How to Run a Live Coding Stream on Twitch Using OBS (opens in new tab)

I am way to self conscious for that... I dive deep into a problem for 10 hours and I try a bunch of stupid stuff along the way or make a bunch of mistakes and now I am broadcasting those to the world; and meanwhile either I am paying attention to the people and not working (I always want to get lost in a complete zone of concentration) or entirely ignoring them (which seems weird)... I will go for long stretches--like an hour--just staring at and reading the same data reports over and over again trying to cross reference all of the information, which would be ridiculously boring... I don't understand how people do these things other than as performance art, workshop instruction, or stunts: that people seem to do it and be productive on their own tasks indicates their brains work very different from mine ;P.

I think it comes down to your "persona". For example George Hotz does multi-hour long coding streams that are all over the place, but they have some entertainment value because he's a bit of a kooky character.

I do live coding with my clients when is kind of a "brainstorming" meeting. We throw ideas around, and I code fast and ugly to have something running on screen, usually maximum 2 minutes per idea, otherwise the client gets bored. After like 10 ideas, both of us agree on one main idea that gets implemented into production.

During this time I screen-share my entire screen, so we can draw fast on Paint, switch to code see how it behaves when implemented, mainly GUI elements only.

I usually use OBS during this kind of meetings to record everything, in order to have later review material in case I forget something. Also a nice side effect is that later on, if client is not happy with something I have hard proof that he did said/agreed on something.

I think a key to streaming is balance of audio and visual "stimulation." If you're not "doing" (as captured by OBS) something stimulating then you need to be saying something engaging. Some in theory if you're coding in python you might need say something to engage your; teaching, explaining your methodology or talking about current events around technology. If you're confident your audio stimulation will not be as strong you need to visualize something engaging. Sometime I did once via youtube was streaming myself writing a research paper creating maps in arcgis.

I did it for an university course this semester and it works surpringly well.

Especially if you have one specific topic and if viewers ask questions.

But yeah, it's a bit hard if streamers don't follow a red line and if they talk in a language that they don't command well.

YouTube is full of awesome content from Chinese and Indian people who talk very bad English, so they probably would have been done better with text.

I've never done it, but I've toyed with the idea for one primary reason: accountability. I might just ignore the viewers, or maybe I'd interact and gain some insight about the problem at hand. Either way, just knowing that someone is watching and expecting me to do something (preferably on a schedule) would be a good motivator to actually do it.

I don't believe I would be productive on a livestream. That said, I think it would be like exercising a muscle I neglect - similar to the physical exercise I don't do :) I'd probably grow as a programmer if I were more comfortable searching for solutions in front of others.

I've seen a few streams of people who are like this, and they seem to do ok. One of the pidgin devs migrated their mercurial repos from bitbucket to their own self-hosted environment, live, on stream.

I think the personality of the person has a lot more to do about whether they keep the attention of their viewers. The ones who seem to get things done seem to speak out their internal dialog.

Watching someone "explore" is still entertaining, I think. You don't need to be a comedian, although that's fun, too. But what I like about livestreaming is that it's a pure, real form of seeing someone's brain in real-time.

One way is to show something you already know how to do. The other is "Twitch plays programming" where you involve the audience.

It's really really fun. I do it a lot, am not very popular doing it, but get good engagement. Especially when the topic is something visually interesting.

I'm now at a point where it feels weird coding without saying my thoughts out loud or writing them down on paper. Like I don't know how to think unless there's some output.

And when watchers highlight a bug or tell me techniques to try that I haven't thought of, amazing.

I need to make better use of scenes and staging screens like OP is doing. My streams are significantly under produced right now.

link if you're curious: https://www.twitch.tv/swizec

I do stream live coding on twitch from time to time -- albeit I started out as a speedrun streamer. You have a point: if I were to write code in the same style I'm used to, it would probably be not that good. But, probably due to the very fact that I know I'm being watched, I noticed I employ a different style than usual: very neat, organized, logical, working on exactly one feature at a time and not allowing myself to wander too much. It definitely feels good and productive.

What's important for most streams is how you audibly communicate with your audience, much less so what you are actually doing on screen.

