Streaming Open Source Development on Twitch — Part 2
My Software Setup & used 3rd Party Services
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TL;DR
Software: Broadcasting Software, Keyboard Shortcuts Tool
3rd Party Services: Community Building, Audio Routing, Background Music
Software Setup
Check out the first part of this series to learn about which hardware I’m using. But here’s the software side of things, the most important streaming-related apps including price, my settings, and some alternatives to consider.
Broadcasting Software: SE.Live (OBS with plugins)
ℹ Description:
The heart of all streams is the braodcasting software. This is what produces the live video & sends it to Twitch (or other platforms like YouTube) as a combination of many different sources. I use it to capture my screen, my webcam, apply a green screen filter, capture my microphone audio, run filters on the audio, run background music, show stream-related alerts like follows, provide sound alerts, switch between different scenes e.g. when I start/stop the stream or have a break.
This is quite a lot of things in one software, so it’s really important to choose the right tool here. The good news is, there’s an open-source project for this named “Open Broadcaster Software”, short “OBS” with 37k starts on GitHub with lots of features that other companies can rely on. I use the StreamElements variant because it’s very close to the original OBS Studio with some extra plugins for community building purposes.
💰 Price: Free (the OBS base is fully Open Source, the plugins are not)
⚙️ My Settings:
I basically set up two types of scenes: When I’m not visible and when I am. For the latter, I downloaded a nice background video from Pixabay and added a dim layer on top of it so the screen feels alive even if I’m not there. I’ve created 3 scenes (before/break/after) with basically the same setup but different text:
