Do you want to live stream your security camera feeds to Facebook,
YouTube, Twitch, or anywhere else? Well you can. Whether you have an IP security camera or even an
analog system, in today's video we're going to show you how you can live stream
your security camera feeds using the free open source broadcasting software, OBS.
A couple of months ago, we started a brand new private Facebook group for our dealers. On that
page, we've been streaming various cameras around our offices via Facebook Live. We've gotten a lot
of great feedback from that. I know people are really enjoying it. But we've also gotten a lot
of questions on how we are doing that. Well it's actually pretty easy, and in today's video I'm
going to show you three different methods for live streaming your security cameras via OBS. You can
get started streaming your cameras right away with very little set up, and here is everything
that you're going to need. First and foremost, you're going to need a security camera. Now you
probably already have this. If you don't, then why are you even watching this video? It doesn't
really matter if your camera is IP or Analog. Just keep in mind the type of your camera when we get
to the three different methods. Next, you will need a computer with an Internet connection and
relatively fast upload speeds. Now the minimum upload speed here is going to be around 3 or 4
Mbps depending on the platform that you're going to be streaming on. But the faster the upload
speeds the better. Next you're going to need OBS installed on that computer. Now OBS stands for
Open Broadcaster Software, and it's pretty much the standard for streamers everywhere. It's simple
to use, it's got a ton of features, and best of all it is totally free. So click the link
in the description and go ahead and download OBS onto your computer. Next, depending on the method
that you use to stream your cameras, you are going to need a couple of additional items. You're going
to need either your IP camera's RTSP address, or you're going to need an Internet browser,
and for the third option you're going to need a video recorder and an HDMI capture card.
So how do you know which method is best for you? Well, let's find out. Like I've already mentioned,
we're going to show you three different ways to live stream your cameras. The
first way is a direct live stream straight from your camera using the RTSP address.
The second option is going to be screen recording your camera with a web browser,
and the third option is going to be streaming your recorder feeds with an HDMI capture card.
First, let's talk about your RTSP address. This is probably the simplest method that
is going to get you up and running in no time. RTSP stands for Real-Time Streaming Protocol.
And what this protocol does is, it allows your security camera to communicate with
third party devices and applications and servers. In our case, the third party is
going to be OBS. And it's just a really simple and seamless way to stream your cameras. It's fast,
it's easy to set up, and you don't need any additional hardware. There's no middle-man,
it's just your security camera and OBS. But there are a few drawbacks to this method. First,
the RTSP feed really isn't that stable, and so you might experience some lag,
especially if you're streaming at the mainstream, if it's like a 4K camera with high FPS, you're
gonna experience some lag and some low latency, and you might have some other video issues.
Furthermore, this method only works with IP cameras. If you have an analog camera, there
is no way for you to get an RTSP feed straight from the camera without going through a DVR.
The last drawback here is that you're only streaming raw feeds directly from the camera.
So if you have any intelligent events or any kind of markers on the screen, you're not going to be
able to see that through the RTSP feeds. The next method is also really simple. This involves just
pulling up your web browser on your computer, typing in the IP address, and getting the live
view, then simply just capturing your screen or that particular window and streaming that. This
is another really easy method and it's a good way for you to show off intelligent markers if
you have something on the screen like Uniview's deep learning cameras, for instance. But this
does take up more real estate on your computer. You won't really be able to use your computer if
you are rerecording the full screen. But this could work if you just have a PC that is fully
dedicated to your security cameras. If you wanted to pull this up and set it there for a while,
you totally could. And the last method is going to be streaming with an HDMI capture card. An HDMI
capture card is simply a device that connects to you r computer and allows you to run an HDMI input
directly into OBS. There are lots of options for this on the market, ranging from
20 bucks to a couple hundred bucks. The one I'm using back here is a Hauppauge HDMI device.
We also have an Elgato capture card floating around here. We use these quite a bit here for
recording NVR interfaces, taking screenshots for blog posts. Since we already have these on hand,
we do use them often for live streaming. With this you can use either an IP camera or an analog
camera as long as it's connected to a DVR with an HDMI output, and it doesn't take up extra real
estate on your computer because the streaming is coming from the NVR. Once you've picked the method
that you're going to use, we're ready to jump onto the computer and get OBS set up and ready to go.
So once you click the link in the description below and download OBS,
it will take you through a startup wizard that will help you adjust some of the settings based
on what you're going to be doing with OBS. This is not a full OBS tutorial;
there are plenty of resources all over the Internet if you want to get a more full grasp
on what this program can do. But just to get you up to speed. If you've never opened OBS before,
this screen right here in the middle is the monitor. It's going to show us whatever is being
streamed or recorded. Right now this is black because we don't have any sources. Which brings
us down here to this panel, which is the sources panel. If we click the plus button, this going to
let us add a ton of different sources depending on what we want to be streaming or recording.
