Using OBS to Stream Your Desktop with FaceCam and Scenes

The OBS (Open Broadcasting Software) is a powerful tool used by streamers to broadcast their desktop, webcam, or game footage to platforms like Twitch.tv or Hitbox.tv. One of the key features of OBS is its ability to create custom scenes, which allow users to overlay various elements on top of their stream.

See the Webcam Full Screen

When using OBS to stream your desktop, you can see the webcam full screen by hitting "Edit Scene" and adjusting the layout. This allows you to position the webcam wherever you want it, making it easy to capture a clear view of your face or any other elements you want to show on camera.

Dragging the Red Box

When you hit "Edit Scene", a red box appears that can be dragged to resize it and reposition it anywhere on the screen. This is particularly useful for creating a facecam feed while streaming your desktop. By dragging the corners of the box, you can adjust its size and position to fit your needs.

Adding FaceCam to Your Stream

With the ability to drag the red box around, you can now easily place the webcam in the bottom right corner of the screen. This allows you to create a seamless facecam feed that integrates with your desktop stream.

Creating Custom Scenes

OBS also offers the option to add custom scenes, which can be used for a variety of purposes such as adding text overlays, displaying information about your stream, or creating a "BRB" (Be Right Back) screen. To create a new scene, simply right-click on the OBS interface and select "Add Scene". You can then name your scene and add it to your main scene.

Adding Global Sources

When creating custom scenes, you can also add global sources that will display on all scenes at once. For example, you can add a BRB screen that displays a message saying "I'm stepping away from my stream for a moment" or "Don't forget to like and subscribe". This allows you to easily switch between different scenes without having to recreate the same elements.

Adding Image Scenes

OBS also offers the option to add image scenes, which can be used to display static images such as logos, screenshots, or other graphical elements. To add an image scene, simply right-click on the OBS interface and select "Add Scene". You can then choose from a variety of options, including selecting an image file or creating a new image.

Adding Text Overlay

Another useful feature in OBS is the ability to add text overlay to your scenes. This allows you to display information such as your stream title, username, or donation amount on top of your video feed. To add text overlay, simply right-click on the OBS interface and select "Add Scene". You can then choose from a variety of options, including selecting a font, changing the color and size, and adding an outline.

Testing Your Scenes

Before going live with your custom scenes, it's a good idea to test them out in the preview window. This allows you to ensure that everything is working as expected and make any necessary adjustments before going live. By hitting the "Preview" button, you can see how your scenes will look on camera and make any final tweaks.

Adding Plugins

OBS also offers a range of plugins that can be used to enhance your stream's functionality. One useful plugin is the CL CLR browser, which allows you to add web browser updates directly into your stream. Another plugin is the sub alert plugin, which displays a notification when someone subscribes or donates to your channel.

Managing Your Global Sources

When managing your global sources, you can adjust the volume of your desktop audio and microphone levels separately. This allows you to fine-tune the sound quality of your stream before going live.

