In the previous posts I went over the things you’re going to need to think about and set up to get your IRL streams running smoothly from your home OBS setup. Here, I just want to summarize the steps you’ll go through. Many of these steps are covered in great detail by cliffcreates on his YouTube channel, so I’ll point you over there and just give you the outline.
Steps
- Get the external IP Address of your home network
- Setup DDNS (optional but recommended)
- Install IRL Pro or other livestreaming app on phone
- configure IRL Pro with your preferences for video quality etc
- Make sure your home IP address is set in IRL Pro
- Install TTS app on phone
- Install OBS Blade or other OBS control app on phone
- Setup port forwarding on your home router
- Install a standalone version of OBS that you will only use for IRL
- Configure OBS Scenes etc
- Configure Websocket Server Settings to accept incoming connections
- Install and configure Loopy SRT
- Install VNC software as a backup to access your PC (optional)
Testing
Once you have everything setup, it’s really important that you disconnect your phone from your home wifi and try to get your stream going using only your cell phone data plan. There are a lot of things that will seem to work fine when your phone is connected to your local network by wifi that actually won’t work when you are on an external network away from home. OBS Blade is an app that’s perfectly happy to work on my wifi network but as soon as I leave home it refuses to connect even though the IP address is correct. You might discover some firewall issues or other connection problems that just aren’t apparent at first because your firewall has different rules for external vs local networks. Speaking of your firewall, if I suspect issues I generally disable the firewall and see if that fixes things. If it does, I know I need to dig into the firewall settings to allow the ports OBS is trying to use then reenable the firewall. Other possible/likely sources of problems are your port forwarding settings and other router settings, especially if your router has a firewall in addition to the windows firewall on your PC.
Once everything works from your phone with wifi turned off then you can be pretty sure it will work from anywhere!
Go Live!
I think that’s it! IRL streaming is super fun and I’ve made a lot of great memories with chat while we’ve been out and about. I’m sure there are lots of tweaks you can make to the equipment and setup to make it perfect for your use case.
If you’re someone that’s thinking about dipping a toe, I hope this gave you the motivation to get started. If you’re not sure IRL is for you, why not go live from the Twitch App in your phone and see how it feels with no upfront cost. It really doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that!
If you have any questions feel free to reach out here in the comments or you can find me live on Twitch at https://twitch.tv/nerduino !
Useful Links
Equipment
USB-C splitter – This is the one but try to buy it somewhere else!
Neewer Battery – You almost certainly don’t need one this big, they have options!
DJI Mic 3 – Spendy vs some competitors but amazing.