Live-Streaming on Twitch for Beginners, Released

I’m pleased to announce that Live-Streaming on Twitch for Beginners, has been released to the courses portal on The Polyglot Developer website!

After having seen the growing interest in the few Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) and Twitch tutorials that were released on the blog, it only made sense to dig deeper into the subject and construct a course that goes over more material.

If you’re interested in broadcasting live content to Twitch, but aren’t sure where to start, Live-Streaming on Twitch for Beginners, is worth checking out.

Boost the Performance of OBS Twitch Streams on Mac and Windows

So you’ve decided that you want to start streaming content to Twitch, YouTube, or similar. When I say streaming, I mean live streaming, not publishing pre-recorded videos to be watched on-demand. Streaming is so popular that you might think it’s as easy as opening your web camera and clicking stream. The reality is that there’s a little more to it, more so around stream quality and performance.

Take my stream for example. I stream a few times per month on Twitch using The Polyglot Developer. The first few streams had a large amount of framerate stuttering, audio and video synchronization issues, and computers sounding like airplane jet engines. I was able to resolve these problems by changing the way I streamed with Open Broadcast Studio (OBS).

In this tutorial, I’m going to walk you through some of the things that can be improved in Open Broadcast Studio to give you better stream performance on the popular content streaming networks.

Live Stream with Guests Using OBS with Skype and NDI

As a technical content streamer, one of the most difficult tasks for me to accomplish was with having guests participate on the stream. To be clear, I don’t mean having guests participate in the chat, I mean having them on the stream with their video, audio, and sometimes screen.

Think about it. You’re streaming to Twitch or another platform using Open Broadcast Studio (OBS). You’re probably streaming your video and audio, but what happens if you need to include a guest? Do you do a Zoom meeting and screen-grab their video using OBS? If you’re capturing the guest video, how do you pipe their audio? What happens if they need to share their screen as well?

This can turn into a complicated mess.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to have guests on your stream without a bunch of complicated hacks. We’re going to see how to use a network device interface (NDI) with Skype for easy inclusion into Open Broadcast Studio.

Create a Stream Countdown Timer for Twitch with JavaScript

As you’ve probably seen, I’ve been ramping up The Polyglot Developer on Twitch, when it comes to live streaming developer content. What might not be obvious to the viewer of the live streams is the technical effort that’s involved in making the stream possible. For example, how do you position all the stream elements on the screen, or for that matter, broadcast a stream at all?

One of the things that took me a while to figure out was in regards to a countdown timer. I was broadcasting streams with a “Starting Soon” screen, but viewers didn’t actually know when the stream would start. Does “Starting Soon” imply a minute from now or ten minutes from now? Since I’m using Open Broadcast Studio (OBS), a countdown timer didn’t exist, so I had to go out and create one.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to create a countdown timer that can be used in your OBS project, or any project for that matter. We’re going to do this with simple JavaScript and HTML.