I’ve been doing more IRL streaming lately including a 70 mile charity bike ride last week! It’s been a lot of fun and a few fellow streamers have asked about my setup so I thought I’d make a post here that people can reference. I use Twitch but most of what I say here can be used for other platforms like YouTube Live or whatnot. Links to all the software and apps I mention are included at the end of Part 4.
Options
Before you get started IRL streaming you need to make a decision and that’s how you will get the signal from your phone/camera to the streaming platform of your choice. There are three main ways to achieve this:
- You can just use your phone and the Twitch app (or the app for wherever you stream), click go live and have a blast. The big plus here is it’s the easiest method and If you are in a location with its own wifi and a good cell signal (5G preferably) it will likely be fine. It does have drawbacks. The biggest one is that if you lose signal your stream will be blank and its possible the platform will end your stream so you may be restarting a lot. Using this method also means you have no overlays, no bot and so on. It’s quick and its simple and I’ve used it. If you want to dip a toe into IRL give this a try first!
- The second two options are kind of similar, you send the stream from your phone somewhere else before it is sent to your streaming platform. There are two flavors of “somewhere else”.
- You can pay for a third party service like restream.io, send the feed from your phone there and then add overlays, disconnect protection and so on. This is fairly simple, but you’ll pay them for all that convenience. Depending on what features you want this can get kind of expensive and if your IRL streams are just a small part of your overall streaming, like a couple times a month, then you have to decide if its worth it.
- The final option is the one I use. I run OBS on my home PC and stream from my phone to OBS on the home PC then stream that feed to Twitch. That means I can have my bot running, I have disconnect protection running and I can basically do all the things I would do if I was sitting at my home streaming setup. It’s free and it works great. There are two main downsides. There is work involved in setting everything up and you have to forward ports on your router. This isn’t very hard to do (sort of medium tech skills I’d say) but it does introduce security vulnerabilities that you aren’t exposed to with a service like restream.io. On the up side its free and you have complete control over your stream.
From here on I’m only going to talk about the third method and in general terms so you know what’s involved and can decide if you think it’s worth it or if you just want to go with a service.
Before I get into too much detail, here is the basic setup: streaming device (phone/GoPro) sends signal to home router -> router forwards signal to the PC you have running OBS -> OBS adds video feed from streaming device to OBS scene and then on to your streaming service (Twitch in my case). You also have a small app called Loopy SRT running on your OBS PC and that will detect if the video from your phone either stops or becomes very low bandwidth and automatically change scenes for you. You can use an app like OBS Blade to start/stop stream and manually switch scenes.
That’s basically it! The rest is details. I’ll stop here for this post. Click here to get into the details in Part 2!