Setting it up on your OBS

By the end, the OBS at your house will switch on its own to your low-bitrate scene or your offline scene when the feed sinks, even if you’re ten kilometres away with your phone in your hand.

You need: a plan that includes connecting your OBS · your OBS already paired and Connected · the three scenes created in OBS · 5 minutes

Before you start

This tab needs to see your OBS. If you haven’t connected it yet, do that first in Connect your OBS to the dashboard: with no dock open, the dashboard says Connect your OBS first and won’t let you configure anything.

And have the scenes created in OBS before you come here. We don’t create scenes in your OBS: we only pick between the ones you already have.

Steps

1. Open Stream Keys and hit Local OBS on your key.
2. Check that the header says Connected.
3. Go to the Scene switching tab.
4. Under Scenes, pick Live scene, Low-bitrate scene and Offline scene. All three dropdowns fill up with the real scenes from your OBS.
5. Under Thresholds, tune Low bitrate (kbps), High RTT (ms) and No signal (kbps) to your real bitrate. They come with 900, 1500 and 450, which fit a stream of around 3 Mbps.
6. Hit Save. You get the Auto-switch configuration saved notice.

All three scenes are required. If you leave one out, the dashboard stops you with “Pick the live, low-bitrate and offline scenes before saving.”

If you rename a scene in OBS, come back here

What gets saved is the scene’s name. The moment you rename it or delete it in your OBS, automatic switching is left with no destination and stops changing anything. After you touch names, go into the tab, pick the three again and save.

The status you see up top

The status card tells you where you are:

Badge	What it means
Not set up	You still have scenes to pick. “Pick your scenes”
Ready	It’s saved and waiting. “Will activate when you go live”
Active	It’s working right now, while you stream

In other words: saving doesn’t switch it on there and then. It starts when you begin streaming to your stream key, which is why the normal state between streams is Ready.

The difference with the Cloud OBS

There’s one, and it’s worth being clear about: on your local OBS, chat is off.

	Cloud OBS	Your OBS
Switching on bitrate and RTT	Yes	Yes
Automatic return on recovery	Yes	Yes
Scenes	The ones the Cloud OBS ships with	Yours, read from your OBS
Chat commands for your mods	Yes	No
Automatic stop when you raid or host on Twitch	Yes	No

There’s no chat channel to pick and no moderator list in this tab, and no command typed in your chat is going to touch the OBS at your house. If you want your moderator to be able to give you a hand, give them a control widget: with that link they switch scenes by hand from the browser.

There’s no retries field here either: your OBS tab asks you for scenes and thresholds, nothing else.

Not working?

“Connect your OBS first.” The dock isn’t open or it dropped. Go back to Connect OBS, leave the dock open inside OBS and wait to see Connected.

“Auto-switch isn’t included in your plan.” Your plan doesn’t come with this. Change it from Billing.

It switches scene when it shouldn’t, or never switches. It’s the thresholds, nearly always. Tune them to what you actually stream at: Recommended thresholds.

Next step

• Recommended thresholds — what numbers to use depending on how much you stream at.
• How it works — what it watches and when it decides to switch.
• Setting it up on a Cloud OBS — if you’ve also got a server of ours.