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How to Live Stream from Mac to Youtube, Twitch & Facebook Live

Live streaming is a trending profession these days, and if you want to stream games or anything live from your Macbook or Mac workstations, a good old tool takes care of most of the things. The Open Broadcasting Software is something I used from the past few weeks, and the following is the step by step tutorial on the same.

Live Streaming from Mac to Youtube, Twitch or Facebook Live

Step 1:

Let’s get started with downloading the open broadcasting software from the official OBS website here.

Install the package in your Mac OS and open the OBS.

Step 2:

At first glance, you will see nothing but the blank canvas, and the big black area in the center is your live stream preview. Whatever you see here will be streamed live.

On the bottom left you will see empty scenes and sources panels unlike mine, which is already set up. In scenes, you can create multiple scenes like one for the live stream, one for when you pause the game and one for when you have some timer on saying starting next stream in few minutes.

You may also want to read: Our Complete Guide to live streaming PUBG from PC, Android & iOS

Step 3:

Let’s create the one scene called Tutorial by clicking ‘+’ Icon and renaming your scene.

For each scene, I can add any number of sources. Like 5 videos playing side by side, or one game window and one front camera and so on.

So I’m adding a new source, and I have so many options. If you want to stream your complete display, you can choose DISPLAY CAPTURE. or Particular Window, go with WINDOW CAPTURE, and to simply add an image in the background you can elect IMAGE.

Step 4:

For each option you select particularly for Window or Display, you will have further option to customize or select particular window.


Here I am selecting a video footage playing in Quicktime. And I only want to display the video playing inside the window and nothing else on my screen.

Step 5:

I am adding New Scene > Window Capture > Renamed the Window to Quicktime and click OK.

You will see a dialogue box to select the Window. And you have to see a list of all open windows on your Mac. I am selecting the Quicktime player from the list and click OK.

You will immediately see the preview on screen. You might want to click the red border around the screen to adjust how this scene should fit your broadcasting window.

Similarly, you can add overlays with Images, or show your face on the corner of your screen, and beautify the stream display as you need. You can see the super easy sample, but you can do so much with available tools and filters for each scene.

Live streaming from Mac with Face camera

You will be able to add audio sources like your microphone into the stream, and you can use an audio mixer to control the volume.

Note that the scenes are layer based. Whatever is on the top of the list will overlay on everything else on the scenes list. So plan your scenes accordingly.  To see how your live stream will look, click on big blue START RECORDING button on bottom right of open broadcasting software.

You will find the recording path in setting, by default it’s Mac>Username>Movies.

This wraps up our broadcasting view part. Let’s move on to the streaming part.

For this, you will need a streaming key from whatever platform you want to stream on. For this example, let’s try Youtube live streaming.

Step 6:

Create a channel on YouTube and get your streaming key and URL from the live streaming settings.

On your OBS > Settings (Another big blue button) > Stream.

Simply copy and paste your stream key and URL here. My settings are for Mobcrush, that lets me stream to multiple channels like YouTube, Twitch, and Mobcrush at the same time. You can try it or keep it simple streaming on one platform at a time.

NOTE- Do not show this key publicly or post anywhere online, as others can stream on your channel without any authentication needed. So make sure to keep it a secret.

Step 7:

In other settings, you can customize your streaming resolution, audio sources and recording settings as needed.

Once all things are set up, try streaming privately. You can do it from your respective platform dashboard (Youtube, Mobcrush or Twitch).

Step 8:

To start streaming just click on Start Streaming button, and you’re all set. You will see green red and yellow square flashing on the bottom right with the frame rates. If your frames are dropping too much your stream will be unstable. Make sure you understand your hardware capabilities and adjust your streaming settings accordingly.

If you stream from Macbook air (which I guess is the lowest powered Mac out there), you can flawlessly stream in 720p. For more powerful macs you can go with a higher resolution.

The process for Windows as well as Mac is almost the same for streaming with OBS software, which is completely free to use. The only issue is with audio streaming, which I will be writing in my next tutorial. Let us know if you could easily broadcast with this tutorial, or if you have any issues, let me know in the comments section below.

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