I wanted to live stream my personal honeybee hive to YouTube.
Requirements:
- IP camera with native RTSP and RTMP Although you may not need it, I wanted night IR, Pan and Zoom camera features. After some false starts and testing a few cameras from Amazon, I settled on a Dericam PTZ IP Camera, Model S1 for $ 149.00.
- Download and install the VLC media player. My version is 2.2.4 Weatherwax. This is available as a free download.
- Obviously, you need to have a YouTube account, so register & set one up if you don’t already have one.
- Finally, download and install the free Open Broadcasting System (OBS) latest version.
Step 1 – Set up your camera.
Follow your camera’s setup procedures. After finishing, your camera should have a local IP address (192.168….) and have some basic settings.
Your settings may be different, but be sure that your camera has an IP address.
There should be some video settings, and these are important for smooth streaming to YouTube.
The key settings for streaming are the Bitrate and the Frame Rate. You may need to play with these setting to get the results you want.
For best results, your camera should be on a high speed wired connection, but that was not possible for my purposes – so I have my camera connected via WiFi which sometimes makes my YouTube live stream a bit choppy.
Step 2 – VLC, confirm RTSP camera feed.
Different IP camera’s may have different RTSP feed strings for VLC, but every camera’s customer support team should be able to provide you with a connection string to stream your camera’s feed locally to your installed VLC player.
You cannot continue if you cannot see your camera’s feed in your installed VLC player.
Here’s my Dericam connection string: rtsp://admin:Password@192.168.0.88:554/11. Your login – [admin:Password] will be different, as will your camera’s IP address. The standard RTSP port protocol is 554, so that probably won’t change. My camera’s stream is 11 (meaning camera 1).
Once you have your camera’s RTSP connection string, start the VLC player.
Click the Media drop down menu
Select “Open Network Stream” and enter your RTSP connection string from step 2.
Click “Play”. You should see your camera’s live stream. If you don’t, check your connection string. Work with your camera’s customer support until you can successfully stream your camera to your VLC player.
Step 3 – Set up YouTube Live Stream.
Go to your YouTube Live Dashboard and enter all your stream’s basic information. Be sure to review “Advanced Settings”.
Copy your “Encoder Setup” to a text document on your computer – you will need this information to set up your Open Broadcasting System (OBS).
Step 4 – Set up Open Broadcasting System (OBS).
Start OBS Studio.
Note: Be sure that “View”, “List boxes” is checked so you see the “+” sign in the Sources box.
Click the “+” in Sources and select “VLC Video Source” in the drop down menu.
You can name your source anything you want – I left it as the default “VLC Video Source”. Check “Make source visible.
Click “OK”, and the property window will be displayed.
Click the “+” sign on the right, and select “Add Path/URL”. A model window will display. This is where you will add your camera’s RTSP connection string from step 2.
Click “OK” and your connected properties window will appear with your camera’s stream playing.
If you had multiple camera’s and multiple streams, you would continue to add them here. Loop Playlist checkbox would then loop through all your different streams. I only have one camera, so the Loop Playlist checkbox is disregarded.
Click “OK” to exit the properties window.
Click on “Settings” on the right.
Click on “Stream” on the Left to enter your YouTube Live Stream credentials.
Click ‘OK”.
Click on “Output”.
Note the Video Bitrate. I find my streaming works best when this closely matches the bitrate you set for your camera in step 1. I also find the Encoder Preset setting “veryfast” works best for me. Your settings may change, and you should both test and experiment with various settings.
Important: Finally, confirm that OBS is connecting to the correct network card(service). Select Advanced and check your Network setting at the bottom of the page – bind to IP connection, you should have a drop down list to select the proper choice.
Note: You should also check the various settings in Video and Advanced to further customize your live stream.
Click “OK” to return to the main OBS dashboard.
Use the Red Framing outline to drag your streaming output to your desired window size.
Click “Start Streaming” to start streaming to YouTube.
In a few delay seconds – you should be live streaming on YouTube!