Not that I think I would be an effective livestreamer.

I think it’s what makes it fun. Your channel will likely never grow to be large, but then you get to interact with a healthier community at a slower pace. Jayne (Overwatch Coach) has been streaming on FB Gaming and has been enjoying the luxury of a smaller view count.

I would imagine most big streamers (let’s say 10K+) would enjoy a smaller community more than a larger one - if they could make the same amount of $$$.

It really depends on what I'm doing. If it's something I fundamentally don't know how to do and it requires all my concentration, I don't really do it on stream. But there's plenty that I know how to do but others don't. For example writing a parser/lexer can be interesting, but I generally only have to solve fairly local problems and not large structural ones.

Really hard things I _could_ do on stream...but I start to feel like it's too much of me staring really hard silently. I have to wonder how much of that is true and how much of that is personal anxiety. I do enjoy streaming though and should do it more.

It can help you be effective if you take the time to watch back the recordings and see what you are doing.

You may have developed some unproductive tics, mannerisms or habits that you’re not aware of.

Be warned. It’s a tough watch sometimes.

I feel like I could fairly easily as long as I planned ahead exactly the work I need to do. As long as I get to the point where I'm translating a concrete plan of action into code I don't need to pay that much attention.

This would be an odd change to do on longer time scales. I do this kind of now, but I'll think for a few minutes and have maybe five to ten minutes of action planned out. Not precisely code just needing translating, more of a rough sketch to flesh out.

Depends how you define success. Streamers get viewers through consistent stream schedules and heavy viewer interaction + engaging "high-level" content where what you're doing is actually impressive (i.e. high level competitive gameplay in a video game).

By that definition no code streamer has been consistently successful on Twitch, Youtube Gaming, or any other platform. The closest to it would probably be Hikaru who is a GM chess player.

I used to do some livecoding myself. The answer is that it depends on the specific things you are working on. Some thing lend themselves very poorly for livecoding, but others work out pretty well.

For example, if you are doing interview practice, for Google style interviews, livecoding your interview practice is actually a pretty good experience.

Coding in front of an audience isn't much different than coding in front of an interviewer, if you think about it.

Non-linear coding can be enjoyable as long as the streamer is vocalising their thought processes.

I'm preparing to code on a livestream and honestly, I've thrown out any notion of being 'effective' out the window; chat engagement means distractions, and while I'm used to that I rather reserve some non-streaming quiet time for deep, focused work.

The last time I went to pyOhio I had multiple people come up to me asking basic coding questions.

Since you are interactive (you would respond to chat) and will initially do it for free I think it would be better than nothing.

Or when you livestream yourself coding people might help you either improve your technique.

I enjoy watching Jonathan Blow's livestreams once in a while to get insight into game dev and Jai: https://www.twitch.tv/naysayer88

Enjoyable is relative. You won't get on the top charts by streaming this, but you will we watched by those interested in development. Even a handful of viewers can be pretty fun if they are chatting.

During quarantine, me and a couple of colleagues have been doing pair-programming sessions with three or more people. We were joking on doing a twitch stream. I think it could work.

It's an easy way to do pair programming without needing to arrange for anyone. Explaining your thinking and process is quite helpful.

But yes, I've certainly found it slower.

having watched a lot of coding streams on twitch and have done a few myself, it is really varied, some are sometimes very focused on doing something specific and is just full steam ahead in knocking it out, some are very stop start with lots of reflection and changes of direction. But it is also interactive, people chime in and you end up in meta discussions or sidetracks, or people offer help, etc. So there is no real set style.

imo sporadic and non-linear makes for good content. Also, I've tried live-streaming coding before and I found I got a lot more done than if it had just been normal coding time, because you can't just idly check HN.

this is why most streams you find are front end development based.

I think the best way to deal with secrets is to not live stream them, at all, ever, in any way.

If you have secrets anywhere near your live stream, it's not a question if "if" you will leak them but "when." Don't put yourself in that situation.

Work _hard_ to keep yourself out of that situation.

On Twitch:

- Not only I have seen secrets revealed on stream, like passwords and tokens and such... I have seen people working with databases full of personally identifiable information, and you could see names, phone numbers, e-mails and addresses on stream. There are irresponsible people out here.

