Learn Open Broadcaster Software - OBS Live Streaming Course

Now it's time for the fun stuff! Let's start to add video and audio inputs to OBS including: webcams, video clips, audio, microphones, text and more.

In this video, Paul shows us how to add a webcam to OBS and talks about the ability to create fun dynamic OBS presentations with multiple cameras. If you have been following along with our complete 2019 OBS video production course, you know that these cameras are set up in scenes inside open broadcaster software. The OBS software organizes all of our cameras and media inputs into switchable production scenes that we can assign hotkeys. With the included transition effects inside OBS we can switch between multiple cameras using this PC or Mac-based live streaming software. 

As we have uncovered throughout this Open Broadcaster Software live streaming software course, you can create high definition video recordings as well as live streams to your favorite content delivery network (CDN) with this software. You can even control PTZOptics pan, tilt, and zoom cameras with a free OBS plugin.

The OBS “Video Capture Device” input allows users to bring in any live video devices available to your operating system. You can have Open Broadcaster Software installed on either Mac, PC or Linux computer. All video drivers that are available to the computers operating systems should be available to the OBS software in a selection menu. Once  you make a live video capture device selection you will be able to view the live video feed coming through an OBS preview screen. 

Once your live webcam feed has been selected inside OBS you can choose to “configure your video”. This option may provide different information depending on whether you are using the Windows or Mac version of OBS. In the Windows version of Open Broadcaster Software, you can adjust most webcam settings available using the UVC (Universal Video Codec) video drivers. Most cameras will allow OBS to access UVC camera settings that include brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, sharpness, gamma, white balance, and backlight compensation. These camera settings may not be available on all USB video devices. Keep in mind that most USB capture cards cannot change camera settings. Once you have selected your webcam inside the video capture device properties window in OBS you can choose a camera resolution. For this video presentation, we have chosen 1920x1080p video resolution at 30 fps (frames per second). 

Finally, in this presentation, we review how to set up and lock a picture in picture multiple camera setup in OBS. First all, you should create a scene inside OBS where you can store two camera inputs. For this video tutorial, we will create an OBS preset called “Webcam Picture in Picture.” Inside this OBS scene, we will add one new video capture device and one existing video capture device. Keep in mind that you should always have access to additional video inputs inside your OBS scenes that are already part of other scenes inside OBS. Therefore you can create multiple layouts of the same video resources OBS has access to in other scenes. This is an intelligent way for your OBS system to only select the video audio sources to process that you require in your video production processing. Now that you have both video camera inputs inside the same OBS scene you can rearange their position in the layer stack and resize each input. Perhaps you want to keep one video feed full screen and move a layer on top of our backgroung to be a picture in picture sytle layout. If that’s what you want to do with OBS, this is the right video tutorial and course for you! Thanks for checking this out and don’t forget to subscribe to the StreamGeeks. 

OK, we are finally ready to start our first live stream. We will live stream to Facebook using OBS. This is a great way to start becoming familiar with the RTMP Server and Streaming Key Basics. 

Controlling your PTZ camera with OBS has been a game changer! Ever since PTZOptics released an open source plugin for Open Broadcaster Software live streamers have had the ability to quickly take pan, tilt and zoom control of their PTZOptics camera directly from inside OBS. PTZOptics has made some significant improvements to the plugin over the past few months. Here is a list of new features for camera control using the PTZOptics OBS plugin:

1. xBox Joystick Camera Control Support

   1. New ability to quickly switch between multiple cameras

   2. New ability to zoom in and out with joystick triggers

   3. New ability to pan, tilt and zoom with multiple controller joysticks

2. Control up to 8 cameras using IP

3. New Advanced Camera Control Area

4. Control cameras Pan, Tilt and Zoom Speeds

5. Complete control over camera exposure - Iris, Shutter Speed and Brightness

6. Complete control over camera image and color - Luminance, Contrast and Hue

7. Control over White Balance - Modes include, Auto, Indoor, Outdoor, One Push and Manual

8. OSD (On Screen Display Menu) Access

9. Image Flip and Image Mirror functions

With all of these new features, OBS users can add more video production capabilities to their live streams. But there is more! PTZOptics has just published a new list of HTTP camera commands that are available for use with OBS and other video production software that supports web browser inputs. These new HTTP camera control commands allow OBS users to automate camera pan, tilt and zoom movements based on a selected OBS scene. OBS users can simply enter a web-browser input with e HTTP camera control string to control advanced PTZOptics camera operations including pan, tilt, zoom, focus, preset positions, and OSD menu navigation. The new HTTP-CGI Command Sheet is now available for use at PTZOptics.com/Downloads.

In this video, we will demonstrate how to set up an Elgato Stream Deck as a live streaming control surface for your favorite live streaming software and PTZ camera controls for PTZOptics cameras. Once you have unboxed your StreamDeck, go ahead and plug it into your computer which will provide the unit with power and connectivity. Your computer should recognize the USB connection almost immediately. The StreamDeck should light up showing you that everything is working. You are almost ready to go!

Now you need to download the latest software to setup your StreamDeck at, https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/downloads.

