What is a Streamdeck?

Chris Biscardi: [00:01] A Stream Deck is a piece of hardware that basically has a set of keys that you can program to do whatever you want. You may have heard of things like AppleScript and other automation tools like Alfred and whatnot.

[00:18] A Stream Deck is basically a keyboard that you can just program to do whatever you want, even if that thing is multiple actions.

[00:28] For example, on my Stream Deck, I have a number of different buttons, one of which is a start button which will set up basically everything I need software-wise to get started streaming, and also send me live and send the tweet, and set up my starting scene.

[00:49] I also have some more benign buttons, like a button to mute my mic whenever I need to. I don't need to go and find, dig through a bunch of software to mute my mic if I need to.

[01:03] A bunch of my themes have muted mics on them already, so if I'm in a new scene, which I also have buttons on my Stream Deck to swap between scenes, then I don't need to worry about it. If something happens unexpectedly, it's super-nice to have that hardware button just sitting right in front of me.

[01:19] There's a couple of other things, like flashback recording. If something cool happens on stream, I can hit a button, record the last five minutes, save it out to a file, deal with it later.

[01:28] I have more advanced theme transitions, which will take basically a set of layers between two scenes, turn some of them off and on, wait until some of the animations are done, and then turn more sources on behind them.

[01:43] This makes it nice to have very fluid theme-to-theme transitions. You don't need them, but if you have a Stream Deck, you can set up a sequence of steps that happen when you push a button. That makes them really nice.

[01:57] You don't need the hardware to use a Stream Deck. There is an app for a Stream Deck that you can run on your phone. It does basically the same thing.

[02:07] That's what a Stream Deck is. You don't, strictly speaking, need one, but they are useful if you are going to do streaming quite a bit.