- I have seen people doxxing themselves by showing their git identity, or some popup window with some licensing information such as "Registered to: John Doe", or when the autocomplete suggestions on their browser search bar shows "[Facebook favicon] John Doe".

As you can see, there are many, many ways to leak your identity on stream. If you want to have a discrete online presence, try to do all your work on a dedicated VM, or take measures such as using a dedicated browser for your stream related activities, a separate git identity, hide splash screens, and pay attention to detail at how things look before you go live.

There is a mention of it, but it isn't clearly marked that this is in part specifically why: the article author takes a dual monitor approach and presumably restricts all secrets to the monitor that is never involved in any of the scenes (the main laptop monitor in this case).

Though with keyboard camera they probably should be more careful in which scenes show that if any of those secrets are typed rather than say copy/pasted.

This reminds me of a very funny moment I saw where a streamer was opening his beta invite key for a new game live and realized when he did that he had just leaked the key and someone was going to steal his invite, but he had a 10 second stream delay setup which give him just enough time to rush and enter the key before anyone else could use it.

Personally, I would stream on a VM to avoid secret leak. PR you own projects, never put any secret on this VM.

I think you'd be surprised how efficient video codecs with regards to bandwidth used, nobody sends raw pixels at all. Also with HLS latency can be very short with the right settings.

A few tips for coding screencasting:

For coding screencasts you should make sure that chroma subsampling isn't enabled when you're doing the encode of the video otherwise it may look worse with highly contrasting areas.

Decrease the encoding frame rate if its primarily going to be just a screencast without a lot of motion on the screen. At the expense longer mpeg segments (and more latency) you may want to increase the group-of-picture size.

There shouldn't be a reason that the encoded screencast looks worse then how it appeared to you unless the encoder you are using is just mashing the quality down.

I think that you can do something like this with VS Code's Live Share[1] feature. And I think it's possible to do read-only sessions as well. Been a while since I looked at that feature though, so I'm not certain.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/liveshare/use/...

What you’re looking for sounds like Skypix, an Amiga based system for creating BBS UIs.

But, honestly, if your intention is to reach an audience rather than simply to geek out over an elegant technical solution (no harm in that!), then just go with streaming. It’s not your bandwidth, after all, if you’re using Twitch et al.

I guess, though, that streaming has the problem of not letting you copy the code, not being meaningfully interactive, etc.

Besides VSCode's LiveShare that was already mentioned, there are several tools that allow folks to collaboratively edit code: Floobits[1] and CodeTogether[2] are a couple that I've used successfully (I'm an IntelliJ IDEA fan, so like to stay in my IDE).

[1] https://floobits.com/ [2] https://www.codetogether.com/

Scrimba pretty effectively (at least in terms of tech implementation) does this for frontend programming. I think the actual course content is relatively middling.

https://scrimba.com/

Whoops, you're right that I didn't mention that. Connecting it to your Mac via Lightning makes the screen available as a video source.

> There are apps on iOS that will share the screen content and camera content and a quick google seems to surface the same for Android.

I have been on the look for something like that in the past. I know of software sharing the camera via NDI, but it was my understanding that doing the same with the screen was not possible inside Apple's sandbox.

You can use AirPlay, of course, but then you're stuck with hoping that on the next OS update the AirPlay server software you're bought is updated quickly.

So please do name one if you're aware.

You can run TeamViewer and feed that as source into OBS.

Yeah, your average side-address condenser really is not a good choice for livestreaming at all. Even the good ol' SM58 or its Made-in-China competitor, the AKG D5 are going to perform much better in terms of background rejection, and are obviously a lot cheaper.

Getting a good level out of a solid dynamic mic requires a good pre-amp as well as (often) a signal booster like the Cloud Lifter or Cathedral Pipes.

It’s a more expensive setup overall, but it does make for a much richer ‘radio’ sound if that’s what you’re after.

Thinking about it a bit more, perhaps one reason to a condenser in this scenario is to easily hide the mic from the video. It's doable with a well a dynamic mic and some composition work too though.