Note: If you are planning to use your StreamDeck to control OBS, make sure that you have OBS already installed. The StreamDeck control panel installs a plugin for OBS when it downloads. It will not load properly if OBS is installed after you install the StreamDeck control panel.

Once you have downloaded the software for either Mac or Windows you can go ahead and launch the program. You are now ready to program your stream deck.

On the bottom right corner, there is a button for more actions. This is where you can install custom action such as a CPU usage monitor, an analog clock and support for 3rd party streaming software such as vMix. Support for OBS, Mixer, StreamLabs, Twitch, Twitter, xSplit, and YouTube are built in by default.

You can add commands to your stream deck by dragging and dropping the commands you would like to appear on your StreamDeck to the buttons represented in this application. For each button, you should see that you can customize the name of the button. You will also be presented with options for configuration.

The physical device will show your changes as you are making them. A unique feature for the StreamDeck allows users to create profiles that allow you to open up new sets of buttons. For example, you can have a home profile and then you can have a profile for each PTZOptics camera in your studio or each social media platform you would like to control. You can add website shortcuts, application shortcuts, camera controls, audio buttons, and much more.

For this example, we will create a unique profile for a PTZOptics camera in our studio. You can also automate your live streaming software such as vMix, xSplit, and OBS. For this example, we will also demonstrate how you can use Open Broadcaster Software. You can control your PTZOptics camera directly inside OBS or you can create custom buttons to call PTZ camera presets.

Let’s start by setting up OBS. Go ahead and create a scene for each PTZOptics camera with that we want to use with a built-in camera preset command. We will use a web browser input to automatically control our PTZ cameras when we switch to our OBS scenes.

Start by opening up OBS and adding a scene for your first camera. Add your camera source and a browser source. Inside the browser, source uses the HTTP command for calling a camera preset. Set up your camera preset in the location you would like the camera to be at in this OBS scene. Don’t forget to click the “Refresh Browser when the scene becomes active” button to make sure OBS sends the PTZOptics camera a preset command every time you switch to this input. You can now duplicate this scene and change the HTTP command to represent a new camera PTZ preset.

Now back in Elgato Stream Deck software, let’s create a profile for OBS to store all of our OBS specific button commands. Click the top left-hand corner dropdown menu and click “edit profiles”. In the preferences, window click the plus button to add a new profile for OBS. We can now access this profile and create a new set of buttons that we can access from our home screen. It’s a good idea to also create a button to go back to the home screen at any time in these newly created profiles.

Let’s start by adding a stream and record button inside our OBS profile. Then in the OBS studio dropdown menu found in the right-hand sidebar, add a scene for each scene you have created inside of OBS. You can drag a “Scene” into any button in this profile. You can then name and configure which scene this button will trigger. Because our OBS scenes have built-in HTTP commands being sent to our PTZOptics camera, the cameras will move automatically when a scene is called. You can go ahead and test this by pressing the buttons.

Optionally, you can send PTZ camera preset commands directly to PTZOptics cameras. This may be a better option for remotely controlling your cameras. To do this, set up another profile in your StreamDeck for each PTZOptics camera you would like to control. In your newly created profile, choose the “Website” option under the systems tab. Here you can name your preset and enter the HTTP command from the list available on ptzoptics.com/downloads.

Note: You will need to know your cameras IP address in order to use HTTP commands. Generally, an HTTP command contains multiple variables used to communicate with your PTZOptics camera over IP.

You can customize the variables in the HTTP command to perform various video production actions with your PTZOptics robotic camera. Do not forget to click “Access in Background” option so that your StreamDeck does not open up a new web-browser every time that you use the button.

And that’s it! You now know how to set up an Elgato Stream Deck to control OBS and PTZOptics cameras. Setting this system up with other video production systems will be a fairly similar process. If you have questions please let us know in the comments below. We are really enjoying this new StreamDeck and look forward to sharing more in the future! So don’t forget to subscribe!

Did you know that you can now pause OBS recordings! With the latest version of OBS 24.0 or later you can pause a recording in OBS and then restart the recording when you want to. This is an awesome new feature available in the latest OBS 24.0 release candidate.

OBS recording formats that support pause and restart

In this video, we review the video formats that you can record in with OBS and pause the recording to be restarted. Currently, you can record video in Flv, Mkv, ts, and m3u8 for use with this new pause recording feature. When recording video, just remember that you cannot pause your live stream. But it is nice if you are recording video content of your live stream during the broadcast for later use. In this way, you can record short clips from your live stream and save them in one file with start and pause feature. One requested feature is the ability to pause a recording with the hotkeys. We will bring this up in the OBS user group.

New OBS 24 pause button during video recordings

Remember the popular Mp4 and MOV video recording formats do not support this new feature. OBS recording formats that support pause and restart are only Flv, Mkv, ts, and m3u8. The reason these video formats have this feature is that OBS has the ability to store this video without being finalized even if the computer is turned off due to a power outage. Assuming you have the latest version of OBS and your recording format selected properly you will see the pause button available once you start recording.

What are the other new OBS 24 features?

