How To Do a Live Broadcast Of Your Mac's Screen Over YouTube Or Facebook Using OBS Studio

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to set up OBS Studio on your Mac to broadcast live over YouTube or Facebook.

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So you notice that a lot of people like to broadcast live over YouTube and Facebook. This is pretty easy to do using your WebCam or your phone camera. But what if you want to broadcast the screen of your Mac at the same time. So you want to demonstrate something on the screen or run through a Keynote presentation at the same time as showing yourself in the corner from your camera. Just like how I do my  videos. Now my tutorials like this one aren't live so I'm using a different process.

But when I do this live what I do is I use software called OBS Studio. It stands for Open Broadcaster Software and it's completely free software. It's cross-platform. Just go to obsproject.com and then download the Mac version there. Then it's actually pretty easy to set things up. 

So this is what you'll get when you startup OBS Studio. Now there's a large area here in the middle to see what it is you're going to be broadcasting. At the bottom there are Scenes, Sources, Audio Mixer, some Transitions, and some Controls. First let's start with Scenes. Your first scene may already have something in it. I've got one that's blank. Either way we can just create a new one with the Plus button at the bottom here. I could call this, you know, Broadcast. You can create as many scenes as you want. So you can save all your settings for this live broadcast and then do it another way another time and then go back and forth.

So I've got this broadcast scene here. Now each scene has multiple sources. Let's start off first with the screen. I'll hit the Plus button here and I can choose from all these different types of sources. So I'm going to choose here, Display Capture and it's going to ask me to name it. I can name it whatever I want. I'll call this Display Capture, just the default, and hit OK. It will start off showing my screen. Now if you only have one display it's just going to show what you have on your screen. You're going to see kind of what looks like a funhouse mirror effect where you see your screen reflected  inside the screen inside the screen, etc. I have multiple displays here so I've got one selected that is not the one we're looking at. 

However even if you have only one display once you get things going you can hide OBS and it will still broadcast in the background and you won't see that repeated screen effect. So I can hit OK here and you could see this screen is actually larger than the broadcast video. I can go into Settings here and under Settings I can look at Video and could see I'm doing 1280 by 720 for a stream. Of course this screen is a lot larger than that. But I can grab a corner of it, just like you can in graphic's apps, and shrink it down. Then I could lock it there and I'll grab the other corner and enlarge it. Chances are your screen may not be the exact ratio for broadcast resolution anyway. So you may end of setting it to be something smaller than the screen, like that. 

Now let's get me on there. So I'm going to add another source. So the idea is you get multiple sources and mix them on the screen. Just like professional broadcasting software. So I'm going to do a video capture device. So I'll just it like Webcam and hit OK. Now I choose the device. So I've got a webcam hooked up to this Mac here. You would just choose yours, and there I am! Hit OK. Now this is another layer on top of the screen there. So I can shrink this down as well to create a smaller one. You know kind of get it to the size I want. Put it in the bottom corner or top corner. Wherever you want. You could even hold the Option key down and drag to crop. So I can crop this in here. 

Now I can deal with audio. Once I've selected the webcam here I'll see the Audio Mixer and I'll see Audio there. If you see it all the way down to zero you're not going to get any audio from there and that might be what you want if you've got an external microphone because I can hit the Plus button here and say Audio Input Capture and add a microphone I've got attached to my Mac. But in this case I'll use the mic that's part of the webcam. So I can arrange this anyway I like. Put this anywhere I want. I can even manipulate it live once I'm broadcasting.

So once I've got things setup like I want I can go and now broadcast it over YouTube or Facebook. Let's start with YouTube. So the general idea here is you need to go into Settings and then there's stream. Here you set what type of service you're using. So you've got YouTube, you've got Facebook, and several others. Then you leave it at the primary server there. You need the Stream Key. So all you need is this special little stream of characters that represent your stream.

To do that you go into YouTube, into your channel, and you say you want to start a live broadcast. Once you do there's various things you could set for the live broadcast. Once you've got it all setup you'll see there a Stream Key. You can copy that Stream Key from YouTube and you can switch apps from your browser back to OBS and paste the Stream Key in. Once you do that then all you need to do to start broadcasting is hit Start Streaming. OBS on your Mac should start streaming what you see here to YouTube. It may take 10 or 15 seconds for it to actually show up and be seen as a stream in YouTube. Once it does then you could go live on YouTube and begin your stream.

Likewise it's almost exactly the same process for Facebook. In Facebook you go to create a new post but you'll see there's a Live button there and you could click the Live button and then you could setup your stream there. That stream also includes a Stream Key and you could take that and then paste that in OBS Studio but you choose Facebook instead of YouTube live. But you have that same field for Stream Key. You paste that in and then you could start streaming and you'll be streaming live on Facebook using OBS.

So back here in OBS there's a ton of stuff you can do as you're broadcasting. You could add different types of Sources. Like, for instance, I could add Text as a source. So I'll add some text in here and hit OK and I can type whatever I want. So like, you know, MacMost.com because I want to promote my site or something. I hit OK and you could see it appears here and, you know, you could have adjusted the fonts and done all that stuff. Then you can position that where you want. Notice you can Hide and Show that. But you can also have different scenes. So I  could Control click on here and duplicate this scene and let's create Broadcast 2. Let's say in Broadcast 2, you know, I've got MacMost.com up here and my webcam down here. In Broadcast 1 I can go in and let's remove the MacMost from there and I will move this over here. So now I can switch between Broadcast and Broadcast 2 like that. So I can create a whole bunch of different ones and switch between them very easily just by selecting a new scene.

You can even go over her to Scene Transitions and change the type of transition. So I have it set to Fade now but I can add, say, a Swipe instead. Call it Swipe. Set the direction. Hit OK. Now I can switch between these. Now if I'm on Swipe when I go and switch between them that's what it does. So you can create all these different transitions and set that up here. 

There's a ton more you can do in OBS Studio. If it seems like it's super powerful and does all sorts of really cool things that's because it does. It really is pretty cool software. There's a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts that you can set so you can easily kind of switch by just hitting keys on your keyboard to different scenes and write things up and do all sorts of stuff. So it pays to actually spend time playing around with OBS Studio and learning all these different cool tricks. Then you'll look like a real pro when you're doing a live broadcast over YouTube or Facebook.