Using OBS for Streaming with FaceCam and Scenes

Overall, OBS is a powerful tool that offers a wide range of features and options for creating custom scenes and enhancing your stream's functionality. By using facecam and scenes, you can create a seamless and engaging streaming experience that sets you apart from other streamers.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone my name is Adam oros Vox and in this video I'm going to be going over an updated tutorial on how to stream to twitch.tv via the OBS or open broadcaster software software now I've done this tutorial previously and you've maybe already seen it before but uh it's been requested I updated for 2015 and that's what I'm going to be doing here in this video now I'm going to assume you already know what OBS is and have it installed it's a free live streaming and PC recording software and you can watch my other videos on it or downloaded it via links in the description below this is what happens when you first open up open up OBS you're greeted with this very blank and kind of intimidating screen so let's get your settings set up first click the settings button on the bottom right hand box here or either up here on the top bar settings and settings your first tab is going to be your general tab this is where you set up profiles profiles are going to be different options of streaming options such as resolution where you send it to etc for different purposes so for example I have this one that I'm using for this tutorial I have one for recording to my PC in 60 frames per second I have one for streaming to Twitch Etc if you wish to make a new tuto or new profile simply type the name of your new profile so let's call this I don't know U yellow and click the add button then you have some options for your language whether or not you want a notification area icon which I'll put it down here in your system tray whether or not you wanted to minimize to that option instead of the taskbar whether or not you want the cursor over the projector the projector is a full screen output which I will show you in a minute where you can project it to just show full screen on another screen this is extremely useful for podcast and radio show broadcast and things like that a feature from wirecast ask that was very much requested by myself to be featured in OBS and then you can have a log window as well now one thing to note is every time you change something in a new tab hit apply before you hit okay or change tabs that way your settings are actually applied click the encoding tab here's where you're going to set up your video bit rate but first you have to kind of determine where you're sending your video first so we're going to skip this for the moment and go down to broadcast settings now this is where you choose whether or not you're recording to your computer or live streaming for the purposes of this tutorial we're going to be doing live streaming so we're going to choose a live stream and then we're going to select a streaming service I we're going to do twitch.tv for this one and well we'll actually do we'll do twitch.tv and hitbox in this one but there are other options you can choose from and if you wish I can do other tutorials for primarily YouTube is the only other one I would really do a tutorial on let's do twitch next you choose your basically your server location since I'm in the Eastern side of the United States I'm going to choose one in Virginia because that's closer to me now it's asking you for a stream key this is basically just a private string of numbers that twitch gives you to authenticate you as your streaming just as a streamer so we're going to go up here to twitch.tv/ broadcast SL dashboard you can also get to this by going to twitch.tv signing in and then clicking dashboard it's just your streaming dashboard on twitch.tv and this is where you're going to sign up or you know put in what game you're playing what the title of your broadcast is what language you're in and you can see chat and a video preview this is going to be a tutorial on more things besides twitch.tv so I'm not going to go hugely into twitch functionality but that's kind of what it's for so on your dashboard click stream key now this is going to give you that you click stream show key because anybody who has access to your Channel or anybody who has access to your key could in theory broadcast your channel so you don't want to show that key to anyone um so like for right now I'm not going to show it on video but you click show key and then you copy that and paste it right here in the path or stream key same thing with hitbox if we go choose hitbox.tv then choose the server closest to us say Virginia it's going to want a stream key go over to hitbox.tv click your profile icon in the top left click live stream settings and then you can show a key and paste that in there as well it's going to be the exact same format as twitch just to a different place now you have Auto reconnect which you're going to want to leave checked as that is an option to basically if for whatever reason your internet cuts out for just like a split second and you want to want it to automatically reconnect without just ending your stream it will do that however you can also set a timeout so that that say after 10 tries it still can't connect then it's going to just stop streaming so it's not freaking out on you a handy feature here is to automatically save your stream to a file now this means you can save a local copy of your live stream now unlike programs like wirecast you cannot record a different quality than your current live stream settings are but you can this is still handy to create a local file of it so that way you can create like a highlights video or something without having to download it off twitch and then re-upload it and lose all your quality through that so to do this you're going to want to choose a location now by