Streamlabs Desktop Setup Guide: How to Start Streaming (2023)

after watching this video you will have all the tools you need to start streaming using streamlabs desktop to Twitch YouTube Facebook Kik or any other platform with the best settings widgets graphic overlays and more let's get to it [Music] to get this started you're going to want to head over to streamlabs.com where you can download streamlabs desktop 100 for free to your Mac or Windows computer I also left the link in the description below so that you can follow along and it does help out the channel if you use it once the program has finished installing go ahead and select finish and it'll launch streamlabs desktop and the first thing that you'll be brought to is a page for you to log in with your account you can log in using a twitch Facebook YouTube or other type of account make sure that you allow streamlabs to connect to that account and then from there you'll be brought back to the streamlabs desktop application where you'll be presented with your layout Editor to give you guys a quick tour around streamlab's desktop let's first start off on the left side where you're gonna see this Arrow icon that's pointing right click on that and that will expand the left side panel where you're going to see at the top application specific customization features such as the editor where you can modify the layout of what your stream Command Center looks like you can also enable Studio mode in this section which is great to do in case you want to modify some of your scenes or sources while you're already live and you don't want your viewers to see what you're currently in the middle of trying to fix or build we'll keep that off for now below that you have your themes which is a collection of free and paid for themes at streamlabs desktop offers that you can use to add some character or further customization to the look of your stream you have the app store for additional add-ons to the streamlabs desktop app and then you have the highlighter feature which is an editing option where you can add in or use clips that you've recorded at a streamlabs desktop to cut and edit together then upload directly to YouTube below that you have three streamlabs links that you can check out one is for Ultra which is the third premium paid for a service that you can check out you can access your dashboard from here and then you have the get help link in case you need some further assistance next you have the settings option where you can modify your video audio and stream settings in the Middle where you see this black space right now that's where your scene is going to be presented with all of its objects or sources within it which will show how to add in just a second in this bottom panel is where you're going to have your scene so you can have a scene for your gameplay you can have a scene for starting you can have a scene for showing your entire face cam or webcam you're going to have sources within that scene to Showcase what you're trying to present in that scene next to that you're going to see your mixer which is going to contain all of the different audio components or sources that you can monitor that are active within your stream if you look a little bit further to the right you're going to see an arrow that's pointing to the left click on this and this is where your entire chat dialog for your stream will show up now if we go to the bottom panel this is where we can test the alerts within our scenes to make sure that they're working the way that they're supposed to be you can start and stop your recordings from here to the right of that this is where you can enable the replay buffer and what is the replay buffer well to put it simply this is essentially a highlight clip recorder so let's say you weren't recording the last 30 seconds of gameplay but something really cool happened with the replay buffer turned on you can now capture that moment that you would have missed otherwise next to that you have an option to schedule an upcoming future stream and then to further out of that is your go live button to push your streams to whatever platform that you're planning to stream to looking all the way to the left hand side on this bottom panel are going to be your computer performance statistics so what's your CPU what FPS are you pushing on your stream this will also be the area where you'll see if you're dropping any frames or encountering any errors for your stream next let's head over to our settings so that we make sure that these are right before we start building out any scenes or sources the primary ones that I want to show you are first the stream section so this is where you're going to have all of the different accounts that you plan on streaming to connect it now multi-streaming is not a free feature of streamlabs desktop but at least you can select which platform you want to stream to so just make sure you're logged into the accounts you ever plan on streaming to if you want to go the custom route of using a stream key and a particular stream URL let's say from Kik for example then you can go to the bottom here to select stream to custom ingest for the stream type you can change that to custom streaming server and then you can put in that URL and that stream key to push to that special destination that don't have a service offering in streamlabs desktop next let's check out the output Tab and this is where we can configure our settings for our stream so I'm going to stick within the advanced mode here and audio track I'm good to keep that at one but for the encoder I'm gonna have my Hardware encoder selected which is going to be my dedicated graphics card on my computer now I know not all of you guys probably have a dedicated graphics card so if that's the case you're going to want to use the x264 option which is going to be your CPU rate control I would keep that at CBR which stands for constant bitrate for the bitrate itself I would do up to a 6 000 kilobit per second bit rate you really don't want to go below the 3000 mark because that'll start affecting the quality of your stream but for places like twitch YouTube Facebook you're going to be perfectly fine streaming up to a 6 000 kilobit per second bitrate just make sure that your internet is up the par meaning that hopefully you have at least maybe a 10 megabit per second upload speed or higher if you're experiencing network issues while you're streaming you're going to want to lower your bit rate closer