Hello everyone and welcome to my tutorial on using the OBS open broadcaster software.
If you don’t know what OBS is, OBS is an open source alterative to other streaming
programs like WireCast or xSplit.
It is free, it is open source, and it’s currently in beta.
It’s not extremely easy to use, it’s easy to use in my opinion.
I like it better than xSplit or WireCast, and to me it streams a lot better.
Now this tutorial is going to be for the purpose of pc streaming is that’s all I have used
it for so far and that’s what I want this to be for.
I will do a second one for console streaming at some point if anyone is interested.
Now to acquire this program you just need to go to OBSProject.com and download it from
the source forge, and install it just like you would any other program.
Now, when you open up OBS you’re going to be presented with this window which looks
kind of taunting at first, but just trust me, once you get into it, it’s not going
to be that big of a deal.
Now, the first thing you’re going to want to do before you do any of this is go to your
settings.
In your settings, you can set up your setting profile name if you want to.
I have it set up to put a notification area icon, which means the system tray icon here.
I don’t want to minimize that, but I do want that icon there just for the hell of
it.
Next you click the encoding little tab over here, and CBR is what you always want to use.
There’s reason why with xSplit and any other program that tells you you should use CBR.
Now, your max bitrate.
If you’ve used xSplit or any other program, that’s going to be what you set for that,
but if you’re not sure what to set for that, do a simple speed test here.
It’s based on your internet, obviously, so go to SpeedTest.net
Now, because I have a bunch of things going this is probably going to give me really crappy
speeds, but just doing it as an example really quick… won’t even load—there we go.
And the speed test really fast here, it’s going to tell you your ping, your estimated
download speed from your ISP, and your estimated upload speed.
Download speed doesn’t really matter for streaming as far as uploading because it’s
all based on your upload speed.
You do obviously want to have a decent download connected regardless, but just saying.
Wow, that’s actually giving me much higher speeds… wow!
Heh, that’s actually pretty impressive for my internet.
What I normally have is 1.5 megabit upload, so if you have 1 to 1.5, you want to do around
1,000 kb/s upload speeds on your video bitrate and 128 on your audio.
Since I have that, I can almost double that but I won’t mess with that right now because
that’s probably not an accurate result, that’s really weird.
And then just leave it as AAC codec, and 128 is really all you need for a stream.
Next, click broadcast settings.
Now, depending on where you want to do it, you can tell it to save to a file or to a
livestream.
We’re doing this for livestreaming to Twitch, so click streaming service dropdown to Twitch,
choose your server.
I choose this one because it’s closer to me.
Then ask for your play path or stream key.
In xSplit, it asks you to login to twitch, but this is just copying your stream key.
It’s a little weird to find it.
You go to Twitch.Tv/Broadcast, and it shows you xSplit or whatever, but then you click
show key and it gives you your little stream key so you can publish your stream.
You just copy that off the window and paste it in there, and then you can have a start
and stop stream hotkey.
I’m going to disable those because I screwed up with those, but you can set those to whatever
you want.
I don’t like hotkeys, so I’m not going to use it.
Make sure you’re hitting apply after everything, or your settings will not save.
Go to video.
Now, this is for essentially your main monitor for where you’re going to be taking video.
I have my TV hooked up to my GeForce 9800 GT, and then my main 660.
I want it to stream video from my 660.
Its base resolution is 1920 by 1080.
You set it to a resolution downscale to 1280 by 720, because you want to be streaming to
1280 by 720 for Twitch or YouTube, or whatever.
So it downscales a little bit.
It has a slight pixilation to that, but if you try streaming at 1080p, it will not work.
It will be choppy and things like that.
Hit apply; make sure your FPS are set to 30.
Go to the audio tab.
Here’s where you get to choose your audio devices.
For your desktop audio device, this is going to be where either your game sound or if you
want Skype sound coming out, you choose that.
This is where, at the moment, my default for game sound comes out as my Optical audio here.
