by this
and it does look super interesting. They've apparently hired a whole team of
video encoding engineers who have been running tests on a subset of games to
see what combinations of settings in x264 video encoder give the best quality
results in the end. This means that they are able to tweak your encoder settings
based on the game that you are playing, to squeeze every bit of quality that
they come from the bitrate chosen. Now right now they say that they have
settings but only a few selected games: League of Legends, Dota 2, Destiny 2,
Fortnight and PUBG and it's important to note that this is only currently for
the x264 codec so you'll see no improvements for the NVENC from Nvidia
or the AMD codecs although these are planned for a future release. I plan on
doing a deeper and much nerdier dive into this technology and actually
comparing measureable results between OBS and Streamlabs OBS in a future
video, I actually wrote my university thesis on quality improvements in the x264
codec, so maybe this is only interesting to me, I'm not sure, let me know if you'd
like a more detailed video maybe I can get one of the Streamlabs engineers in
to tell us more about it. But for now I think it's a super exciting exercise and
one that I know Netflix and Amazon and other video based companies have had
lots of success with so it's great that they're doing it in the gaming space and
I'm really excited to see how this improves. So that's just a handful of
some of the cool improvements that Streamlabs OBS have integrated into
their software. Obviously the software is new and it's just in beta
so there are some limitations and there are some bugs that are present in the
software at the moment, one of which is that currently the Streamlabs OBS is
only available for Windows and it's only available for 64-bit systems and I
know that they're having some trouble with Windows 7. This is a bug tracker
that Streamlabs have set up, I've linked to it down in the description below this
video so you can have a look exactly at some of the bugs that have been reported.
Right now as I'm recording this video, I know that they're having some issues
with YouTube chat, some issues with local recordings and some people importing
scenes from OBS are having some crashes to do with that but these are all being
investigated and the bugs are getting squashed every single day at an alarmingly
quick rate. They also have links to their discord where you can report new bugs
if you find them. Another thing you might want to look at is the roadmap, again
I've linked to this down in the description below this video, this is
basically a Streamlabs OBS current priorities of what the developers are
working on. You can see that some of the priorities at the moment are fixing a lot
of the issues that people are facing, but they're also building in some key
features like Elgato stream deck, they want to do something to do with face
masks so you can connect them to alerts so when somebody subscribes a mask gets
put on your face, things like that. They're also adding more overlays all the time.
And some future features they want to add studio mode back in which currently
isn't supported, they want to add their chat bot integrated and they want to
have a performance mode so that it doesn't impact as much when you're
streaming. Thanks so much for watching this quick first look at Streamlabs OBS,
I'm going to be creating plenty more videos on the software as well as
comparison videos between Streamlabs OBS and OBS, I think I'm gonna have to
start calling it SLOBS because Streamlabs OBS just takes too long to say, but yeah
thanks very much for watching, let me know down in the description if you've
tried it out and what you thought, and subscribers, I'll see you in the next video, Peace!