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NOALBS without installing anything

NOALBS is what keeps your stream from freezing when the signal dies. Here it comes already running, so the only part left for you is deciding which scenes to use.

What NOALBS is

Section titled “What NOALBS is”

NOALBS stands for Nginx OBS Automatic Low Bitrate Switching. It’s an open-source project born in the IRL community, and it’s the piece most IRL setups lean on: it watches the bitrate and the latency of the feed arriving at your ingest, and when they sink it tells OBS to switch to another scene. When you recover, it switches back on its own.

That’s the whole idea. Everything else — thresholds, retries, chat commands — is detail around it.

What running it yourself costs

Section titled “What running it yourself costs”

Plenty of people run NOALBS by hand, and it works. It’s worth knowing what you’re signing up for before you decide:

  • An ingest server of your own that publishes live statistics for NOALBS to read. No stats, no switching.
  • A machine that stays on. NOALBS has to be running the whole time you stream, which in practice means it can’t live on the laptop you close when you leave.
  • A configuration file with your scene names, your thresholds and your credentials, kept in sync by hand every time you rename a scene.
  • The updates, and the afternoon you spend finding out the feed stopped switching because a rename broke it silently.

None of that is hard. It’s just work that has to keep happening, and it happens on the day you’re about to go live.

What you get here instead

Section titled “What you get here instead”

It comes already installed, already running and already pointed at your stream key. You don’t download a binary, you don’t edit a file and you don’t keep a process alive.

Running it yourself On a Cloud OBS Against your OBS
Who installs it You Nobody, it ships with it Nobody, it runs on our side
Where it runs Your machine Your Cloud OBS Our side, through the dock
Configuration A file you edit The Scene switching tab The Scene switching tab
Ingest statistics You set them up Included Included
Chat commands Yes, if you wire them Yes No

The last row is the real difference between the two setups here, and it’s covered in NOALBS chat commands.

Coming from your own NOALBS

Section titled “Coming from your own NOALBS”

Everything you already know carries over, because it’s the same project underneath. Same three scenes, same low-bitrate and offline thresholds in kbps, same RTT, same retry count, same !fix, !switch and !bitrate.

Two things do change, and they’re the ones that trip people up:

  • The scene names come from a dropdown, not from you typing them. That kills the single most common failure of a hand-written config, which is a name that no longer matches.
  • There’s no config file to back up. What you save in the tab is the configuration.

Where to set it up

Section titled “Where to set it up”

Next step

Section titled “Next step”