Category: OBS

Twitch Launches 2k/1440p and Dual Format for most!

A screenshot from the Twitch Dashboard, showing Advanced Broadcast Features

Twitch has released today:

Pop over to Stream Settings on the Twitch Dashboard to see which of the features are available to you!

Heres the Tweet:

Getting Started

Assuming you meet the hardware requirements (this is for 1440p AND vertical together), which briefly is:

  • OBS v32.0 or newer
  • NVIDIA 2000 or newer, AMD 6000 or newer (check the help guides for in depth)
  • The upstream internet to support this, either 9Mbps with Improved Server Side Transcode 20Mbps otherwise

    Assuming you meet those requirements, to get Dual format going you just need to utilize a plugin for OBS and the easiest to get going is Aitum Vertical.

You can find that here or if you need the Zip for installing to portable OBS, or just don’t like installers, you can find Github Releases here. It works well with Aitum’s Multistream platform, to say, send Vertical to YouTube for example.

Once that plugins installed and active, it’s just a matter of in OBS do the following:

  • Open Settings
  • Visit Stream
  • Check “Enable Enhanced Broadcasting”
  • Leave the two “Maxium” fields set to Auto, should never need to touch those
  • Under “Addtitional Canvas” select “Aitum Vertical”
The settings dialog of OBS showing the relevant Multitrack Video settings

Now all thats left to do is under docks enable if not already:

  • Vertical
  • Vertical Sources
  • Vertical Scenes

Places those docks as needed, heres my layout for example:

A screenshot of OBS showing Docks layout

Here I put my Vertical Scenes with Horizontal and Vertical Sources with Sources.

Scenes and Sources

Then all that is left to do is to Setup your Vertical scenes and sources, which you should be familar with, having done it horizontally already and Vertical will present your existing horizontal sources if needed!

Take time in vertical to consider the layout, generally on mobile the lower 1/3 will be where chat is (to viewers) so consider there when choosing you layout. And be aware viewers on mobile can resize chat to take up more/less space how they feel (from the bottom up)

Linking Scenes

Once you have made your Vertical Scenes and sources, make sure to LINK your Vertical and horizontal sources together, so that when horizontal changes scenes, vertical follows!

A screenshot of OBS showing how to link a Vertical scene to a Horizontal one so the outputs follow the scene selections!

To do that, right click a vertical scene, go to linked scenes and select the matching horizontal scene. Here my vertical and horizontal are called the same so Vertical “Pause” is linked to Horizontal “PAUSE”.

Thats it, now when you go live on Twitch you’ll be sending both Horizontal and Vertical feeds. Viewers on mobile can easily switch between the two by JUST rotating their phone, and you can check your own Vertical feed in the dashboard stream manager!

Quality Check

Want to check your feed qualities? Pop over to the Twitch Inspector and check whats going on. Heres my last stream! Can easily see that I’m doing horizontal and vertial and the speeds that I’m sending!

A screenshot of a stream from Twitch's Inspector tool!

I think that about covers it. Go forth and dual format and check out the help guides if needed!

BUT WAIT THERES MORE

Check out the LIVE demo of Mary Kish doing the Setup here on Today’s Patch notes (a successful live tech demo no less!)

OBS 32.1’s new SHINY

OBS 32.1 is out and comes with some shiny stuff.

Aside from partial Canvas support into OBS Websocket, which is handy now that dual format streaming (and/or sending horizontal one place and vertical to another) is a thing. So WebSocket consumers can have some idea whats going on, but I need to sit down and play with that a little more before I comment further.

But what I have already been playing with is the new Audio Mixer, (I had some tester access to a build with the Audio Mixer in thanks to Warchamp whose leading the work on tweaking/updating the OBS UI)

So what does the new Audio Mixer do? Well in a nutshell:

  • Clearly shows which sources in the audio Mixer are Global (or pinned), Active in this scene or hidden (either due to manually hidden or not on the active scene)
  • Easy access to “monitor this source” without having to open the Advanced Audio Settings UI (and see the monitoring state)
  • Pin an audio source (to move it from the local to global list)
  • AND THE BIGGEST USEFUL THING: Ability to Rename Audio Sources! (and to some degree sort sources in the dock as it’s Alphabetic)

In Pictures

So your Audio Mixer can go from

to

Summary

So here on the new UI, you can see I already renamed my global sources, no more Mic/Aux 2/3/etc it’s closer to the Windows Device name for the source as set in main settings -> Audio.