to that 3000 Mark there's no need to use a custom buffer size below that the keyframe interval it's good to set this at two that's great for a lot of streaming platforms for the CPU usage preset if you're using the x264 option of course it's good just to keep this at very fast or if your CPU is really good you can set this to faster but if your computer isn't so great you're going to want to set this to super fast or Ultra fast to alleviate the frame dropping issues for your profile you can set this to high that goes for the graphics card as well if you're using that for your encoder there's nothing really unique to set for tune maybe you could go with zero latency as a good option but that's just optional if you look under the recording tab I will change your video format to MP4 as that's much more compatible with a wide array of video editors below that you can keep your encoder the same as the stream settings on the far right you'll see the replay buffer tab where you can either enable or modify your replay buffer settings next within the audio section you can keep the sample rate and the channel set to their default settings below that you're going to have the desktop audio device one here you can either change it from the default or you can can switch it to wherever you know that the audio is going to so that could mean your speakers or your headphones select the corresponding device so that you can get your desktop audio to flow through below that you're going to see your mic auxiliary device one and if you select this drop down this is where you can choose the microphone of your choice that's plugged into your computer so in my case it's this Elgato Wave 3 microphone so that's what I would choose in this setting if you do decide to keep this at default streamlabs desktop is just going to take in the microphone that you have set at your operating system level jumping over to the video video section this is where we can set our base and output canvas resolution so by default they should be set to 1920 by 1080 but let's say you want to record and Stream in 2K or 4K resolution then you're going to need to select the drop down and choose custom and this is where you can actually put in that custom base canvas resolution that'll also need to be applied to the output canvas and then just make sure you adjust your bit rate within the following ranges that you see on screen with respect to the resolution that you plan on recording or streaming in but once you're happy with your resolution you can select your downscale filter the best would be 32 samples to go with your FPS type is good to just keep at common and then you can set that common FPS value which you can set up to 60. if you like you can also set some custom hotkeys which is being able to select certain keys on your keyboard to quickly perform actions within the application you can also achieve this same result by using the remote control feature so if you scan this QR code it'll take you to install the remote control app from streamlabs so that you can use your phone to wirelessly control your stream with the settings out the way let's start adding some sources to our scene so the first scene I have here I'm actually going to rename this and call it gameplay to add a source we just need to go to the right of sources and select the plus button and this is where we're going to get a whole catalog of sources directly from streamlabs to add into our canvas here and what's beautiful about streamlabs desktop is that it has almost all of the sources that you might need for your stream without having to add in any custom plugins or configurations like you have to do in OBS so let's first take a look at the essential sources here you have your media file source which is great for adding videos music even Graphics such as FaceCam overlays or anything that has Motion in it which is usually a web imp file if you're trying to add in plain or static images then you're going to want to go with the image source instead of media file one of the next essential sources is the video capture device Source this is where you can add in your face cam or gameplay which we should do honestly because that's how I record my gameplay all the time with my capture card currently the webcam is selected but what we're gonna do is actually select our capture card the live gamer extreme three give that a second to pop up there it is there's really no other settings that I need to configure here it's all good to go and I'm going to select close and there it is but let's go back to our sources now and next up I'm gonna add my face cam to the mix so instead of this being an existing Source this is going to be a new source so I'm going to check that option there we're going to name this one face cam add source and now we're going to keep the FaceTime HD camera right where it is Select close and of course you can select any webcam of your choice that you have connected to your computer I'm just using my camera here off of my computer to make it a little bit easy now not all of you guys are using capture cards and you're recording gameplay directly off of your PC so in that case you're going to want to check out the screen capture Source within this Source you can capture a specific game that you have on your computer you can capture your entire screen or whichever monitor that you want to capture from you can even select to capture a specific window of your choosing that's on your computer this is literally a catch-all source for whatever you need to record and the extra beauty of this source is that when it's added it'll record the audio directly off of that window or screen or game that you have selected and yes Mac OS users it works for you as well the next thing that's a must-have part of your stream is the alert box so with this selected you can add this Source you can customize this to your liking for each type of alert so donations new subscribers Super Chat all that stuff if we go over to test widgets and then we go to subscriber this is where we can see what it currently looks like if somebody subscribes now we can modify this a little bit with the layout so it can look like that you can modify the text template for the alert here as well as adjusting the font in the font size and the color of that font the secondary color is going to be the name of the person that just triggered the alert if you want to modify the GIF that's a part of your alert instead of sticking with the dinosaur