default it's set to record to a FLV file however you can record to an mp4 file simp simply by telling it where to go so I'm going to tell it to record my Hardware raid and name it give it a name I'll name it tutorial and then see when you change it it it already has MP4 selected if not there'll be Flash video but you can tell it whichever one you want just simply type in the extension so I'm going to call it tutorial. MP4 now every time you stream it's also going to save a tutorial. mpp4 file and the just just add in like 1 0er 2 3 4 Etc in parentheses after this obs s also now has a buff a replay buffer I don't entirely know how this works because I've not seen a way of actually initiating the replay however it does it can save an initial temporary file which acts as a replay for plain replay back I assume this is a functionality they're going to be best addressing in future Updates this is of course still very much a beta software so to set that up simply choose a different save location by default it's going to my dvideos folder that's fine basically wherever and we'll name it ob- replay. MP4 and then you can tell that how long you want the replay to save keep in mind it's going to take up space based on that so I'll say save 15 seconds of Replay that'll take up 4 megabytes out of 4 gigs that it can possibly save for that click apply now you also notice down here that warning your OBS settings are not optimized and then it has some other settings that you'll want to change in advance to optimize you can either go to that and check them out which we'll do in a minute or simply click optimize and it will automatically change that setting for you and then you're good to go so let's go back up to the encoding tab on here it's what you set the bit rate or basically kind of like the quality that you're streaming to on Twitch or hitbox now I'm not going to answer in the comment section down below which bit rate you should use but what you can do is go to OBS calculator on obs's website estimator that's what it's called OBS pro.com estimator link will be in the description It'll ask some settings about what what Hardware you have and what your internet speed is which you can get by going to speed hello speedtest.net run a quick speed test and it's going to tell you your estimated upload and download speeds simply pop that in the calculator tell them what resolution you plan on streaming and it will tell you a bit rate to use it's not going to be 100% accurate but it's a starting point and then simply put that number in here for my internet connection I typically stream about 3450 kilobytes per second this does run on kilab BTE that runs on Kil a bit there's a difference for the most part you're going to want ubr and UC CBR padding enabled and leave custom buffer size unchecked for audio quality please please please at least turn this up a little bit it obviously impacts your speed but I'd say always stream at at least 192 kilobits per second audio and then 44.1 khz is what most things run at it's not going to hurt you whatever format you choose I just choose that again hit apply and then let's go back down to video now now here it's going to have your video adapter if you're having difficulty getting say anything to show up say it's showing like a black screen or something like that you will want to make sure that this is selected the right device I only have one graphics card on my computer it's a gtx970 and so that's what I have checked but if you're on a laptop that has multiple devices you want to choose the right one for you on certain laptops you may have two devices such as Intel integrated graphics and even on some desktops actually such as like AMD or Intel integrated graphics and then a secondary Nvidia or AMD graphics card your games are going to be running on the AMD or Nvidia graphics card whereas your basic desktop stuff is going to be running on the Intel or AMD integrated card now this may show up as any number of things such as Intel Graphics 5000 Etc that's going to be totally unique to your system and I can't really tell you which one to choose you're kind of going to have to make a rough estimate on that and then choose the resolution of your monitor if you don't for whatever reason know this you can minimize OBS or minimize everything really and then right click your desktop and go to screen resolution or if you're on Windows XP is go to right click properties screen resolution and then look at your main monitor for me it's 1920 x 1080 so go back into your OBS settings under video make sure it says 1920 x 1080 and then for resolution downscale if you have decent internet which is I don't know that's per person but say you're streaming at at least 1,000 or between 1,000 and 4,000 kilobits per or kilobytes per second that's your streaming resolution you're going to want to downscale it down to 1280 by 720 if you stream at full 1080p at a low bit rate then you're going to get a lot of choppiness and artifacting that's totally unnecessary because if you just downscale it to 720p it's going to look 10 times better this doesn't actually slow your system down any and it can make a huge difference on how your stream looks if you're streaming at super low say like under 1,000 kilobytes per second then you're going to want to drop it down to 852 by 2 by 480 and stream at that resolution it's less than 720p but it's going to look a lot better you can also choose your frame rate here if you're not partnered on Twitch or hitbox you cannot stream at 60 frames per second so for there's no point other of setting 60 unless you just want a 60 frames per second highlight reel that you're going to upload but if you're recording instead of live streaming setting it at 60 frames per second if your computer can handle it that's something you're going to need to play around with is whether or not your computer can handle that then you can set it to 60 and