Live Streaming with OBS Studio

Disclaimer: This blog post will be dealing with how to setup a twitch.tv account with OBS Studio. You will need an account from there in order to get a stream key. This is also assuming that you have read our previous blog post on recording with OBS Studio. Also one final note is that this is just the bare essentials to streaming and doesn’t go into depth with some things.

Step 1 - Setting Up the Broadcast Settings:

Open up OBS Studio again. Head into the settings; On Windows it is under ‘File > Settings’ and on OS X you can click on ‘OBS’ in the top bar of your screen and then ‘Preferences’, or just hit the ‘Command + , (comma)’ key to open up the preferences. Now on the left-hand side again head into the ‘Stream’ section. The first few settings should be setup properly, but you may want to change your server to the closest one available in your area. For me this would be ‘US: East New York, NY’. Next you will need your stream key from your twitch.tv account. Go here and click on the ‘Stream Key’ tab. You should be looking at this:

Go ahead and view your stream key. Then copy and paste it into the section in your OBS settings in the ‘Stream key’ box under the ‘Stream’ section. Also a small note; Do not share your stream key with anyone ever.

Step 2 - Stream Settings:

Next head into the ‘Output’ section on the left-hand side inside OBS Studios settings. You should be looking at this:

For video bitrate you will want to go to speedtest.net to find your upload rate. Then you will want to head here and fill out the information for it to give you an estimate on what bitrate to use. Since I have slow internet I have a pretty low bitrate. Next choose your encoder (or leave as default). For audio bitrate you can choose between 128 and 160. Click ‘Apply’ in the bottom right and then head into the ‘Audio’ tab on the left.

Step 3 - Audio and Video Settings:

You should be faced with a screen like this:

Leave the sample rate at whatever value is default, for channels choose stereo, desktop audio device can be left at ‘Default’ and for mic you can either set it to default or choose it in the list like I did. Now head into the ‘Video’ tab on the left. You should be looking at this:

For base resolution match it to whatever resolution your monitor is. For output resolution you will want to choose a smaller resolution than your base resolution. I picked 1280x720 for 720p. Leave the downscale filter at the default setting and also leave the ‘Common FPS Values’ at 30 since you need to be a twitch partner and have a beast setup to handle 60FPS for streaming. Click ‘Apply’ again and then ‘OK’.

Step 4 - Streaming:

Now that you have all your settings configured you can start adding scenes and sources for your stream. You can add desktop capture like we did in our recording blog post for OBS Studio or game capture or anything you like. The setup is pretty much the same except instead of clicking on ‘Start Recording’ you would click ‘Start Streaming’.

Conclusion:

That’s about it for the basics of streaming with OBS Studio. Feel free to look around the internet for more advanced tutorials that go more in depth with how everything works. Goodbye for now and we’ll see you on our next blog post.