How to Live Stream on YouTube – 2020 Setup Guide

– Going live on YouTube these days really isn't as complicatedas you would think.

– [Man] vidIQ.

– [Woman] vidIQ.

– [Man] vidIQ.

com (funky music) – So in this video, we'regonna discuss a few things.

I'm gonna go over hardwarethat you need to stream.

I'm going to go over softwarethat you need to stream, and I will also show youhow to set up your broadcast within YouTube itself.

Hello, I'm Dan, and welcome back to vidIQ.

We are the YouTube toolacademy and channel that help to educate youalong your YouTube journey.

Now as always with me, I like to give things a gaming focus, so I am going to be usingvideo games as an example, but in this case, all of this advice should apply to anytype of YouTube channel looking to learn how to livestream.

Since we're on the subjecttoday of livestreams, I wanna know from you, how often do you watch streams on YouTube? I know I myself watch a lotmore videos than livestreams, but how about you, whatare your viewing habits? (funky music) Streaming these dayshas gotten a lot easier when it comes to the hardwareyou're going to need to do so.

Instead of making anhour long video of about exactly what would giveyou the best quality stream for the best price, I'm going to explain to youwhat I'm using to stream from my own computer when I play games, and hopefully that givesyou a good base line as to what you could be doing.

More importantly than whatI'm already using though, is going to be your internet.

This is going to be the biggest bottleneck that you're going toface while livestreaming.

Internet is so important becausein some areas of the world, you just can't control whatkind of speed you're gonna get when you sign up for your internet plan.

The best thing I can recommend is no less than fivemegabits per second upload when you're trying to stream on YouTube.

Personally, I have 10 megabits per second for my upload speed, and it allows me to push abetter quality livestream.

Five is of course just mypersonal recommendation, I think any less, and you're going to strugglewhen it comes to quality.

As for the type of computeryou need to play a game and then livestream it at the same time, I have a GTX 1060, three gigabyte.

I have 16 gigabytes of RAM, and I'm using an olderAMD Ryzen 7 processor.

These items allow me to stream with 10 megabits per second upload.

I can play Minecraft at 1080pwith 30 frames a second, or I can play it at 720pwith 60 frames a second.

If I try to push it any higher than that, the game performance drops, the stream quality drops, and it's just not a good situation.

The bottom line is that hardwarejust gets really tricky, but with software coming asfar along as it has lately, it may not be so bad ifyou have a lesser computer, and going into software, I'll explain why.

(funky music) When we talk aboutsoftware for livestreaming, we're actually speaking of encoders.

Anything you've used tolivestream is an encoder, and I'm gonna be teachingyou with Streamlabs OBS.

There are a lot of encoders out there, and if you check the linkin the description below, it actually goes to YouTube's own page that has all these encoders it recommends, some of them free, some of them not, and I would recommend you check it out.

Thanks to how powerfulthese encoders have gotten, using something like Streamlabs OBS allows you to stream agame on your computer at a much higher quality than ever before, using a computer that doesn'thave to break the bank.

Before we dive in head first, I will warn you this set-upcan get very technical, and I'm gonna cover it very briefly, and in the most basic way possible, just to get you started.

All of the things I'm showing you are going to depend on you, at the end of the day, running test streams on your own channel, maybe even getting feedback from viewers on different testing streams you do, and then, going from there.

Really quick, we'lljump over to Streamlabs, and I'll show you how to get it set up.

So once you have Streamlabs OBS opened up, go to the bottom left, clickthis little arrow here.

It's log in, and you wannalog into your YouTube channel.

Follow all the prompts to connect your YouTubechannel to Streamlabs.

I don't need to log in, soI'm gonna hit skip for now, and we'll come back to this main window.

Let's get something on the screen here so you guys can have some context.

Right now, if we went live, this is what people would see.

So I'm gonna go down to sources, I'm gonna click the add button here and I'm going to add a game capture.

Click game capture and hit add source.

