New administrator taking over ods maintenance

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Bob Neuweiler

New Member
New to system, 6 moths. OBS was set up to live stream by individual no longer with us. Today OBS failed to transmit to live stream. Re-boots and updates have no effect. Rumors of OBS scheduling only one stream per day add confusion. I am not finding any schedule ing option within OBS. Where should I look to find the address to our YouTube account?
 
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Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
I recommend starting with an OBS guide. As this is for a House of Worship, I strongly recommend PTZOptics's / StreamGeeks new OBS Guidebook (free PDF to download)

As a starting pointer, most streaming service (YouTube, Facebook, etc) work by entering a stream key into OBS. The streaming service ties that key to an account. Rotating stream keys regularly is good practice (though like most security things, people don't do it, and then suffer the consequences). So, there is no 'new address' you just need to make sure your Channels' stream key is the one in OBS. And if an admin leaves, always good practice to change stream keys regardless.

Recognize that real-time video encoding can be complicated, (and OBS provides lots of power and flexibility, with the complexity that goes with such) so there are LOTS of possible reasons why a stream will fail
- OBS update and not manually updating 3rd party plugins
- OS and especially video driver updates known to cause all kinds of issues (though usually crashing, not stream failures)
- if OBS PC running well (not pegged at 100% CPU or similar hardware resource overload), then network upload bandwidth would be a key thing to monitor/check. And that assumes no WiFi in the data path from camera or audio, to OBS PC to Internet
All it takes is one unwitting person to connect (ex Guest WiFi) have something running and consuming your (usually far more constrained) Internet upload bandwidth

See my .sig for links to OBS automated Log Analyzer (good first place to check), then how to post your log if you need more help from this forum.
And if you do want more assistance, I recommend being more specific/technical in description of the problem. "failed to live stream" can mean lots of different things. And OBS has color indicators on its status bar, which can help. So things like was OBS running ok? did the Stats window indicate encoding and transmit working, or ?? What dd YouTube's preview admin page (I use FB for our HoW, so not sure of exactly what YT's interface looks like, I'm assuming similar functionality) indicate? What about OBS PC hardware resource utilization monitoring? your internet connectivity monitoring? etc
 
B

Bob Neuweiler

New Member
Lawrence_SoCal said:
I recommend starting with an OBS guide. As this is for a House of Worship, I strongly recommend PTZOptics's / StreamGeeks new OBS Guidebook (free PDF to download)

As a starting pointer, most streaming service (YouTube, Facebook, etc) work by entering a stream key into OBS. The streaming service ties that key to an account. Rotating stream keys regularly is good practice (though like most security things, people don't do it, and then suffer the consequences). So, there is no 'new address' you just need to make sure your Channels' stream key is the one in OBS. And if an admin leaves, always good practice to change stream keys regardless.

Recognize that real-time video encoding can be complicated, (and OBS provides lots of power and flexibility, with the complexity that goes with such) so there are LOTS of possible reasons why a stream will fail
- OBS update and not manually updating 3rd party plugins
- OS and especially video driver updates known to cause all kinds of issues (though usually crashing, not stream failures)
- if OBS PC running well (not pegged at 100% CPU or similar hardware resource overload), then network upload bandwidth would be a key thing to monitor/check. And that assumes no WiFi in the data path from camera or audio, to OBS PC to Internet
All it takes is one unwitting person to connect (ex Guest WiFi) have something running and consuming your (usually far more constrained) Internet upload bandwidth

See my .sig for links to OBS automated Log Analyzer (good first place to check), then how to post your log if you need more help from this forum.
And if you do want more assistance, I recommend being more specific/technical in description of the problem. "failed to live stream" can mean lots of different things. And OBS has color indicators on its status bar, which can help. So things like was OBS running ok? did the Stats window indicate encoding and transmit working, or ?? What dd YouTube's preview admin page (I use FB for our HoW, so not sure of exactly what YT's interface looks like, I'm assuming similar functionality) indicate? What about OBS PC hardware resource utilization monitoring? your internet connectivity monitoring? etc
Click to expand...
Outstanding overview, you have given me plenty to research. The previous guy set the whole thing up but didn't train anyone or leave any notes. I will try to connect with him also.
 
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Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
Bob Neuweiler said:
The previous guy set the whole thing up but didn't train anyone or leave any notes.
Click to expand...
I suspected something along those lines
One thing to be aware of is plugins. They can be used to extend the functionality of OBS. I mention this so when you read some OBS material, and you come across something where you know your OBS setup is different, realize it may be a plugin
- for example, I make use of plugin "Advanced Scene Switcher" (found in the Resources section of this web site) which I use to automate the start, and end of our livestream service (ie automate start recording differently from time to start streaming, scene changes (incl slide with countdown timer), and a "Go in Peace" fade to black at the end, etc
Looking around in OBS would not show someone our setup, unless they knew to look at the plugin. Even then, without some of my documentation, how that all fits together would still be a mystery to someone untrained on my specific setup. As such, I fully documented our setup and process, which goes beyond OBS. I even setup up essentially a broadcast runbook, which walks through the process (for us, each HoW would be different), our content sources including watermark, OBS streaming (pre-live test for each service, Go Live, to service end, and post stream activities).

Good luck
 
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