Going live on Twitch for the first time and testing bandwidth

Chris Biscardi: [0:00] We've downloaded OBS, we've set up our very first, very basic scene that just shows our desktop and lets us put our mic audio through. Now, what we want to do is we want to start streaming.

[0:12] If we go into Settings, we can see that we can pick a different service to stream from. We will pitch Twitch, even though we can pick Mixer, Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, things like that. We'll leave the server as Auto (Recommended), and we'll need a stream key.

[0:29] If you click on this link here, it will send you to the Twitch dashboard. There are two types of stream key. One is your Primary Stream key, and the other is your Test Stream key.

[0:41] This does bring up one good point. While Twitch makes it really nice here, and I can copy this out and get into OBS without you ever seeing it...If we click show here, Twitch actually warns us that we're about to leak our keys, which is nice. If I do this, you can see that it's live, whatever, whatever, and then a bunch of other characters.

[1:07] In other settings, in other applications, since we're going to be streaming code or design, or whatnot, we're going to end up in places that have secret keys that we don't want to leak.

[1:19] You will eventually leak your key, which means that you need to know where this reset button is for every application that you ever are going to use on stream. You will eventually have to click this button and reset the key.

[1:32] If you show a key on stream at any time, you must reset it. I'll repeat, you must reset it. It doesn't matter if it was only on screen for a split second, it doesn't matter if it was only on screen for one frame.

[1:48] If it was on screen, what that means is that anybody can reverse through your stream, find that scene, find that frame, and then copy the key out. Once it's on stream, it's gone. It's over. You need to reset your key.

[2:07] I'll hide this again and I'll reset my key. I'll copy it out. Back in OBS, I will put in my stream key. I'm just going to show this to you so that you know what it looks like. There's one more bit of magic sauce to put into this.

[2:24] This is our stream key, which will make us go live on Twitch immediately. There's another option here. If we add what is basically a query string to the end, we add ?bandwidthtest=true, our stream key is now a test stream key. We can stream and check our bandwidth settings, and things like that, without streaming live.

[2:50] If we hit Start Streaming now, we go to our dashboard, which is also known as the Stream Manager these days. We can see that we're never live. This allows us to test all of our bandwidth and our ctu usage, and things like that, before we go live. Let's stop streaming.

[3:12] I'll take ?bandwidthtest=true off of the end. If I click Start Streaming, and we refresh the Stream Manager, you'll see that we see our stream up in the Stream Manager. We've got ourselves muted. If I bring this up, we'll hear what we sound like.

[3:33] We can also do things in here like Edit our Stream Info, give our Title for our stream. Once we have subscribers, our Go Live Notification will go out every time we go live. We can also do things like search for categories. We'll do Science & Technology. In Tags, maybe I'm doing some Web Programming, or Web Development, or just Programming in general.

[3:58] That will put us in and give us an achievement for the first thing that we've ever done on Twitch.

[4:06] This is a very basic setup. We have one scene. We have some audio. The audio's coming from the Powerbeats Pro. We've gone to the Stream Manager. We can also go to our page and view our actual theme. If you look at the screenshot on the right, this is where anybody that talks to us will go. Down here, we'll get into what panels are later.

[4:30] That's it. Now you're up. You're streaming. You've got a theme. You've got some audio. You can stop there. You can just go with this for now.