And I am live! Hi Everyone. I am live? Can you hear me?
Um, ok. Hi, am I not live? My bitrate is too high? What does that even mean?
Hey everyone! Welcome to DIY in 5. My name is Trisha Hershberger and today, we’ll be going
over how to set up your broadcasting software so that your stream looks smooth as butter.
This is a to-be-continued of sorts to our first video, which covers the basics of setting up scenes and sources
and really personalizing the look and feel of your stream.
Today’s video will focus a bit more on the
back end and take a bit of a deeper look into some of the more advanced functionality that streaming
software like OBS Studio can offer.
If you find you learned something from this video,
we’d be forever in your debt if you wouldn’t mind liking the video and considering a sub to this channel so you don’t miss out on any future tech tips.
OK, so let’s see, where’d we leave off? Ah yes,
we had set up a few basic scenes to swap between when live.
I’ve added a few more here like Starting Soon, BRB, and an Ending Screen.
This is all entirely up to you and depends how fancy
you want to get with the look and feel of your content.
I know we had a bunch of folks asking how to add Alerts for things like new followers so I’ll just go over that fairly quickly for you now.
You can use a number of free services like Streamlabs or Streamelements to set this up,
customize what you’d like your alerts to look or sound like, and copy and paste the generated
URL into your OBS as a browser source, to be resized or rearranged as you like.
Now, for those of you who are really getting fancy with your scenes - and let’s say you
want a different Starting Screen or Overlay for each game you stream - or maybe you produce a
variety of types of content and want a different look and feel for each show or platform you stream to.
That’s where Scene Collections come in.
This is a great way to not overload your software by loading up too many assets and sources at once,
plus it helps keep things organized and simpler to switch between on the fly.
The Scene Collection drop down menu at the top gives you the option to start a new scene collection,
copy one you are already using if you don’t want to start from scratch, rename and import and so on.
For those of you who are giving StreamLabs OBS a whirl, SLOBS,
there are included templates for scene collections to easily import if you need some ideas to get started.
Ok, now to discuss Profiles. While Scene collections are more focused on what goes
out to your viewers, Profiles are how your content gets there.
Like Scene collections, you can have various profiles for different streaming platforms if you like - say YouTube, Twitch, Amazon Live, Facebook and so on.
You can also use different profiles for various quality setting adjustments,
say between streaming for YouTube vs local recordings to cut into a YouTube video later.
So let’s walk through how to setup a basic profile for YouTube streaming in OBS Studio.
When you click “Create a new Profile” you’ll see an option to use the Auto-configuration wizard.
This can also be accessed and run at any time from the Tools menu. Click that.
Then specify what you’d like your recording to be optimized for: streaming, recording or just the virtual camera.
We’ll say streaming for now. Then you can choose your base resolution and preferred FPS settings.
Note, your base resolution is not necessarily the same resolution you will stream at, just what is being captured.
After hitting next, you’ll see a dropdown menu asking which service you’d like to stream to.
Some of these have direct logins through OBS, like Twitch or Restream, which make this setup process even easier,
but for now, let’s stick with YouTube.
You’ll be asked for your stream key.
This can be found within your YouTube studio settings and
luckily, OBS studio has a handy dandy “Get Stream Key” button right here that will take you directly to the part of your YouTube settings
where you can copy and paste that stream key right into your OBS settings.
Thanks!
Heads up - this is the key that will let anyone stream to your channel, so try not to share this around
or show it on stream at all.
Choose primary YouTube ingest server as your main server.
Now you’ll see a section where you can choose video bitrate.
In video streaming, bitrate refers to the amount of bits processed in a specific amount of time, usually bits per second
or in this case kilobits per second.
The more information you send per second, the higher
quality your stream will appear, but also the tougher it will be on your system and internet
and server bandwidth so keep that in mind.
Google recommends a bitrate of 4500-9000 for 1080p/60 content, so put in your desired kb/s and click next.
After testing is complete, the wizard will give you the option to apply the settings to your new profile and you are set up to go!
Once you are all set up, some platforms will even let you conduct a test stream to see if your
setup can handle and output a high-quality stream before you go live.
This looks a little different depending what platform you are on, but let’s say for Twitch, you can go into your stream settings,
click the box that says “Enable Bandwidth Test Mode” and go live, except your stream won’t actually show anywhere.
You can then go to Twitch Inspector to monitor the quality of your stream in real time - all before ever actually going live.
Once you’ve tested and things look okay,
you are good to go live! Now that being said, just being totally real with you,
there’s a lot of moving parts to any livestream and there’s always a possibility that something
will suddenly stop working or work in a different way then it did when you tested or
any myriad of issues, and it happens to everyone. I mean, did you see the Superbowl or the Emmys??
If you find yourself in a live troubleshooting situation, just remain calm and do your best to
troubleshoot - maybe your chat will even help you out. Also, if you have to stop streaming to give
that PC a Ctrl-Alt-Believe as I like to say, no one will fault you.
I hope this video helped you on your early streaming journey and please feel free to leave any additional questions below.
I’m Trisha Hershberger and I appreciate you watching DIY in 5. See you next time!