So far we’ve got our devices sorted out, we have power and some sort of magical wireless way of moving our video feed to our home PC. Next up are a few practical considerations. These are the things that work for me in the way I IRL Stream. Give them a go and if you find a better way for your style of IRL let me know in the comments!
Monitoring Chat
Chat gets grumpy if you don’t reply to them so we need a way to see or hear what they’re saying!
Text-To-Speech (TTS) audio is essential for me in a situation like riding a bike where I can’t be looking at a screen to follow chat. If looking at a screen is not a limitation for your activity, you can either follow chat on your phone screen via IRL Pro or have a second device strapped to your wrist that you use to watch chat while your primary phone is streaming the video. The bigger that screen is the better (up to a point!) as it can be hard to follow if chat is moving fast on a small screen.
I honestly think the Text To Speech option is the best solution for most IRL applications if you’re a small to medium size streamer (Most TTS apps can only buffer a limited number of messages, so in a really busy chat it will start getting left behind). The ability to follow chat while looking around and being present in the focus of your IRL streams without constantly staring down at a tiny screen cant be beat in my opinion. Currently I use IRL Plus Chat for TTS and its been great.
As an extra bonus of the TTS it means if you are streaming from an Android device you don’t need to keep your screen on all the time, saving yourself a lot of battery and heat (overheating phones if you are IRL in the sun can be a real thing!). I have heard apple products won’t keep the stream going if you turn off the screen but I don’t use them so I can’t say for sure. Of course then you can’t see the video feed but in the case of a fixed camera like I have on the bike, once I have the video set up the way I want it, I’m not going to change it so I can safely shut off the screen.
Controlling Stream
Ok, your IRL rig is ready to go and you want to hit the ‘Start Broadcasting’ button, but it’s many miles away back on your home PC. Fret not, this is not the disaster it appears. There are a couple of options, both work. There are apps, the one I use is called OBS Blade, that will connect to your home OBS setup and give you buttons to start and stop stream and also switch scenes. I have not been able to get this reliably working for me, when it does, it’s great. I can’t figure out if it’s a firewall issue with Windows or what the deal is. My backup is to have a VNC server running on my windows machine so that I can remotely connect from my phone and start and stop stream. It’s a bit clunky, but in a pinch it works fine. Loopy SRT then takes care of automatic scene changes if my bandwidth goes low etc.
Connecting To Your Home PC
One detail we need to get into a bit is the IP address of your home PC. Most of us have dynamically assigned IP addresses from our Internet Service Providers and these can change (If you can get a static IP address and plan to IRL stream a lot, it might be worth doing). Often your IP address won’t change for weeks or even months, but then you have a power outage or reset your router and your ISP will serve you a different IP address from the available pool. This can cause havoc because the streaming app on your phone needs to know the address of the computer where it can find OBS to send your video feed.
There are a couple of ways around this. The most basic is just to double check the IP address of your streaming PC before you head out to IRL stream. The only time this will fail is if your IP address changes at some point after you check and before you start livestreaming. This does also means you have to mess with your streaming app on your phone every time to fix the IP address. It’s fine and it works but its just one more thing to worry about and remember to do and if you forget and your IP address has changed you won’t be IRL streaming using this setup on that day (Don’t give up, just go live in the native app on your phone and IRL stream anyway!
My preferred method to avoid some of this is to use dynamic DNS (DDNS) with a service likenoip.com. DNS or Domain Name Server is a computer (or series of them) that maps human readable website names like www.apnews.com into an actual IP address, say 192.168.0.1 (I know, I know). You set up an account somewhere like noip.com and create a human readable website name like superstreamer.ddns.net. Then you can tell your home router to contact ddns.net regularly, log in to your superstreamer account and update the IP address that superstremer.ddns.net points to. Magic, now any time I want to IRL stream, my IRL streaming app just points to superstreamer.ddns.net and it will always find my home PC even when the IP address has changed. Setup sounds worse than it is honestly and there are plenty of tutorials out there and at noip.com itself. The basic service is free although you do have to go in and confirm your account once per month. They email you to remind you, but if you want rid of that you just have to pay them a few bucks.
OK, that was a lot! Take a break and in the final part of this series we’ll go over a checklist of the things you’ll need to do to get IRL livestreaming to your home PC working and talk a bit about testing the setup!