HOW TO: Stream to YouTube

Make sure you have a valid YouTube channel

The first thing to do is to make sure that you have a valid YouTube account and a YouTube channel.

• If you don't have a YouTube channel yet, you can create it here.
• And when created, make sure that you have enabled "Live Streaming" for your YouTube channel. Make sure you have agreed to the YouTube terms of services.

Once your channel is created and you have enabled "Live Streaming", you can check your "Live Dashboard" on your channel. 

If you have more questions on live streaming with YouTube, you can check the following page.

IMPORTANT Note: It takes 24 hours for a YouTube account to "enable" Live Streaming after you have asked, so don't do this at the last minute!

Setup your "Stream Now" event

Currently, the Softron Streaming Pack allows you to stream to the "Stream now" event, not to scheduled events. To edit the Stream now event, go to your Live dashboard and make sure that you have selected "Stream Now":

And there you can edit the title of your stream and other parameters. It is important to set it there as these cannot be edited in Streaming Center.

Set your "Basic Info"

In the first pane, you can set the most important parameters:

• Title: this is what your users will see first, so pick a good one.
• Description: to tell a bit more about what the viewers will see.
• Category: Select what kind of topic you will cover
• Privacy: 
  • Public: Anyone can see and find your Live stream
  • Unlisted: Anyone with the link can view your live stream, but cannot find it otherwise
  • Private: Only accounts that you have allowed will be able to view your Live stream.

Setup "Stream Options"

In the next pane, you can set more parameters:

• Enable DVR: If you want your viewers to be able to "go back in time," up to 4 hours.
• Make archive unlisted when complete: Enable that option if, after the live stream, you don't want your viewers to find the live clip.
• Stream optimizations: this is self explanatory. If you don't need to be close to real time, we would advise you to set it to "Normal latency"; otherwise there might be some format or quality limitations.

There's even more advanced settings, and you can go over them, but that goes beyond the purpose of this article.

Create a Preset in Streaming Center

Once you have setup the options for your stream in the YouTube Dashboard, open the Streaming Center application and create a new preset, either:

• Click on the + icon at the bottom of the window
• 
• Use the Menu "File > New Preset"
• Keyboard shortcut (cmd+N)
• Right-click in the window and select "New Preset"

Name your preset

Select the "YouTube" pane, and enter a Name for your preset:

This is the name that will show up in the MovieRecorder destination or in your playback application. It is not the name of your Streaming event; this was done previously on the YouTube setup.

Login and set up YouTube account

Click on the "Log in" button:

This will open a window where you will log in:

Enter your email or phone number, then your password. The following window will appear:

Click on "Allow". That's it -- you are connected when the status says you are connected:

Stream to backup server

Enable this option if you want this preset to stream to the backup server of the event. In YouTube, you can stream to a main and backup server for redundancy. A few things to note:

• You should first make sure to stream to the main server before doing it to the backup
• It doesn't make much sense to stream from the same computer to the main and backup, as if you have an issue with that computer both streams will fail. You should instead stream to the main server from one computer and to the backup from another computer. You will need 2 licenses of the Softron Streaming Pack (and your other Softron application license) to achieve that setup.

Edit Video and Audio settings

Then you can change the video and audio settings if you need.

Video settings

By default the Video formats are set to "Same as source", which means that the format will be the same as the one that is set, for example, in the MovieRecorder source. Note that if the MovieRecorder source is set to "auto-detect", the incoming format may change during the stream, which is not advised.

So make sure to either set the incoming format in MovieRecorder or choose a format and fps in your Streaming preset. When streaming, we will then resize the source format to match these settings.

Quality

By default the Quality is set to the highest bitrate possible for the selected format. If the format and/or fps are set to "Same as source", you won't be able to see the bitrate used, but if you manually select a format and bitrate, you will see what bitrate will be used:

These bitrates are within YouTube's recommended bitrates. Note that these are variable bitrates.

Audio settings

The audio settings cannot be changed for YouTube streaming as only that format is supported by YouTube.

Customise Video and Audio formats and bitrates

We have limited the settings that could be done here to match what YouTube supports. If you want to modify these values more precisely, you can create an RTMP setting, but then you won't have the direct integration that you enjoy here.

Use your preset in MovieRecorder 

Create a destination

In MovieRecorder, create a new "Streaming Destination":

Then click on the "Setup wheel" and select the Streaming Preset that you have just created:

You can also change the name of the destination so it describes a bit better where you are streaming to. 

Assign the destination to one of your sources

In the Viewers area, click at the top right of the destinations list to enable your "Streaming Destination" for that source:

Start streaming

Then to start streaming, click on the record button on the viewer of the source, or the gang record button at the bottom of the window if you want to start streaming multiple sources simultaneously.

Streaming to a scheduled stream event

There are 2 types of Live stream in YouTube:

• Stream Now: this is an unscheduled stream. Basically, you start streaming from your favorite streaming software and that's it
• Events: you can schedule your live streams so they are announced ahead of time

Currently, with the direct integration of the Softron Streaming Pack, you can only stream to "Stream Now", you cannot stream to a scheduled live stream. For this, you need to do a "Custom" Streaming Preset:

Enter the Address, protocol, application, and port as shown above. You will need to retrieve your "Stream Key" from your YouTube account.

Using "Live Dashboard"

For this, first go to the "Live Dashboard", then select "Events":

If you haven't created an event yet, create it, then select to edit its "Ingestion settings":

Then in the "Select your encoder" section, choose "Other encoders":

Just above that option, you can select either a "Single-use stream key" or a "Reusable stream key". The Single-use is the safest option, but if you want to stream multiple times, it might be easier to choose "Reusable stream key". Just make sure that no one else can access that key as they would be able to stream to your server.

You will then find your "Stream Key" here:

Use that stream key in Streaming Preset as shown above, and that's it. 

Note that you could be also use the same method, and retrieve your stream key for the "stream now".

Using "Live Control Room"

The interface above has been there for a while. Google is working on a new interface called "Live Control Room". With that interface you can also create a Live Stream:

 

Once it is created, you will find your Stream Key here:

Click on the "Copy" button, and paste it in the Stream Key field in your custom Streaming Preset.

Once it is created, just use that preset in MovieRecorder, as explained above.

Viewing your stream - Sending public URL to viewers

You can view your stream in "Live Control Room" on your YouTube account; go to the "Manage" section to view it.

But it's also interesting to see how your viewers will see it, and you may also want to know which URL you should send to your viewers. For this, the easiest is probably to check in the Viewers area of MovieRecorder, in the destination popover menu, where there is a "Reveal In Browser" icon:

When you click on the icon, it should open your media browser on the public URL page. You can share this URL with your viewers.