How automatic scene switching works (NOALBS)

You step into a lift, you lose coverage and the stream freezes. Automatic scene switching watches your feed the whole time and, when it sinks, puts something decent up front until you’re back.

What it watches

Two numbers from the feed arriving at your stream key:

• The bitrate, in kbps. What your phone or your encoder is actually pushing up.
• The latency (RTT), in milliseconds. It rises before the bitrate does when the network starts to choke.

What it does with them

You have three scenes assigned and it moves between them depending on the state of the feed:

Scene	When it comes in
Normal	Everything’s fine: bitrate above the threshold and reasonable latency
Low bitrate	The bitrate drops below the low bitrate threshold, or the latency rises above the high RTT threshold
No signal	The bitrate falls below the no signal threshold

The Low bitrate scene is usually a static shot or a camera with less movement; the No signal one, your “back in a minute” screen. You decide what they are.

When it acts and when it doesn’t

Only while you’re streaming. If OBS isn’t live, it touches nothing: you can prepare scenes in peace without them being switched out from under you.

It doesn’t jump at the first bump. Before switching it waits for several bad checks in a row — the retries, 5 out of the box. That way a one-second glitch doesn’t take you off shot.

It comes back on its own, and fast. As soon as the feed recovers, it returns to your Normal scene without waiting for anything or asking your permission. You don’t have to remember to go back.

The scenes have to exist with that exact name

Automatic switching doesn’t create scenes: it only switches to the ones already in OBS. If you assign a scene and then rename it or delete it, it’s left with nowhere to go and nothing changes. Check the names before you head out.

Where it’s set up

It’s configured per server, and there are two places depending on where your OBS is:

• On a Cloud OBS: the Scene switching tab in the server detail. Every Cloud OBS plan includes it. → Setting it up on a Cloud OBS
• On your own OBS: the Scene switching tab of that OBS in My OBS, with the EnhancedIRL Switcher plugin and remote control turned on. → Setting it up on your OBS

The important difference between the two: on the Cloud OBS you can tie it to your chat and give your moderators commands; on your local OBS, you can’t. That’s in Chat commands.

What NOALBS is

Automatic scene switching runs on NOALBS — Nginx OBS Automatic Low Bitrate Switching — an open-source project born in the IRL community. It’s the same tool plenty of people run by hand on their own machines, and it’s what most IRL setups lean on to survive a bad connection.

The difference here is that you don’t install it and you don’t maintain it. We run it and keep it configured from the dashboard, both on a Cloud OBS and against the OBS at your house. No binary to download, no JSON to edit, no process to keep alive: you pick your scenes and your thresholds in the tab and that’s the whole job.

If you already run NOALBS yourself, everything you know still applies — scenes, thresholds, retries and chat commands are the same ideas under the same names. → NOALBS on Enhanced IRL

Thanks to whoever keeps the project going: you can tell in every stream that doesn’t freeze.

Before you trust it

1. Create (or review) the three scenes in OBS and put real content in them.
2. Assign them in the dashboard and save.
3. Tune the thresholds to your real bitrate. The stock ones fit a stream of around 3 Mbps. → Recommended thresholds
4. Do an ugly test on purpose: go live and cover the antenna or kill your phone’s data. It should drop you to Low bitrate and then to No signal, and come back when you reconnect.

Next step

• Recommended thresholds — what numbers to use depending on how much you stream at.
• Setting it up on a Cloud OBS — the tab, step by step.
• The scene doesn’t switch — when it’s on and nothing happens.