I’m testing the Pi HQ camera with a C-Mount Tamron lens that gives similar bokeh for a total cost of around $100... but it is awkward and a little clumsy, and offers no autofocus, so you have to be careful to not move out of the prefocused area.

So in other words, it’s easier to just use a good mirrorless camera.

I have a similar setup to OP, but I bought a used Sony a6000 and the same lens on sale, so the camera and lens only cost me about $500. You could use the Sony kit lens too, and it would still be a huge upgrade over any webcam.

Any camera with an f/2ish lens will do it, even $150 ones (but it also depends on the size of the sensor). You might not be able to use it as a Webcam directly, though.

I'm using my phone, there's an app that lets you stream from your phone's camera... which is usually better than the dedicated web cams.

Technically this is still kind of the best way of doing it.

Guy who wrote this article made a mistake, his keyframe interval is set to 0, which tells his encoder its free to do scene detection... however, he's exploiting the nature of the encoder (the scene never changes, as its a static image) to create extremely large GOPs, but not as big as manually setting it can go.

Twitch, as do other platforms, have recommendations, but they'll ingest pretty much anything you give them. This means, you can send them 15fps or lower with a ridiculously huge keyframe interval of 10 or more (Twitch recommends 2, 1 is a saner choice for low latency usage, 10 is still gives you enough ability to interact with viewers).

I've toyed with code/static optimized streams, and using x264 instead of HW encoding on a Nvidia Turing (currently the best HW encoder), and playing with custom args: -refs 16, -qmin above 10, -keyint_min set to keyframe interval * framerate (allows 1 I frame per GOP, the rest of the GOP could be near-zero bandwidth P frames), and -tune stillimage (which sets lesser known options which sorta helped here). Static views of an IDE would use extremely little bandwidth.

You'd be optimizing for the IDE view part of a stream, not the stream of you, which would be in a corner of the screen.

It's a totally impractical, goofy thing - just for fun!

It should be much like any other sort of marketing effort. Seek out some marketing books. Maybe pay a social media marketer to do some marketing for you if you don't feel you have the necessary skills or can't pick them up fast enough.

There's also good old fashioned networking, too. Find social coders with a similar style to you (and a reasonable audience) that you could be friends with / mesh well with. Try to make friends with them. Try to do streams after their regularly scheduled streams and encourage them to send their active audience along to your channel when they are done for the day. (That's what Twitch Raids are; Twitch built an entire viral networking tool for that.)

Youtube videos. You need to have a youtube channel and put up videos for people to discover if you want to grow.

With twitch alone it's easy to get lost among the other streamers, and I'm not necessarily going to dig through VODs either.

Putting a condensed version of your stream to a youtube playlist and having links to your twitch will help a lot.

I believe code streamers need to bring their own audience from some other thing.

It's not what you want to hear, but it is what I've seen.

Not sure of what OS you utilize, but Twitch recently released an app called Studio for Windows/OS X that allows you to very easily stream your desktop to their service.

Twitch is a lot more "discoverable" in that you can easily search for folks who are coding _right now_. I get lots of new viewers this way.

For YT, viewers would have to already know who they're looking for and so they're not likely to "stumble" across your stream.

Probably stream to both simultaneously until you figure out which one works better for you.

If you get Twitch affiliate or partner I believe you can stream on both YouTube and Twitch still just not simultaneously, at least that is what I have read. Not sure many big streamers have tried so not sure on the details.

I've done this a few times too and posted those on Youtube. Good times.

Streaming could be fun, but if you're streaming something you're actively learning (let's say a new piece of tech while you build something), for me it would be likely 50 minutes of Googling and 10 minutes of coding for every hour. That's how I talk myself out of not streaming because I personally would get bored watching someone Google things endlessly.

One thing I wanted to add is that as another commenter mentioned it can be a very "sporadic" activity. But what's interesting is that the craziness of programming really only happens at certain points, then at other points its very focused as everything just sort of falls into place.

One thing I was trying to demonstrate to my coworker is that with experience you know where you're probably gonna go from the start but you still have to do all the same mundane bullshit regardless to start :)

I have a problem with diving into rabbit holes and spending more time on "being efficient" than sometimes just doing the work. Two things that have helped are

1) recording a "session" (I use snagit, but any screen recorder that lets you narrate works), where I describe what I'm working on, what the goal is etc. It seems silly, but even if the only person that's going to watch the video is me it somehow helps keep on task. And the video journal aspect is actually interesting.

