Have you ever wanted to have your own show? Live streaming, or streaming a live video-production to a webpage where you have control over switching in between yourself, guests, or any other content has become the ‘broadcasting’ of the 21st century. So…what would it take to do in these teach-at-home times we are in?

As I’ve written before, the opensource app OBS is a great (free) tool to get you started on your journey of studio production for recording lectures especially with a green-screen. Building off of that, lets say instead of setting up your scenes around your teaching, let’s say we built scenes based off the inputs of audio and video sources you’d like to send live to a stream (in this case we’ll use YouTube).

Setup Notes

• Audio from a video conferencing app to OBS on the Mac does need an extra plugin and a little tweaking.
  • iShowU by the folks at ShinyWhiteBox
  • OBS Forum with a short walk-through to setup a MacOS Audio Aggregate device
• In YouTube, to setup your live session.
  • Streams can be Public, Private, or Unlisted.
  • When you create a session, you’ll need the stream keys from the “Go Live” session. Those keys you’ll copy and paste into OBS.
  • In OBS you’ll test your stream by hitting “Start Streaming” but this will not be live yet. It will allow you to preview you stream in that YouTube Live session you setup to get your keys and from there (once everything looks and sounds ok) you’ll hit “Go Live” one last time to make it Live.

A few kinks and questions;

• I had to set the stream to 480p because of my hardware and prevent video latency.
• We had some bandwidth issues that caused the audio and video to loose sync, but looks like it caught up towards the end?