OBS with Remote Audio Feed - Skype or similar

[Martin_H]

I’m using OBS to stream religious services to YouTube and Facebook using this workflow:

(IP Camera and Audio from PA system) -> OBS (Win10) ->Restream.io -> (YouTube and Facebook)

Something I’d like to be able to add in during the current Covid lockdown* is the facility for people to participate from home doing things like Readings and leading prayers. I’m thinking of maybe bringing in audio through Skype/WhatsApp/Zoom or similar on desktop and using desktop audio as a feed into OBS.

Main concerns I have are time lag – there is roughly 7 second lag between OBS and YouTube/Facebook and people at home would be responding to that so timing would be at least that much off. The ideal thing would for them to be able to hear the streaming service straight from OBS on whatever app they are using to participate; I’m wondering if I turned on audio monitoring, could they hear that through the desktop audio.

I intend to experiment a bit with it this week; I was wondering if anyone here has done anything similar or has any suggestions.

(* I’m in Ireland where there is currently a 6-week lockdown where religious services cannot be open to the public.)

 

[JonLuker]

Hi there Martin. I might be able to help.

We stream a live Sunday Club every week to FaceBook. Something like this, when we were able to be in the same place, but now the restrictions are tighter it looks more like this. My family are at home, and Producer Rob is in his home office. We use Skype to connect to each other, and OBS to send to Facebook. Here's the nice part - you can make OBS a virtual web-cam, and use OBS' output as the video feed on Skype. We've tried Zoom, Google Hangouts and the like - the same thing works for all of them.

What does this mean? It means that whatever you're sending through OBS to a streaming service is also what you're sending to your Skype participant (if you want to) - so they get to see it 'live', rather than delayed. They can pick the audio and visual cues directly from what is going on in your stream as long as they're (i.e. the Skype stream) a source in OBS. You can then make a scene where they are the source, or a split screen, or whatever you need.. Just be careful about feedback.

So, yes, in short. You can use Skype & OBS to communicate 'live' so that your guest doesn't have any lag, but also to stream them in directly in to OBS.

Hope that helps!