And then for my microphone, that’s my mixer, line in USB right here, you can set to use
push to talk.
I don’t use it.
You can also set a delay, but really, if you’re streaming, you’re going to want to just
have your mike open pretty much.
You can set hotkeys to mute your mike or mute the desktop.
Not really necessary, but if you’re doing specific things, you can do that as well.
Something extremely useful for me is you can actually multiply your volume level.
For the desktop, that would be absolutely terrible.
You don’t want to do that because your desktop audio, especially if you have your volume
set to a 100, the default right here, you do not want to do that because it will just
clip and completely overpower and ruin people’s speakers, or something.
But for your microphone, mine comes in very, very quiet.
So you’re going to want to set it to—you know, if you have a microphone that’s very,
very quiet like mine, you’re going to want to pump it up a little bit.
I found two is perfect for me.
This is not volume balancing for the stream that comes later.
This is simply just adjusting your input levels.
Hit apply, go to the advanced tab.
You can change stuff here if you want to.
The default settings here work very well.
You want your process to remain normal no matter what.
Very fast, x265 preset works very well.
There’s no reason to change that really.
But, if you want advanced options, then here.
Microphone noise gate, you can set that if you have weird microphone issues but I don’t
really.
Default for those is fine as well.
You get back to here and you still just have an empty window.
Kind of confusing, but whatever.
First things first, is you want to lower your game volume, especially if you’re talking
in the stream.
If you’re not talking, then you can mute your mike and turn your game volume all the
way up.
But I talk in my streams, so I want the game volume turned down.
I found that if I keep my games maximized and my volume here in game, so I can actually
hear it, then turning it just to that last bar is the best bet so people don’t hear
too much game volume but they hear me perfectly fine.
Now, just like in WireCast or xSplit, you have different scenes.
You can have multiple scenes, multiple sources on the scenes and things like that.
We’re going to rename this one; this is going to be our monitor + webcam scene.
Now this is where things get a little funk.
So kind of pay a little bit of attention.
With most programs, you either just do a smaller screen region dedicated to a window or game
capture or whatever.
You have this in this, in OBS, it’s just very confusing at first if you’re just looking
at it to figure out exactly what those things are supposed to be.
So we can set here, you can add an image.
You can name it whatever, so let’s name like, BRB, well we’ll do that for another
stream, so let’s add another scene.
And it’s add scene, it’s going to be BRB, so this is one I’m going to need to go off
camera really quick and basically cover up the entire stream.
Then I will have an image for that.
You just give it a name so you know what it is in the list.
You can change some settings about it.
That’s where chroma key comes into place or whatever, but for the purposes of this,
we’re not going to be doing that.
Find the image you want to use.
I have a wallpaper set.
There it is.
Just use that.
It automatically fills the screen.
If you want to see what you’re doing as you’re working on it, you preview your screen.
It’s not actually streaming anywhere, but you can get a preview, tell you what it can
encode at, what frame rate it’s encoding at, and you get to see what’s actually going
on.
And there’s your image, so we have our BRB slide done.
Back to our monitor and webcam one.
First, we’re going to add the monitor.
We’re going to add monitor capture.
We’re going to make this main monitor.
For the sake of livestreaming, this is going to be when I’m not in game, when I switch
to a window to show people things.
This is what that’s going to be.
This is going to be, you know, my main monitor, if you know, I get a funny picture I want
to show someone from Reddit or something, and I go there, and I can be like, oh hey
guys, here’s Reddit.
I’m showing you Reddit.
And yeah.
Or if you’re playing like a flash game or something.
Next we’re going to add the webcam to it, so you go to add, and video capture device.
This is where a lot of things are.
We’re just going to name this webcam, and it brings up a list of devices that it can
detect.
Now, it does detect my Elgato Game Capture HD, but I have not tested this yet, so I do
not recommend trying it until a proper tutorial is created.
Pull out Logitech Pro Webcam C920.
Set a custom resolution.