Let's call it Minecraft, hit add source, and it's actually going to look for a game to capture on your system.

Now, Minecraft is on in the background, but it seems to be havingtrouble finding it, which happens, so we'll hit the drop down.

I'm going to capture a specific window, and that specific window isgoing to be Minecraft 1.

15.

2.

Once we click it and hitdone, Minecraft should pop up, and you'll notice it's actuallybeing cut off significantly.

So you may want to adjust that.

I have a 4K monitor andthis window is 1920×1080.

So just go ahead and adjust the screen so it fills out perfectly, there's no black bars showingor anything like that.

And now, we have Minecraft.

And this is what peoplewill see when they jump in.

Now that our viewershave something to see, I'm going to very briefly go over some of the more technicalaspects of livestreaming.

Bottom left, hit the settings cog, and let's start by hitting stream.

If you didn't log into YouTube, you'll need to go grab your stream key, and I'll show you wherethis is in a moment.

But you already loggedinto YouTube hopefully, so none of this window will matter to you, or even look the same.

If we visit the output section, we can choose our encoder.

So right now, it's set to software x264, this is going to use my CPU todo all of my encoding for me, but if you want, you can change it to NVENCor the new version of that.

This uses your graphics card to encode.

Depending on what you're doing, the game you're playing, or the broadcast, the typeof broadcast you're having, this will vary, and you know yourbroadcast better than I do.

Personally, I prefer usingNVENC when I'm streaming, so I'm gonna go ahead and select that.

And I'm gonna do a bit rate of about 5, 000 because I already kinda know my system, and I know I can handle that.

Like I said before, this is going to taketesting on your part, so maybe 2, 500 is a goodplace for you to start, and you can go from there.

For the sake of not getting too technical, I'm gonna move on to the video tab.

You'll notice the base canvasresolution is 1920×1080.

I would leave it at that.

I don't wanna change that.

That's gonna be the sizeof this window right here.

And I did already haveto resize Minecraft.

In theory, I should probably raisethe base canvas resolution, but that's okay.

I just got this 4K monitor, and I don't feel like re-sizingall my different elements that I have on my normal livestream, so I'm gonna leave it at 1080, but the output scale is what's going to directlyimpact your broadcast, and I'm broadcasting at 720.

These days, when people watch livestreams, they watch them on a variety of devices, including phones and laptops.

So this screen beinga little more compact, being squashed down to 720, is probably gonna give youa higher quality livestream at little to no impact on the viewer.

And if you lower that resolution, it's going to get you closer to being able to streamat 60 frames a second, which will impacteverybody who's watching, regardless if it's anice, big TV or a phone.

So because I like high framerates when I'm playing games, I'm going to leave it at 720, but if you have a super awesome computer, maybe you can try 1080 at 60 frames.

That's all up to you.

The last recommendedsetting I'm gonna give you is under advanced.

You can scroll down and find dynamically change bitrate when dropping frames while streaming.

A dropped frame is basically when the stream can't really keep up and starts skipping those frames.

You just got a nice 60 frame stream going, but now, they're beingdropped little by little.

So if the software detects that, it will change your bitrate to keep up.

So this might take some of the sharpness away from the image, but the frame rate will stay high, which is what you want.

To save your changes, go ahead and click done.

And from there, you should be ready to click go live, but there's one more thing we need to do, and that's set it up on the YouTube end.

(upbeat electronic music) Setting up a live broadcast is a lot like setting up a regular video.

You still need an impactful title, a good description, some tags, and a good thumbnail.

Let's jump in.

So as you're in the YouTube Studio, go up to create, and then, hit go live.

If you've already streamed before, you're going to need a prompt that tells you that youcan copy all the settings, the thumbnail, thedescription, everything, from a previous stream, or you can go ahead andset up a new stream.

So I've gone ahead and clicked new stream, and now, I'm going toset up everything I need for the livestream.

I can put a title in.