But what else does it do? Bottom right you can see a new monitoring status button/icon, you no longer have to go into Advanced Audio Settings to toggle monitor on/off and you can much easily see which sources are montored!

So left to right, the global/pinned group then the scene active group. And then sources are alphabetic sorted instead those groups.

So get renaming after updating today!

Check out the full change log for OBS 32.1.0 over on Github or check your OBS today for the update!

And you can offer feedback via the OBS Discord!

OBS 32.0.0 the one that will be pain (sorta)

Well OBS 32.0.0 is out, and it’s gonna be pain, but in a good way, wait is pain ever a good thing.

It’s similar pain to the OBS 28 to anything after 28 move but PAIN all the same.

Along with all the new shiny features, like FiniteSingularity’s Plugin Manager, theres a bunch of changes under the hood! And the “Streamer Important” of these changes are what this blog post is gonna blog post about!

You can go read the full change log, over on the Releases Page, new shiny features at the top!

OBS 32's Plugin Manager

Look at this AWESOME Plugin manager. (OBS on line 2? Well thats Logitech’s Plugin apparently… go figure)

So What Broke

So since I have a finger in a LOT of pies, not just on Twitch but other realms, all within Streaming space, I’ll pull OBS Beta’s as they come and start testing. (Curse past me for setting my Mac OBS to always grab the betas… but whatever)

So, I pulled down OBS 32.0.0 beta 1 and it crashed on Launch. Here is the GitHub report yeah in the OP I was blaming EVERYONE and their dog (not Finite’s Dog). Took some better knowing peeps to trace it down and at the time I was busy and couldn’t do my own tracing. (Was too busy OMGWUT-ing to “upstairs” with “please don’t let customers go to 32.0.0 just yet)

Beta 2 fixed the crash on launch issue. But the problem here was the Streamdeck Plugin calling something that was removed from OBS in 32.0.0, since under the hood changes are dropping support for some legacy/older plugin hooks (or so I believe), and the SD plugin was invoking that and the fault wasn’t “safe caught” leading to OBS to crash instead of skip plugin loading.

Elgato was informed and so they chimed in with a “we are on it“, praise be to Videophile.

OBS 32.0.0 is General Release

So OBS 32.0.0 is now “released to the masses”

Heres what you need to do step by step, these steps are valid for OBS 31.x.x but shouldn’t be different for Older OBS, if on OBS Portable HAVE FUN! But you should know what you are doing here if you are running portable anyway…

  1. “File” -> “Show Settings Folder”
  2. Take a copy of the folder “basic” your scenes and profiles are in here and you should routinely back this up. (sure this doesn’t backup media assets (images/videos) that your scenes use thats up to you to sort but will preserve file paths and the like)
  3. Close OBS
  4. Next to update Streamdeck, first check that Streamdeck itself is “recent” should be running at least Software Version 7.0.0. Hit the “Cog” -> “General” -> “Check for Updates”. (At time of writing V7.0.1 is available) this step may also do the next step for you.
  5. If Streamdeck has updated it’ll restart, next Hit the “Cog” -> “Plugins” -> Scroll to OBS Studio, “Check for Update”, anything newer than 2.2.8 and you should be good. (Current version is 2.2.9.9), side note: most plugins have auto update, but some plugins you installed before that was a thing won’t so check those manually if you want.
  6. Now Open OBS and let OBS update to 32.0.0 (do “Help” -> “Check for Updates” if not auto prompted)
  7. Away you go!
Streamdeck showing running version 7.0.0 - Build 22005
OBS Studio plugin for Streamdeck showing "outdated" 2.2.8

Other Plugins

After Restarting OBS into 32.0.0 you’ll want to check for and update any other plugins you use/consider important before you go live for the first time.

Notably ratwithacompiler has put out an update for the Closed Captions Plugin, that a lot of people use (and the one I recommend to people for adding CC’s to your streams), during the OBS 32.0.0 beta phases, to fix a similar fix to what Elgato has needed to do.

But everyone installs different plugins, and currently Plugin Management is manual and not all plugins with hint you need to update. (Why “currently” you say? Well the new Plugin Manager is going to be looking at hinting for updates I understand! YAY)

Aitum Multistream will for example, but I don’t think they have any updates at time of writing. Since it works fine under OBS 32.0.0, I just know it has a visible thang for “update available”.

Post Amble

Just doing my OBS updates, nice alert 😀 I know which ones I need to go and do now, but if you have other plugins make sure to check manually in case they didn’t get reported as not loading!