Alright, in settings, first let's jump down in here to the video tab. And you can see that we
have our base canvas and our output resolution, as well as our frame rate down here. So right now we
have the base resolution as 1920 x 1080. However I know a lot of times we have security cameras
that are above this 1080p resolution. Personally, I don't recommend streaming higher than a 1080p
resolution, simply because most platforms are going to reduce the video quality anyway during
a live stream. Plus, the higher the resolution, the lower quality the stream is going to be,
especially if you have lower upload speeds. So I'm going to leave this
base canvas resolution as 1920 x 1080, and the output resolution right now is also 1920 x 1080.
If you have lower Internet speeds, you can reduce this to something like 1280 x 720, and what that's
going to do is take your 1080p video and stream it at a lower resolution. Again, the lower the
resolution the higher quality your stream is going to be, the less lag you're going to have.
So unless you have really good upload speeds I recommend switching this down to 1280 x 720.
Now we have our frame rate down here. This pretty much is going to depend on
the frame rate of your camera. You can choose anything you want here. If you are streaming
a camera that is 30 frames per second, for instance, you can change the frame rate to 30.
Next I'm going to hop up here to "Output," and this is where we actually adjust the quality of
our stream. We have two different modes here. We have "Simple Settings" and "Advanced Settings."
For this tutorial, we are going to stay here on the simple menu. So, bitrate. This is going
to be an important number. This is the amount of data that you are streaming every second.
So the higher the bitrate, the higher quality the stream is going to be, the less lag,
all that kind of thing. But there are a couple of catches here. First, you're going to want to look
up the bitrate requirements for whatever platform you're streaming on. Again, we stream mostly on
Facebook which does cap out at 6,000 Kbps. In my understanding, this is true for most platforms, so
I just always leave this on 6,000. Theoretically we could increase this to 8192 Kbps, which is
what we typically recommend for 4K cameras. But in this case, when we're streaming to something
like Facebook, that extra bitrate really isn't going to help us and in the long run it might
end up hurting us. So just keep this at 6,000 unless you know the platform you're streaming on
is compatible with higher bitrates. But here's the other catch. We are going to need to keep our
upload speeds in mind for this, because we don't want our video bitrate to exceed our upload
speeds. For instance, I can have this at 6,000 Kbps because my upload speed is about 10,000 Kbps,
or 10Mbps. So before you set your video bitrate, you are going to want to run a speed test so you
know exactly what your upload speeds are. That way if you only have like a 3 or a 4 Mbps upload
speed, you'll know that you need to keep your video bitrate at around 3,000 or 4,000 Kbps.
And now I will throw a handy chart up here on the screen so you can see
exactly what your limitations are going to be if you do have to have a lower bitrate. Now this is
what we have found as acceptable configurations per upload speed. Your results may vary,
so if this doesn't work for you feel free to play around with this numbers a little bit.
And while you're looking at that and crunching those numbers, I'm going to have a sip of coffee.
*Sips coffee* Ahhh
Okay, you guys ready? Feel free to pause it if you're still looking at that chart,
otherwise we are moving on. I'm going to completely ignore audio bitrate here because
we're not streaming audio, we're simply streaming the video from our cameras.
If you do have a camera that has a built-in mic, then you will be able to pull that audio stream
in as well. But honestly, just leave this at the default 160,
you're not going to need anything more than that. And at the bottom, we're just going to click "OK."
So far everything that we've done in OBS is going to be the same regardless of the method of
streaming that you've chosen. Now as we start to build up our stream and set up our media sources,
this next part is going to be different for each method, so first let me show you how to pull
in your IP security camera's RTSP feed. The first thing we're going to do is come down
here and click on the plus button to add a new source. This source is going to be a media source.
So you can click that, you can name it whatever you want. I'm going to name it IP security camera,
and click OK. And now we have the properties for our new media source. By default, "Local File" is
selected, but we don't want "Local File," because we are going to be streaming via the network.
Network Buffering, we are going to turn this up to 8, and Reconnect Delay, we are going to turn
this all the way down to 1 second. Feel free to check "Use Hardware Decoding When Available" if
you do have some good hardware in your computer. Now we just need to add the input. Now this is
going to be your RTSP address. The RTSP address is going to depend on the type of camera that
you're going to be streaming. For instance, the camera that I have today is a Uniview camera,
so I'm going to type in the Uniview specific RTSP address, and here is what that looks like. Now it
may look confusing at first but don't let this scare you. All you need to do is swap out those
color-coded variables with your own information: your username, your password, your IP address,
your RTSP port, which I will show you how to find momentarily, and your stream. Most of the
time this is going to be 0 for your main stream, however you can also pull in the sub stream if the
main stream is having video issues. The example there is what this might look like if my camera
was on the IP address 192.168.1.180. And in this instance it would be pulling in the sub stream.