You don’t really want it set to the maximum resolution like 1920 by 1080 here, because
that’ll lag, the frame rate won’t be very good, so what I’m doing is actually setting
it to 864 by 480.
I’m going to hit okay, and I’m going to add it, and it takes up 864 by 480 pixels.
Since I’m not going to have the webcam at least in this scene, taking up the whole window,
there’s no need to take up resources by giving it the entire resolution.
You can’t really do anything with it here, but all you have to do is click edit scene
right here, and it gives you the option to resize, reposition, drag the webcam over here,
and you’re good to go.
Monitor right here, you’re showing people stuff, you have your face up here still, you’re
good to go.
Going to add one more scene.
This is going to be webcam alone, add video capture device, webcam.
Browse, Logitech Pro Webcam C920, and since we’re broadcasting at 720p, I’m still
going to drop it down to 720p for the webcam just so it doesn’t, again, waste too much
resources, get choppy or anything.
Works perfectly fine, looks really good, and honestly this looks a lot better than it does
in xSplit and WireCast in my experience.
xSplit and WireCast do not like my webcams, but they look fantastic in OBS.
All right, we’re going to add one more scene here.
This is going to be game play + webcam, and of course you can do them without webcam,
things like that.
All right, now, for this one, we’re going to go on and add our webcam here just to add
it, so we have something on the screen.
Logitech, custom resolution, 864x480.
You can lower that if you want, I just kind of chose that.
I think you could even choose square resolutions because obviously I don’t need all this
stuff off to the side, but I’m just not messing with that right now.
Next, we’re going to add game capture.
But for it to detect game capture, you actually have to have a game up.
So we’re going to find a small game here that we can add that it will add.
Something that doesn’t take up—ooh, I know what we can do.
We can just do PokeMMO, since that’s a popular series on my channel, I will use that as an
example.
We’re going to go full screen and what you see may be black for a second, so I apologize.
Now, I’m back to OBS, and in your scene where you want the game play to be, right
click add, and go to game capture, and we’re just going to name this PokeMMO, because it
ties in to the graphical hook for the game, so it’s per game.
In this window region here, you find your window, PokeMMO, click that, essentially leave
everything the same and click okay.
And then you’re going to want to move it down, and it doesn’t show anything until
the first time that you pull the game up, so just blow your webcam so your webcam is
over top your game play, and click back over in your game really quick.
There we go.
Back to OBS.
And as you’ll see, now the game play preview is up in the preview.
My webcam is over top, it looks okay, everything like that.
Now when you tab out of the game, it does leave the last frame that the game showed
to OBS up, so, yeah.
All right, going to close out of this really quick.
When you do so, it’s back to a black screen.
Now this is how you get things set up for the basic.
Once you’re ready to stream, you hit stop preview and you click start streaming and
you are good to go.
You cannot—there’s obviously, you don’t preview and stream at the same time.
Stop preview, and start streaming, and it streams to Twitch.
It also work with YouTube, it just takes a bit different because in your broadcasting
settings, you have to set up a custom arm TPP channel and stuff like, so weird stuff
with that.
But, that’s just a basic lowdown on how you stream games from PC to Twitch.
Now, one thing I do want to note that is specifically why I love using OBS so far for PC streaming
is, see the frame rate down here?
Obviously this is showing a picture, so it’s going to hold 30 frames per second, but I
can play games at the full 1920 by 1080 resolution and stream them down to 1280 by 720 without
having to plain window mode, without having to lower my resolution, and it keeps the solid
30 frames per second, and streams at a decent speed on my processing power.
That will, of course vary, from computer and to computer, but with mine it handles it much
better than any other streaming software that I have used, and so I absolutely love it.
And it has done very good for me so far.
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial, guys.
I hope it helps some people out.
I know it’s a bit long.
If you want to see one for consoles, let me know and I’ll try and set something up,
and if you have any specific questions about using the software, let me know in the comment
section below and I will do my best to help you out.
Thank you for watching, having a nice day.
See you next time.