Background
I don't know why i always had this desire (in native tongue Keeda) of sharing my learning with the community & improving/learning from the feedback. The journey for the same manifested via blog posts, Q&A on our SAP Community. I was pretty satisfied with it but in parallel kept on thinking how this can be enhanced. I never knew about Live-Streaming till the time our mentor DJ Adams introduced this to us starting via his channel on Twitch then moving to Youtube. The moment i heard of it, i knew this is direction where i wanted to explore more. But my initial reaction was its way too complex for me. But it turned out other wise😀
Bare minimum What all we need to start?
I realized all we need is a decent laptop with a webcam to start it, pretty simple right. Of course you need to decide on which platform you want to stream for example i wanted to do it on Youtube. When i saw DJ's stream he had his screen also as well his camera being projected in same view that is when i got to know about OBS(Open Broadcaster Software). OBS is what allows you to create different scenes for different times, such as when you are starting a stream what shall be shown to audience, when you are offline what shall come etc...
I was overwhelmed and created few scenes. Only thing which i did not like about OBS was each time i have to first schedule a session on Youtube and then provide the key manually to OBS. I found it bit irritating. So the search to ease out this experience started that is when we discovered Streamlabs. Streamlabs is built on top of OBS but with all enhanced features. The moment you login into Streamlabs using your Youtube account, you don't need to add a key each time. Plus it comes with very nice inbuilt widgets such as chats, subscriber notifications etc. which is like icing on the cake!
So I had my streaming set up ready with a laptop, Streamlabs and a Youtube account. I already had an additional desktop which i used as an extended one. I was like it is done we are good...no...read on what happened after we got the feedback from my first session😀
Working on 1st Session Feedback!
The first feedback which we got from session was good but my face was not clearly visible😀. I was like okay let me see what we can do. So looking around i found out we can use my phone also as a webcam using an app named EpocCam. I ended up buying the paid version of the app its very good. So the set up got enhanced to as shown below.
Does the story end here no no.. the second session had another feedback read on..
Working on 2nd Session Feedback!
The feedback from one of the person was about sound quality which can be enhanced if possible. I was like okay. Let me try to see what i can do, i ended up buying a micro phone, Maono which actually just worked like magic that too with default set up. I have not got into the details of modifying parameters, planning it soon. So as a result my current set up got enhanced to as shown below. I was like now everything is good now but my 3rd session led me to another change😀 read on!
3rd session brings another change
If you see we have an extend desktop, so normally on extended desktop my Streamlabs run and then we broadcast the laptop screen. Since during the stream we have multiple windows to be opened in one frame it makes sense to have Streamlabs running on laptop and desktop being used for screen sharing. I was like okay lets do it but then i realized the jugaad which i have used to set up phone😜 does not fit well here!. So that led me to add a a Logitech webcam to the desktop. So the final set up looks something like as shown below. So when we livestream now, in the normal chit chat scene we are using phone and while doing live coding on desktop we switch to webcam.
You can see the use of both the views in below mentioned screen shot!.
The next question is does it stop here?
Obviously not, looks like the more we stream the more we learn:). I believe this set up shall keep evolving. I am just using every setting as default one and its working perfectly fine. I for sure know that i will tinker with them the more i understand the technical jargons. I hope this experience helps you in getting started into streaming and sharing of knowledge what you have. Feel free to share your setup details or provide any feedback. My rants can be heard on Youtube or on Twitter😀
Top comments (2)
I get a lot of questions about when to use OBS and Streamlabs OBS. It's all about what works for you, or in your case, what you found kind of annoying! In my case I prefer OBS because I was streaming to different YT and Twitch pages, so I wanted to make sure I grabbed the right credentials for the right stream and that extra manual step was a good way for me to double check.
Happy Streaming!
Thanks Amara for the comment. i got it... this was my only purpose to share it might help someone to start streaming along with i get good feedback and suggestion from others like i got one from you:)