Question / Help Audio-only plugin?

[church streamer]

Hi to everyone. We use OBS Studio to live stream our services. Is there an audio-only plugin? I see that Wirecast (expensive!) can do audio-only but apparently OBS cannot. Thanks.

 

[Narcogen]

Where are you streaming audio only RTMP to?

You can just stream a static image or even a black screen.

I suspect that if there's an "audio only" mode for Wirecast that sends to traditional services like YouTube, that's probably just what it's doing.

 

[church streamer]

Thanks for your reply. I thought of streaming a black screen but that uses bandwidth and I cannot select 0 kbps bitrate or 1 kbps bitrate to use almost no video bandwidth. The audio only stream is for people with limited bandwidth. Wirecast allows you to uncheck video so no bandwidth is used for video at all. The screen is black by default. I'd like to do that with OBS. We push our streams to a streaming provider other than youtube. They make it available to anyone.

 

[Narcogen]

A static black frame uses up as close to no bandwidth as is practicable.

You don't want to set a bitrate of 0 or 1 as this is the bitrate for the entire stream, audio and video, not just video.

Set a bitrate the same or slightly higher than your audio bitrate and use a static black frame and you shouldn't have an issue. OBS does not have an audio only mode.

 

[church streamer]

Narcogen I experimented with your idea and got a good result. I set a solid black image as the video source and the audio to the lowest possible, 64 kbps using CBR. The lowest video selection was 50kbps but I selected variable instead of constant bitrate. It added 10 to 15 kbps of video bandwidth on top of the 64 for audio. The end result was good quality audio with a total of about 80 kbps. That's acceptable for what we were trying to accomplish. Thanks!!

 

[Narcogen]

Glad that worked for you. As long as your provider supports VBR that should be fine (most prefer CBR for various performance related reasons that become more important depending on how many streams are being served).

 

[vbleu]

What did you set your Output video resolution to? Or what would be the best video resolution to make the black screen broadcast at?

Narcogen I experimented with your idea and got a good result. I set a solid black image as the video source and the audio to the lowest possible, 64 kbps using CBR. The lowest video selection was 50kbps but I selected variable instead of constant bitrate. It added 10 to 15 kbps of video bandwidth on top of the 64 for audio. The end result was good quality audio with a total of about 80 kbps. That's acceptable for what we were trying to accomplish. Thanks!!