I mean the dinosaur is pretty cool but maybe you want your own custom type of Animation just go to Media here and this is where you can change it so you can just x that out and select the change the media and from here you can either upload your own images like you can go to sites like giphy and download your own and throw them in here or you you can select the stock files and if you scroll down a bit you'll see a bunch of different funny GIF animations that you can choose from that are not the dinosaur and maybe there'll be some here that work with your type of stream so choose what you want I'm gonna go with the think GIF I'm going to select done and then it'll upload right here as a new media file if I want to update the sound I can do that as well by following the same steps don't forget you can also adjust the volume of that Alert in case it's a little bit too loud or annoying for your stream you guys can also add an event list to your stream which is great to have so that people can keep track of the different alerts that are being triggered across the entirety of the stream instead of it just being a blanket alert this kind of keeps a list of the things that have been happening across your stream having stream labels is a nice thing to add as a part of your stream the list of labels is very very extensive this is something great that you can have so you can chat out people who are like your all-time top donators top Super Chatters people you really want to to give some high recognition to within the settings of this Source you can customize how you want that text to appear and most often than not people use that text to be fit into like a certain section of their stream or they'll have like a box where they can put in the name of that person that they're trying to recognize as for the general sources here I think most of them are pretty self-explanatory but as a quick rundown starting with the color block this source is just going to be a custom color block that you can set the color for as well as the width and height and most people just put this like behind their scene so that their scene background just isn't straight black next you have the browser Source where you can put in URLs to certain websites or videos that you might want to show up on stream in addition to custom widgets like from stream elements you can add an image slideshow Source where you can add in a whole bunch of different pictures from your computer and have those rotate you can add your own custom text Source if you'd like next to that you have your display capture window capture and game capture which is all wrapped into the screen capture source so these three aren't really even that necessary anymore to the right of that you have your audio input capture source which I won't find you having to use because you can select your audio sources right within your streamlab settings that same thing applies for the audio output capture source as well but something important you should keep in mind is if you go to your Advanced Audio properties you can actually listen to your audio sources such as your capture card audio all you need to do within this audio source is select the monitoring option and choose Monitor and output and that way you can hear your game audio coming through stream Labs additionally to balance out your audio you want to go to your mixer and set your microphone audio to stretch into the yellow area for the game or desktop audio you want that to stretch into the upper green area if you're a VR gamer you might get some use out of trying the open VR capture Source here collab cam is great for inviting guests onto your stream it almost acts like a little Zoom call but better because you can actually control the object of that person's webcam and place it at different parts of your screen I actually made a whole video about it to really cool feature but it's definitely a great tool to use especially if you're collabing with other streamers or if you're playing with friends who are comfortable showing their camera on stream the next general Source here is the Apple just fantastic I'm so happy that they updated the app and added this in because this will allow you to record a specific window from your computer this is such a game changing feature for those of you who don't have separate virtual audio mixers next to that the instant replay source is great to have as it'll automatically play the last recording from the replay buffer to be a part of your stream and you can actually control how fast you want that recording to play out so that it's just not the normal speed but this Source will add an extra layer of Engagement to your stream so people that are watching don't have to scroll back to see what happened that was really cool but instead you just play it for them now as for the widgets what you see here may vary depending on if you're logged into YouTube twitch or Facebook but some of the big ones that you'll see a lot of streamers use are the donation goal the subscription goal and the member goal which are great to have so that you can have that Milestone or achievement on your stream for those different things chat box is also a huge one so that people can see their chat chat right on the video stream so not just having them look at the chat in the streaming platform but actually seeing their chat matches pop up on screen viewers love that stuff and it's a great source to have a part of your stream and whenever you add this in you can actually customize the theme of this streamlabs has five different ones that you can go with you can set these messages to always show up on screen or you can set them to go away if you do set them to go away you can set the high delay so how long will that message stay up on screen before it fades away you can set that with this setting here below that you can have the chat delay in case you want a little bit of a delay between when the person sends the message and when it comes up on screen if you go into the browser settings this is where you can set the width and the height of that chat box to your liking as well as any custom CSS that you might have or want to add into it some other things people like to add or a viewer account to Showcase how many viewers they have on each of the different platforms one of the newer widgets media share that streamlabs has recently implemented is pretty cool as somebody can donate to Showcase a piece of media of their choosing on your stream I