2) Focusmate.com - this worked for me for a while, but I'm a secret uber-introvert, so I dreaded the introduction part of the process. But telling someone "I want to accomplish X in the next hour" and then having them watching over my shoulder really works.

Maybe you should try the live streaming, but just leave out the streaming part? :-)

I believe you can add a delay for what the viewers see, which would give you some time to cut the stream in case any secrets are shown.

Else, it's good practice for a secret rotation process :)

Not sure what IDE/editors you use.. but a quick search in VS Code's extensions revealed one named "Cloak" that might protect you to your satisfaction?

It seems like you've been doing this long enough that you've lost empathy for folks who are getting started. Pretty common for technical folks. OBS is not the most intuitive piece of software. For instance, "Scenes" will be new concept for folks. This was a great guide. Thanks OP for writing it.

There seems to be quite more to the article than that. Maybe if being critical of everything on the internet, the comment section may not be for you.

1. What does gatekeeping accomplish here? 2. Did you even read the tutorial? It does much more than just "stream your entire screen"

I think it's personal preference! I tried this out, but I didn't like it as much. I found it harder to configure, a little clunkier, and so on.

Streamlabs used a ton of cpu usage on my Mac Mini 2014. Even when not being actively used. Made it a no go for me.

> What about hardware-level cursors? (I think that's a thing?)

Software that wants to capture the desktop has to emulate the hardware cursor by getting the current cursor position and bitmap and blit it into its copy of the framebuffer. That's because the hardware cursor doesn't exist in the framebuffer, it's overlaid by the GPU during readout.

For the same reason screen-effects like "nightlight" don't affect the cursor in Windows, because the effect is applied as a shader, which can't touch the cursor. They could fix this by updating the cursor bitmap, but they don't.

> Or do different OSs have very different strategies for this?

Yup. Check out their capture "source" plugins:

https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/tree/master/plugins...

https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/tree/master/plugins...

https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/tree/master/plugins...

Good luck and have fun!

>There was a twitch-like platform for live coding once, but obviously it flopped.

I went searching for that exact site and couldn't find it (or maybe I did but regardless it was dead). I actually used it for about 5 maybe 10 minutes once upon a time because I thought the concept was cool. Watch me create a SaaS service on the fly. 3 minutes into it, I'm realizing I'm about to type in public IP addresses, log into secret management systems, pull data out of a CMDB which gives up a bunch of my internal system data... So I thought to only share a single monitor and use my second monitor for privacy related tasks. But then people can't see what I am doing and for long periods of time while i'm gathering CMDB data, no one sees any coding going on. At the end of the 10 minutes, I had about 12 viewers so I'm sure if I was doing somethign worthwhile it would increase a decent clip..

But live coding without planning is a security nightmare. Someone I knew once live coded their programming "homework" for a position they applied to and then shared their coding session with the interviewers. That takes the cake. He was hired on the spot, probably because he wasn't afraid to show his mistakes.

Hey, I can't link to it right now but there's a couple of Twitter threads about that card and some true USB3 1080p capable ones - they're about $50AUD on AliExpress. I still wonder why the manufacturer or seller filed off the names of the chips.

I have seen quite a number of hardware/embedded streams, but not a lot lately. Many of the streamers (both hardware and programming) are often new or mid level devs, there's a few super experienced programmers. I like watching Daniel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Stenberg), https://www.twitch.tv/curlhacker who created curl, and pretty much has spent forever working on the project. He streams off and on.

I can barely get 1-2 people to briefly look at my stream, and that’s without attempting to charge them anything at all. And meanwhile even popular people stream for free. Why should anyone pay upfront to watch a stream? Much better with Patreon, Twitch subscriptions and donations while allowing anyone to come see.

I'm using OBS on Ubuntu to stream my maker sessions on https://youtube.com/c/StavrosKorokithakis/ and everything works fine, what problems are you having?

PS does anyone know how to get a better channel URL?