record a 60 frames per second video click apply now one more thing I want to note about resolution is right here where it says 16 by9 if you choose a monitor let's say I choose monitor 2 you can see here the resolution is 1280 by 1024 its aspect ratio is 5 to4 that means that it you know 1280 x 1024 is a square resolution which is a square monitor some people still have these some people have monitors that are like 1440 by 900 which is a 16 by10 aspect ratio unless you run your games in a window at 720p or 1080p and have it at 16 by9 if you stream with these kinds of monitors you're going to have black bars either on the sides or the tops of your video on your live stream there's nothing you can do to fix this other than like cropping it out and making it look bad so if you're running on a non 16x9 monitor you really just kind of have to deal with it unless you're going to run your game in a window instead of full screen and run it at a 16x9 aspect ratio just something to note audio this is where you choose your microphone or speakers and stuff so by default desktop audio device that's what your games and stuff play out to go to your stream I leave it on default for microphone I'm going to choose line in on my Scarlet 2i2 USB interface that's what I'm going to use and then you can change um you can add an extra boost to your microphone or desktop audio I leave it at default because mine's just loud enough if you notice yours is just way too quiet you can add in a boost here however it is a multiplier so changing it to do will multiply your volume by two times so don't just Jack it up or you're going to blow out your recording click apply the hot Keys option here is where you can set hot keys to automatically mute your microphone start the stream stop the stream Etc change that to your liking or leave them blank that way if you're in game and you can start and stop streaming you can just hit the keys the advanced tab you can leave most of this as normal if you're experiencing some issues you could change this to super fast the preset however I recommend leaving everything at normal you know just how it is at default except changing the key frame interval to 2 seconds like obs suggest you should only really be changing this if you know what you're doing or if you're posting in their support forums if you need help with OBS and they suggest you change something leave quick sync encoder alone if you even have that option browser you're not going to have because I'm using a plugin and the Noise Gate you can enable A Noise Gate which kind of tries to cut out background noise on your microphone however it is very primitive and you're just going to have to play with it if you understand any of it yourself to learn it because I use a dynamic microphone so I don't actually need a noise gate on my microphone once you're done with all these settings hit okay you're almost done the next thing we need to cover are scene collections scene collections are just groups of scenes that you would display on your live stream of input sources such as images video sources your desktop webcam etc for a basic live stream you only need one of these you can view mine here where I have if I preview the stream I have a starting stream image a BRB image my monitor which is set to the wrong one at the moment my webcam Etc like I said for a basic stream you'd only need one the only reason you would might want multiple ones if you do separate streaming and recording or separate types of streams separate series Etc so simply hit file new or scene collection new and give it a name Now's the Time to start setting up your scenes at any point in time if you've set up a scene you can hit this preview stream button which is going to give you a preview of what your stream would look like without actually streaming it and then if you need to resize something you can click edit scene and it's going to put a box around it which allow you to resize it and do different things with it we'll explore that in a moment to start editing your scenes use the default one it gives you right click it and go to rename and determine what your purpose is going to be for it I'm going to call this one webcam now you're going to want to utilize Global Sources for certain devices such as your webcam images that you're going to use often or video capture cards such as the Elgato game capture HD or HD 60 I explain Global Sources in another video which you can view the full video to view an in-depth look at Global Sources but basically it's a way of identifying identifying one device that you're going to use consistently throughout multiple scenes without having to set it back up individually each time and causing issues so click the Global Sources button and if you're if you're setting up a webcam and click add and we're going to add a video capture device I've done an in-depth video on video capture devices as well so you can check the link for that but we're just going to cover the basis here I'm going to call this C920 cuz my webcam is the Logitech C920 and sometimes I have multiple hooked up on your device we're going to select which one we want leave everything the same make sure audio input device is disabled if we're using a separate microphone or have the audio set up separately inside the actual stream if you have this webcam microphone selected in the stream audio and you have it put here you're going to be given a huge Echo that you don't want so make sure it's disabled in the actual video properties and click okay within that properties window you could also set up chroma keying for green screen things like that delays but we're not going to mess with that for right now and then I'm going to click and add an image this one's going to be my BRB image and then I'm going to click browse and I'm going to find my image that I've made for my BRB image now this can be for you you can make this with a variety of