Updating the VLC playlist which is livestreaming via OBS to YouTube

[Sku]

Hi folks! Firstly, thank you so much for OBS and for this forum!

I've successfully begun my first live stream of a VLC playlist, sending it via OBS to YouTube.

I now want to add additional items to this VLC playlist. Will this interrupt the livestream, and/or do I need to relaunch OBS or YouTube in order for the new items to start appearing in the livestream?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts - greatly appreciated!

~Sku

 

[AaronD]

What's in the playlist? Can you have a bunch of scenes instead, with one thing per scene, and use the Advanced Scene Switcher plugin to automate the scene changes?

You'll have to interrupt the stream once to install the plugin (if you plan it well and the install works like it usually does), but then you can add and remove scenes on the fly and modify the automation on the fly.

In Adv. SS, don't be tempted to use a long macro with a series of [Wait, Switch Scene] pairs. That's easy to think of and even appears in the examples, but it's completely rigid and not operator- or curator-friendly at all. Instead, use either a separate macro for each transition (the naive and labor-intensive way, but it works), or see if you can have a single macro to detect anything being almost done and dynamically choose from the existing scenes at the time to switch to. Either way, put the required timing in the condition somehow, and not a Wait action.
You'll know better what most of that means, after you install it and see it.

You don't have to set up everything before you go back online. Just install the plugin, and get right back on it. You can do all of the other setup on the fly...if you think it through and plan it well. When you're ready, you can "flip the switch" manually, however you've set that up to work, and then remove the old scene while the new system is running.

 

[Sku]

Thanks so much for the reply, Aaron, much appreciated! I'm broadcasting a simple audio playlist, 24/7, and want to keep things fresh by continuing to add new items. Interestingly, it seems as if one time after I added new items to the VLC playlist and resaved the playlist using the same filename/location, the live broadcast seems to have ingested the changes. Another time, though, the new material didn't ingest until I shut down OBS/YouTube and restarted everything. Overall it's working very well! Really appreciate your suggestions - I'll look into scenes now (I'm not yet familiar with that aspect).

 

[AaronD]

Another possibility that I thought of later, is to just have two identical scenes, except that they point to different VLC playlist files. Whichever file you're not using at the moment (keep track of that!), you overwrite with a copy of the live one, edit and save, and then switch scenes in OBS.

Don't know if that actually works or not - it might come back to the same problem of not reloading the changes - but it'd be easier to get there from where you are now.