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Live Streaming with YouTube and OBS #79

Open practicalli-johnny opened 4 years ago

practicalli-johnny commented 4 years ago

Article title Live streaming with OBS and YouTube

I have done about 60 hours of broadcasting live events now and learnt a lot over that time.

https://obsproject.com/ is the tool that just about everyone uses for streaming live from your computer. You can also record (simultaneously). It's free and is very high quality and pretty easy to learn.

OBS can stream to any of the online services such as YouTube, Twitch and Discord (which seem to be the main services). YouTube gives you the widest reach, twitch is more for gaming.

I use YouTube, which also records live streams. There is also an online video editor in YouTube, so you can post process a live stream recording

YouTube is easy enough to use one you have learnt its way of doing things (can be frustrating to start with). You can stream live, schedule events (notifications up to a week in advance). You create a channel, add some channel graphics, get a key (token) from the YouTube settings and add it to an OBS profile. Then create events (copying a previous event uses the same key, so OBS settings don't need to be updated.

You can set up different scenes in OBS. I have an intro/outro image, full webcam with channel banner and screencasting screen with image logos and thumbnail webcam. You can add lots of different sources.

I created my own graphics for the broadcast, to give them a little more professional look. Inkscape.org is a very good too for this (and free).

OBS is focused on broadcasting from one computer, so if you have multiple people broadcasting then you need some group video chat / conferencing. I used to use Google hangouts, which is okay for up to about 10 people talking.

Zoom also does conferencing and live streaming, but only records locally (I don't think it connects to other streaming services). You can always upload the recording after the event. Zoom isn't quite as resilient as YouTube (once my computer crashed during live streaming and even after a reboot I could just continue broadcasting to YouTube as if nothing happened).

Things to improve the quality of the online broadcast include decent microphones and avoiding background noise. Most webcams in computers are good enough, although a nice 1080p external webcam is usually the minimum, especially if the webcam is the main part of the broadcast.

If you need someone to help set this up for you, let me know. If it's a community event, then there would be no charge.

Article description or content A good article would include

Content should be written in markdown (although I am experimenting with asciidoc). Images and videos should be shared as publicly accessible links

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