Web Development: How to Make Multi-Source Live Stream Video for Free With OBS.Ninja and OBS Studio

Monday, December 21, 2020

How to Make Multi-Source Live Stream Video for Free With OBS.Ninja and OBS Studio

The Group Chat in OBS Ninja lets you control media feeds from multiple participant's, and makes it easy to send streams to OBS Studio for broadcast. A hedirector's room feature lets you manage settings and communicate with your participants outside of the broadcast.

In this tutorial, learn how to easily add multiple remote contributors to your live stream for free with OBS Ninja and OBS Studio.

1. Set up a Group Chat Room in OBS.Ninja

Head over to https://obs.ninja and click Add Group Chat to OBS.

You’ll need to give your chatroom a name (with no spaces) and it’s wise to choose a password too. In theory someone could create a room with the same name as you, but it's highly unlikely you'd both also choose the same password.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what you can see:

Guest Invite

You give this link to those who you want to join your chat or broadcast – they’ll be asked to put in a password if you’ve assigned one, so you’ll need to give them that too. Other guests will be able to see and hear each other.

Broadcast Invite

This is a broadcast only link, so any users you give this link to will be able to broadcast their feed but won’t see or hear the rest of the group.

Scene Link: Manual

This is a link to add the feed as a browser source in OBS Studio. You can add each guest by clicking Add to Scene.

Scene Link: Auto

As above but any guest using this link will automatically be added to a scene rather than you assigning them individually.

As each guest joins, you’ll be able to see them in the Guest slots at the bottom of the screen. The guests can decide whether to share their camera, audio or screen.

When someone clicks your link, they'll see this:

If they’ve got more than one camera and microphone option they can choose which to share. When they hit ‘START’ they’ll appear in your room.

You’ve got a few extra controls once someone is in the chat. You can record their feed, add them to another scene, transfer them to a different chat room, adjust their audio volume, mute them, kick them out, or send them a message.

As each person joins the chatroom you'll see them as above, in their own little sections.

You’ll see an option to copy solo link, which will take that particular feed’s audio and video for you to use elsewhere but still let you control it from the main chat room if you want to.

Add Your Source (Solo Link) to your Broadcasting Software

Copy that link for use in your broadcaster – we're using OBS Studio. You'll need to add it as a source; it's probably easiest if you create a scene for each participant and then add their feed as a source, as it can be easier to flip between scenes than sources. We look at how to add scenes and sources in this article:

How to Use Sources to Create Video in Open Broadcaster Software Studio (OBS)

With scenes and sources you can setup multiple recording targets, like monitors, specific applications and even webcams, and switch between them or layer and...

Kezz Bracey
26 Jan 2019

Video

Add each participant to OBS studio as a browser source

Add the link to a scene as a browser source and you'll see that feed appear in your main window. Do this with each participant's link and you've got everyone in one place, with all the benefits of OBS Studio like any graphics and animations you may have saved for your broadcast.

You could also use this method if you wanted to have two cameras on yourself while you're broadcasting, and still control everything from OBS studio. If you're doing that, remember to switch off the audio on your second camera or you'll create a pretty terrible echo. The AWS Blogger has a great example of using OBS Ninja's chatroom feature as a second camera source.

There are more great ways to add remote video sources to live streams with OBS Ninja, too.