different programs I use Photoshop for my design work you can use whatever I'm not going to be doing a tutorial on this as that's a graphic design tutorial that I'm not suited to make but you can find plenty of them online and learn to do graphic design yourself now here's my BRB image that I use for tutorials and then I click okay now I have a couple Global Sources set up here so for my webcam stream I'm going to right click under sources go to add and I'm going to go to Global source and hit C920 and to click okay now if we preview the stream there's my webcam and it's full screen but say we don't want it to be full screen I'm going to hit stop preview we're going to right click add a scene we're going to call this desktop plus webcam we're going to go to sources we're going to add and then we're going to go to monitor capture this is going to show your whole desktop for monitor in case you're wanting to stream something from your web browser or you doing like Photoshop work or something like that I'm just going to leave the name monitor capture and you you're going to have your choice of different monitors so you're going to have to know which one's which you can also view that via the screen resolution window that I showed you before and click okay now we're going to right click again in sources hit add Global source and C920 click okay now when we preview stream you still see the webcam full screen but if we hit edit scene this red box comes up and we can drag the corners of it to resize it and put it wherever we want so I can put it in the bottom right hand corner and suddenly I have face cam while streaming my desktop you can put it wherever you want any size that you want Etc very useful for setting up live act or live reaction FaceCam videos and things like that I hit stop preview here next we're going to add the image scene so we're going to add a scene call it BRB and then this is what you would use if you needed to step away from your stream real quick so we're going to add a global source of our BRB screen and then now anytime we're streaming say we're streaming our webcam real quick hello hello hello and then we need to step away we can just click BRB and now all it shows is the BRB screen pretty simple we're going to make one more Scene here I'm just going to call it test because we're going to do a couple things with it just to show off you can also do instead of a full desktop capture you can add a just simply a full window capture and so if you add window capture Source you can add your options are only going to be limited to what kind of has Graphics going on in it so at the moment here we can try that um it's my streaming software I'm using to record this with now if I hit preview it's only showing the window of that program so it doesn't matter where I move the window it's only going to show the window of that program and I can overlay that onto something else you can also add game capture where right here game capture and we can call that uh game and then it's going to look for similar things where it hooks into whatever game's Graphics you have going at the time now you do need the game running and have pulled up the graphics for it before it can make the hook with this so if you do this before open your game you have to come back and actually add the game capture and then select your game before you can use it um but then hit okay and it functions in a similar way but it's going to be looking for a DirectX game so you got to make sure you have a game running and then you can add over top your G your webcam and things like that and do the same stuff lastly if you wanted to add text overlay right click add text call it whatever you want and then you can choose from any font installed on your system you can make it bold you can make it intall you can change the size you can add a outline or stroke and you can choose it from file which is how some of those programs for like currently song playings and things like that are coming from this is a test and then hit okay and then it hit edit scene and it overlays that on top of your stream which you can do whatever you want with although obviously if you're scaling it up you're going to want to change the font size up else it'll look like a pixelated mess and that's pretty much it for scenes there are other extensions you can do with this program with your with plugins like you saw here if I go add to CL CLR browser that's a plugin so you can add web browser updates on over top your stream you can add sub alert to it you can add lots of things like that where it pops up when you get a new subscriber or follower or donation you can stream record or start the replay buffer you can manage your Global Sources down here and then you can also change the volume of your desktop audio and your microphone this is extremely useful for making sure your stream sounds okay before you start streaming so let's say we hit preview stream here this is a test you can see how loud my microphone is and how loud whatever is playing on my computer is be that a video or a game and then you can turn that down so that way you can make sure that your voice is coming across across the other audio that is very important to use and then say you're on the BRB screen and you don't want anybody to hear you just click the microphone or desktop icon and it will mute either Source this was a bit of a lengthy video but it was a an updated 2015 version of my OBS tutorial and walk through to learn how to live stream from your computer to twitch.tv or hitbox.tv let me know if what other twitch tutorials you'd like to see well not twitch OBS tutorials you'd like to see in the description or in the comment section down below thank you so much for watching be sure to subscribe and check out our other videos and channels and the like give us a follow on Twitter Facebook Google+ Etc and I will catch you in a future video bye-bye\n"