We can also use the RTSP stream to pull in cameras off of an NVR. This is what that
would look like for Uniview. In this example here, we would be streaming the sub stream
of the third channel of the NVR found on 192.168.1.180. Now that's Uniview.
At this time we do carry two other product lines:
R-Series and H-Series. So let me show you what this would look like with those cameras.
First here is an R-Series camera. It's a lot simpler than the Uniview RTSP
feed. All you need here is your IP address, your RTSP port, and the number there for your stream,
again 0 for main and 1 for sub. If you want to stream cameras off of an R-Series NVR,
all you have to do is swap out that C1 with whatever channel you'd like to stream.
Again, in this example, we are streaming the third channel.
Finally, if you have an H-Series camera from us or even if you have a Hikvision camera,
this is this RTSP address that you'll type in. The only difference with H-Series is that,
instead of 0 for main and 1 for sub, our stream variable would be 01 for main and 02 for sub.
And again, if we are streaming an NVR, we can swap out that 1 at the end for whatever channel we'd
like to stream. And once again, in this example we are streaming the sub stream of channel 3. If
you have a camera from another brand, you can always try one of these to see if it works.
If you're still having trouble, you may just need to contact your distributor to figure
out what the specific RTSP address is for your cameras.
So, here is the camera that I'm going to be streaming today. I'm going to come in here and
click "Setup." I'm going to click "Network" and "Port." Under "Port" we can see our RTSP port is
554. That's the default for most cameras if you have an R-Series or an H-Series camera,
it's probably also going to be 554, but it's always nice to double-check. So, in input, here is
the RTSP address that I'm going to type in. First, and this is going to be the same for pretty much
any IP camera, "rtsp://". Next we are going to add our login credentials, which is, for this camera,
"admin" is the username, then ":1234567a!" After this we are going to hit the "@" sign
and then type in the IP address of our camera, which in this instance is 192.168.122.
After the IP address, we're going to pop in another colon and type the RTSP port number, 554.
Then "/media/video1." And that's all that we need to type in here, and we are going to click "OK."
And there we go. Our RTSP was pulled into OBS. And you can see
that since we do have a 1080p base resolution, in other words this monitor right here is 1080p,
we do have some adjustments to make because the security camera that we're streaming
is higher than 1080p. So I'm gonna grab these resizing handles here and I am just going to
drag the security camera down to fit inside this window. We're downscaling the security camera to
1080p, and then once we stream it, remember we did set our stream resolution to 720p,
so it's going to downscale it even more. But now this camera is ready to stream!
Let me show you another way of getting this camera in. So we're going to come
in here to "Add Media Source." We're going to click "Display Capture" and click "OK." Now,
we can either capture the cursor or not, I'm going to unclick that just so our cursor's not
floating around on the screen somewhere. This works best if you have two monitors. I don't
have two monitors, so once I minimize this I'm not going to be able to see what we're recording.
But if I kinda drag the window out of the way there, you can kinda see. Let's click "Live View,"
and OBS. So you can see that I'm able to stream my screen here with all of the intelligent markers
available. This does have the downside of taking up real estate on your computer. Again, unless you
have a second monitor which is nice to have for something like this. Or, as I mentioned earlier ,
if you do have a dedicated computer just for your security cameras, you could do that as well.
But the way I like to do this is by streaming my NVR. And to do that, again I have the HDMI capture
card connected here. I have my NVR plugged into that capture card, so now I'm just going to add
that capture card as a video source, and to do that I'm going to click "Add," come down here to
"Video Capture Device," and we can name this "NVR." I'm going to click "OK."
And here we have the device set as the Hauppauge Siena Video Capture Device.
Whatever your video capture device is, you'll be able to find that here.
And there we go, that is my NVR's interface popping up here. And I'm just going to click "OK"
and leave everything at the default. And now I can stream my NVR. So I'm just going to double-click
the window here for our IP camera, and that's going to make it full-screen. Once I stop moving
that mouse around, that little menu is going to go away, there we go, and now I have my IP camera
streaming through the NVR, and because we do have those intelligent markers set up on the NVR,
we are able to stream those as well. This is my favorite method of streaming an
IP camera because I don't have to worry about the RTSP feed cutting out. This is a lot more stable,
a lot less laggy, and easier to control. But again, while this is streaming, you can't
really access your NVR from the HDMI interface without that showing up on the stream as well,
so keep that in mind. And that's pretty much it! Depending on which method you've chosen,
you are now all set up and ready to go. You can come in here to "Settings" and to "Stream,"
And this is where you will connect OBS to whatever platform you're streaming on. Again,
we have Facebook Live set up here, so we will pull our stream key in here which changes every time,
so we have to copy and paste each time we want to go live. And then we simply start streaming.
I know this was a lot of info, so if you guys have any questions,
please feel free to leave those down in the comments below or reach out to us,
give us a call, send us an email, we're always happy to help you out with stuff like this.
Thank you guys for watching this video and I will see you in the next one.