Let’s be honest now, you’ve seen those professional e-sports gamers broadcast their gameplay live for their audience to watch. You also have a beast gaming rig laying around doing nothing but collecting dust. So you decide to clean it up, turn it on again and live stream your insane gameplay as well. Just like most of the streamers nowadays, who are now earning millions by playing video games every year, you might also have a chance to grow from scratch to a professional e-sport gamer. Let see how to use OBS in this article.
Sounds so awesome! But here’s the deal, you do not know how to set up, configure, and use the OBS software. And after hours of researching around, if you found this article, then you are very lucky, as we bring you the complete beginners guide to how to use OBS as well as configure it according to your personal needs. If that is what you want to accomplish, then do keep reading!
What is OBS?
Just as in the case of science, where understanding those complex equations requires a thorough understanding of the basic concepts, you also need to clear your basics in this particular field also. So, What is this OBS thing? OBS is free software that allows you to record, capture, and, most importantly, share your screen to your YouTube or Twitch channel over the internet. Because of these three characteristics, OBS studio has created a special place for itself in the hearts of gamers and live streamers around the globe.
In addition to this, it provides tons and tons of templates, created by developers all around the world, for you to completely customize your stream according to your content or the audience, or both. Be it a webcam frame, a screen animation, a subscriber counter, or anything else that relates to streaming requirements; OBS offers them all.
Now with that out of the way, let us dive into the main topic. The ‘how to use obs’ guide can be conveniently be broken into two sections, and that is how we are going to do it to avoid any sort of confusion.
How to set up your stream layout?
This section related solely to the looks of your stream. You can have an extremely simple stream layout or a very aggressive gaming style one; it all depends on your taste!
Adding the Game Source
Most crucially, you need to select the window or game that OBS studio is going to capture and subsequently stream. You cannot stream a game without selecting a game! Follow the given steps to do it:
- Click the Plus-shaped icon in the Sources menu and then select the Game Capture option.
- Try and give your game capture a unique name. This will make it easy to recognize amongst several sources.
- Now you can customize the capture settings, depending on your computer’s hardware capabilities. The mode is what is important here: you can set it up to automatically capture any application that is in the fullscreen mode or manually select the window which is to be captured (though that will require you to start the game for it to appear). If you’ve got a dedicated capture card, this is where you ought to select it.
- Once you’re satisfied enough, click OK to save your settings and then add the source to your scenes panel.
Setting Up for the Required Platform
This section will deal more with the technical aspect of how to use OBS. Since there are a variety of online platforms that support live streaming – like Facebook, Youtube, Twitch, etc. – we can set up our stream specifically for any particular one, depending on your needs.
To set up OBS for your website of choice, follow the given steps:
- Since it is necessary to have administrator permissions while using a Game Capture software on PC, you will first have to right-click the OBS studio icon and select the Run as Administrator option.
- After the software opens up, Click on File.
- Now go into settings and select the Stream tab on the top left-hand side.
- Select the platform you want to stream on.
Since we have a wide variety of platforms to choose from, we will be looking at two of the most popular ones of all time, that is YouTube and Twitch.
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Twitch.tv
- While you are in the stream tab, open up the drop-down list of streaming services.
- Select Twitch from the list.
- Open up your browser now and navigate to your Twitch Tv dashboard.
- Click on the gear option to open up the settings.
- Twirl down to the Stream Key option. Under that, select the Show key option.
- Copy this key and paste it into the Stream Key text box in the Broadcast Settings section in the OBS Studio software.
- Hit Apply.
Youtube
- While you are in the stream tab, open up the drop-down list of streaming services.
- Select Twitch from the list.
- Open up your browser now and navigate to your YouTube Creator Studio section.
- Select the Live Streaming tab to open it (pretty obvious!).
- Search for the Encoder Setup section, and once found, click on the Reveal option to reveal the Stream Key.
- Copy this key and paste it into the Stream Key text box in the Broadcast Settings section in the OBS Studio software.
- Hit Apply.
- While you are in the stream tab, open up the drop-down list of streaming services.
- Select Facebook Live from the list.
- Open up your browser now and navigate to your Facebook Live Creation Page.
- Select the Create Live Stream option.
- Search for the Connect Tab, and once found, click on the Enable Persistent Stream Key checkbox to activate it.
- Copy the Steam key and paste it into the Stream Key text box in the Broadcast Settings section in the OBS Studio software just like the last time.
- Hit Apply.
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Conclusion
So that’s how you configure one of the best screen recording and broadcasting software, that is, Streamlabs OBS. We tried to keep the tutorial as simple as possible for you to get streaming without much fiddling around. One thing to keep in mind is that the OBS software requires some beefy specs to work correctly. And if that is not at hand, then streaming is a big No-No!
OBS has just loads of presets for you to download and get straight to work. But that’s not it. You can customize each preset and merge several elements to create your dream preset.
For more detailed instructions, you can refer to OBS’s official site: https://obsproject.com/wiki/OBS-Studio-Quickstart.
So what are you waiting for? Go and do some live streaming!