• The long-requested ability to pause recordings

• A new option to use dynamic bitrate adjustment while streaming instead of dropping frames when the internet is congested for whatever reason

• The ability to control browser source audio volume with the audio mixer, as well as apply audio filters, and output audio to stream only rather than desktop audio

• The ability to create custom browser dock widgets so you can have custom web pages opened whenever OBS is opened

• Hardware-accelerated decoding of H264 media files in the media source

• Updated x264, FFmpeg, and CEF versions on Windows. x264, in particular, has a number of new optimizations that should improve performance for anyone using software encoding

• A whole lot of minor optimizations to the program

Join the OBS User Group on Facebook here – https://www.facebook.com/groups/OBSUSERS/

In the latest version of OBS 24.0, there is a new feature to dynamically change the bitrate to manage bandwidth congestion. in this video, we review how to stop getting dropped frames in OBS during your broadcasts using this new feature. Remember this feature is still in BETA. So it's worth testing this feature with various bit-rates to see what gets the best results for your live stream. This new feature allows OBS to use dropped frames as a way to judge what the ideal bit rate should be.

If you are just learning about OBS, bitrate is essentially the quality of your live stream. You can have a 4K resolution live stream with a low bit-rate and it look poor quality. And you can have a 720p resolution live stream with a high bit-rate which could look great. So giving OBS control over your bit-rate is an easy way to optimize your broadcast as congestion in your network connection changes.

GitHub download here - https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/releases/tag/24.0.0-rc1

OBS 24 is now available and in this tutorial, you are going to learn how you can set up dockable PTZ camera controls inside of your OBS interface for PTZOptics cameras. Once you have downloaded the latest version of OBS (which should be 24.0 of later), you should make sure that you uninstall any previous version of OBS. Once you have uninstalled a previous version of OBS you can go ahead and install the latest 24.0 or later version.

The new feature you can use to create custom PTZ camera controllers are called “Custom Browser Docks” and it can be found under the main “View” dropdown menu nested in the “Docks” area. If you have never ventured into this area of OBS, you will notice you have the ability to reset and lock the current OBS user interface. You also have the ability to quickly open or close any of the dockable modules inside of your layout. Go ahead and play with your layout and determine which modules you want to access before moving forward.

Next, go ahead and download the custom “PTZOptics OBS Browser Docks” at PTZOptics.com/OBS. Once unzipped, you will find all of the PTZOptics open-source control software with a folder called “PTZOptics OBS Controllers.” Here, you will find small, medium and large controllers you can open up in any web-browser. You will see that the current designs look very nice in either the dark or Ranchi themes. Everything is completely customizable via CSS if you ever want to alter the look and feel of these dockable controllers.

Once you have downloaded the pre-designed PTZOptics OBS Browser Docks, unzip the files and put them somewhere safe on your computer. Next, you can go ahead and open up the docks that you plan to use. Go ahead and open up the small and medium-sized controllers in Google Chrome Web-Browser. From here we just need to copy and paste the HTTP URL information into OBS. Inside the “Custom Browser Docks” area you will find a table with two fields per item. You can name your custom browser dock and you can enter the URL.

Here you can enter the name of your first PTZ camera dock and enter the URL. You can have multiple docks for the same camera so you can have one small PTZ dock for quick controls and another medium-sized dock to quickly click on a preset image. Once you have added your docks name and URL click “apply”. This will create your browser window you can drag and drop into any module area of the OSB interface. For convenience, you can drag the small PTZ controller over the Scene transitions area. Notice that if you layer one dock on top of an existing one it will create a tab at the bottom of each docking area. You can now rearrange the order of these docks and add as many as you would like.

Now let’s set up this controller to work with our PTZOptics camera over the network. You should already have your cameras static IP address. If not, please refer to your camera setup video to learn how to set this up. Click the “Preferences” button and notice all of the options we have for this controller. You have the option to set pan, tilt, zoom, and focus speeds. You also have an area to enter the camera's unique static IP address. Go ahead and type your cameras IP address into this area and click “Reload Camera”. Once you have entered this information you need to refresh the OBS browser window. To do this, go ahead and delete the dock and re-add it.

Next, you can add the medium-sized ptz controller dock to the area next to the main program output of OBS in studio mode. You will notice that this will give you an area to have quick camera presets that you can customize. Each of the preset buttons will recall PTZ camera presets that are stored in the camera. You can customize these buttons by replacing the 90x90pixel images inside the “images” folder that came with your download.

So, lastly, what if you have multiple PTZ cameras and you to have controls for each available in the OBS interface. No problem. You will notice in your PTZOptics OBS Browser Docks that there are multiple folders for cameras 2, 3, and 4. You can go into each of these folders and get unique URLs for different cameras and import them into OBS just like we did with the last cameras. Just make sure to use the “Preferences” area to store your next cameras IP address into the browser. Also, make sure you are using one of the unique set of folders we have setup for you in the download.

So that’s it. You now have simplified your PTZ camera control setup inside of OBS. Please note that more advanced PTZ functionality is available via OBS plugin. But, for most users, this layout is more than enough to take full advantage of their PTZOptics and OBS live streaming setup.