So it's going to be, let'ssay, “Minecraft LIVE!” Don't make that your title.

That's very basic.

You can set it toprivate, public, unlisted, just like a normal video.

If you want it to be private for a bit just so you can keep tweakingthe description and stuff, go ahead and do that, but if you want people to know that you're gonna stream at some point, go ahead and make it public.

And then, just go in and fill all this out like you would for any other video.

Add a description.

Add a title for your game, that's really importantto help categorize you for the game itself.

So if you are playing Minecraft, then start typing it.

There you go, Minecraft from 2009.

Click that, it'll fill it in, and now, you will becategorized under Minecraft while you're live.

These obviously come up because I'm under the gaming option, but if we did somethingsuch as howto and style, that goes away because those are not categorizedthe same way as games.

From there, you're gonna wanna comedown and schedule for later.

I would highly recommend this.

A livestream is an event, and you want people to knowwhen it's going to happen.

So scheduling for later will allow you to setthe date and the time that you're gonna go live, and everyone will know exactlywhen to come to your stream.

And then, of course, uploading a custom thumbnailis always crazy important, no matter if it's a video or a livestream.

You want that thumbnailto be clickable because, just like anything, people are going to see it, and they're going tojudge a book by its cover, and if that cover's clickable, they're going to click on it.

Make sure you go intodetail about COPPA here, if the video is madefor kids or if it's not.

Select what's appropriate.

And if you want to restrict it for viewers that are 18 or over, this will basically tellpeople before they come in, “Hey, just so you know, thisstream might be pretty crass.

“So if you're under 18, go away.

“Don't watch.

” Now, I'm not actuallydoing this livestream, so I'm not going to make thispublic or anything like that, but you'd want to hit create stream once all that's filled out.

Once you've created the stream, you'll get this dashboard, and the dashboard will cometo life while you're live.

You can keep this dashboardon while you stream.

You can pop out the chat and watch it.

All that stuff is kindadone through Streamlabs too, your viewer count and yourchat are in Streamlabs, so you don't necessarilyneed to pop this out.

It's kinda up to you if you wanna watch thisstuff as you're streaming.

But the thing we can payattention to right now is all of this informationdown in the bottom left.

Basically, what normal latency does is it takes the broadcastand it renders a bit, buffers it a little bit, for the audience.

They're gonna get ahigher quality broadcast, but they're also gonna see a higher delay based on when their chat message goes out and the time you read it and maybe say it out loudand answer their question.

So people will kind of pick up on that.

Doing low-latency or ultra low-latency will cut down on that buffering time, but you risk the quality of your streambeing lower, obviously, because there's not enough time for that buffer to kinda build up.

Because you've already loggedinto YouTube on Streamlabs, you shouldn't need to worry about this, but if you're using a different encoder, not Streamlabs OBS, you will need to grab the stream key, and like it says, pasteit into your encoder, in that section in Streamlabsthat we saw earlier.

Sharing your stream key will, of course, let people take over your channel and stream whatever they want on it, and you probably don't want that.

After you're done streaming, you can go ahead andcome back to this page and check out the analytics, your viewer activity, your stream health.

Do all of that data analysisthat you would normally do after you upload a video.

We're not gonna worry about any of this right now, of course, because we're gonna be talkingabout streaming strategies in a future video.

To edit the tags on your livestream, you can actually go backthrough the Dashboard, click the live tab, and then, go your new broadcast.

Click on the pencil, and you'll notice this is almostexactly what it looks like when you upload a video toYouTube and go to edit it.

Scroll down, and you have a tag section.

you can even add your livestreamto a playlist from here.

Whether you play video games, go fishing, do a daily vlog, I hope that this video was helpful to you for setting up yourfirst YouTube livestream.

Don't forget to subscribe because I have more videos onlivestreams coming very soon, including one about when to do one.

Thank you so much for watching.

I'll look forward toseeing you in the next one.

Have a great day.

.