Restart OBS and continue live streaming

[Bender]

Greetings!

I´m a newbie with OBS and want to broadcast a live stream (YouTube) from my bird feeder, later from a nest box too.

My laptop, camera and internet connection works well, I testet it several days without serious problems.

Today I wanted to restart my laptop because of the installation of new updates from windows and OBS.
But how can I "pause" the live stream?
I have two buttons: "Stream beenden" ("end stream") and "Übertragung beenden" ("end transmission").
Both of these will result in closing the stream permanently, so I have to create a new one and the viewer needs a new URL.

My "solution" is not the end OBS regulary but simply restart the laptop and "kill" OBS at this way.

Is there a better way to restart the system and to continue the live stream?

 

[AaronD]

I think the real problem is on the server side. When the data stops for longer than some timeout, it ends the stream. If the server-side timeout is less than what it takes for you to reboot, then there's nothing you can do, except to just not reboot.

 

[Bender]

Thanks for your reply.

I know, that YouTube has a timeout, some people say its up several hours. But even if it is only 10 minutes, it would be enough to reboot the laptop.

My problem is: how I am supposed to end/exit OBS WITHOUT getting the "stream-end-signal" to YouTube?

Am I the only one with this problem?
There are hundreds of live-streams broadcasting for years, did they never end up OBS for an update or other maintenance?

 

[AaronD]

I stream a church service to YouTube every week. The timeout that I see is about 1 minute. There *might* be a setting for it, but I've never looked.

We use the stream key, without logging in. (not in OBS, anyway; we also have a browser open to monitor the stream, and *that's* logged in; OBS is not, just the generic URL and stream key) We don't schedule the stream either. We just have one ready to go, that starts automatically when we start throwing data at it, and times out when the data stops. So I see that no-data timeout every week, as part of our normal operation.

I suppose it might be possible, to set it up that way, reboot, and send data to that same key again, and have the server continue the original stream, but I haven't tried it.

There are hundreds of live-streams broadcasting for years, did they never end up OBS for an update or other maintenance?

Not everyone uses OBS. There are lots of things that can generate data that YouTube will accept. But in general, it's entirely possible that they've never rebooted since they started the channel.

Some naive ones might do that with a common laptop, which is a wide-open invitation to get hacked, but I would expect most of them to have a dedicated device that does nothing else ever, and has every other function locked out or not even coded for. No hacking that, because it can't do anything beyond what it's already doing, even with a pedantic understanding of that claim.

The always-on, single-function, 24/7 streaming device might not actually create the content either, but switch seamlessly between two or more other things that do, which allows rebooting each thing when it's not live.