could think of some ways that could go very very wrong I think our gameplay scene is looking pretty cool here but I want to add in some starting soon and ending scenes so one way to do this is just by adding another scene we'll call this starting We'll add another scene call this ending and then we can fill this out with different images or Graphics custom text but what if we use some of streamlabs free themes so I'm going to go to the left hand side select this theme icon and under seam themes we're gonna go to the search bar here and just type in free and we can go through the mini that might be available here once we find something we like let's just go ahead and select install theme this will import all of the scenes that apply to this theme as its own scene profile so don't be alarmed if you don't see the scenes and sources that you've previously made you'll be able to get back to that but first you just decide what scenes you want to keep or delete I just kept the starting and in scenes now I'm going to copy the starting scene Source I'm gonna select this little drop down arrow right here next to Quantum and then I'm gonna go back to my scenes and this is where we were working on our scenes I'm going to go to starting and then I can just paste this on in now have a starting screen and now I'm going to do the same thing for the ending screen as well to add a transition between these scenes you can select the icon to the left of where it says sources by default you're going to see that the global transition is a cut but if you want to modify this select the edit icon and you'll see that you can choose the drop down and select fade swipe slide or even a stinger transition if you're going to be using your own custom transition one thing you might want to add to your starting screen to make your viewers pumped and excited and ready for your stream is a countdown timer so to do that you're going to want to select the plus button and then you're going to want to add a text Source add that on in select add Source you don't need to do any customizations at least right away because we need to add in the timer source so what you'll need to do is download the My Stream timer from the Microsoft App Store launch that under the first countdown tab you can set the amount of time that you want the timer to count down from in the custom output field you can remove the h8 so that the hours do not appear in your timer Additionally you set with text is displayed once the countdown finishes next you'll want to copy the path of where your countdown timer is and then go ahead and select start back in streamlabs desktop you can double click the text source that we added and then check off the box for read from file here you want to paste in the path that we just copied and then choose the countdown script now you can choose a font make sure that you maximize that font so that it's not blurry you can also customize the text style to your liking by changing the color adding a gradient and even adding borders some other things you guys are going to want to do before you go live is if you go back over to the left hand side here and you check out the dashboard if you click this you can go to your dashboard home page you can skip a lot of these Pages because you already have streamlabs downloaded of course but one page you don't want to skip here is the Tipping page this is where you can set up your PayPal email address with streamlabs so that now when people donate to you through your streamlabs donation page then you'll receive that money directly to PayPal make sure you accept the terms of service and you'll be in to your streamlabs dashboard now on the left hand side if you check out cloudbot this is where you'll have a little bot or moderator as a part of your stream cloudbot is a good one so you're going to want to make sure that you enable cloudbot at the top here and then depending on the platform that you're using you're going to want to make sure streamlabs is added as a moderator within your account because if it's not cloudbot won't work and you won't see any sort of messages from them at all within the mod tools you can set certain restrictions within your stream under the commands tab you can put in your own custom commands this is typically for your viewers to be able to trigger certain things if you go over to the timers tab this is where you can configure cloudbot to say a certain message at a specified interval of time so for example you can set cloudbot to message to the chat subscribe to the channel every 10 minutes another great feature of cloudbot is the Loyalty sections with this enabled you can build up points for your viewers depending on the amount of time that they watch and those points can go towards giveaways that you can run through streamlabs now with all of that information we covered throughout this video you are ready to start live streaming to the maximum start up your stream by selecting the go live button make sure that you have the destination of your choice enabled you can set a title for your stream you can set a description what's the title or the category of the game that you're using if you're on YouTube you can add in a custom thumbnail here as well as for the latency drop down have that at ultra low latency you want the least amount of latency possible everything else you can keep default you can also connect your Twitter if you want to share out that you're live on your Twitter and from there select confirm and go live if you guys have any questions whatsoever please leave a comment down below I will do my best to get back to you and if you're a PS5 or an Xbox gamer and you don't have a capture card but you want to use streamlabs desktop check out one of the two videos here that apply to you and that'll get you set up and going with that like subscribe I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: MidnightMan

Views: 138,704

Keywords: midnightman, ps5, playstation, tech tutorials, stream tutorials, streamlabs desktop, streamlabs obs, how to setup streamlabs, best streamlabs tutorial, streamlabs beginners guide, streamlabs vs obs, streamlabs setup, streamlabs obs settings, streamlabs desktop settings, streamlabs stream settings, streamlabs obs settings for 1080p 60fps, streamlabs recording settings, streamlabs audio setup, streamlabs 2023 tutorial, Streamlabs Desktop Setup Guide, how to use streamlabs desktop

Id: KM-kNhfe8VI

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2023