Live streaming with ProPresenter & OBS on two computers

This series of articles is now located at www.thechurchpod.com. Switch your bookmarks accordingly and thanks for reading!

In the previous article I explained how to set this up with one computer. Why use a second? Your main machine might not be able to process the stream fast enough, resulting in dropouts. But in my case I needed two solutions: I wanted a second person to supervise the live stream—make sure it’s working, change scenes during the service, maybe handle the audio mix. I also needed another physical monitor output to send the stream to our HDMI/CAT5 building TV screens; our iMac didn’t have enough ports on the back. So here we go:

The first Mac is for ProPresenter only. The second Mac is for OBS and Facebook. It’s an older Mac Pro that’s connected to our closed AV network via ethernet (don’t use wireless…a cable beats the air any day). I installed OBS as well as a different version of Syphon called NDISyphon. This is required because we’re running between computers on the network (NDI is required for PC systems, by the way). Open NDI and you’ll see your main ProPresenter computer under clients (as long as both computers are on the same network). Select it, then check the Enabled box. That’s it…although in my case it doesn’t stick when I reboot the computer, so we have to select and enable it every time (if you have a solution let me know).

The camera switcher and audio interface are connected to the OBS Mac, so set that up just like I described in the first article with sources and scenes.

In our case, we wanted to feed TVs around the building with the live stream content (camera feed, lyrics, audio), but not from Facebook (glitchy, delays, etc). We can send the clean, original live stream signal straight from OBS to any display we want, so I ran an extra HDMI output from this computer to an HDMI/CAT5 extender box. This gizmo converts an HDMI signal to an ethernet output, multiple ones, in fact. From there we run ethernet lines to each TV around our building, where there are receiver boxes that convert the CAT5 back to HDMI. Since the CAT5 signal is regular computer data, you can extend this anywhere you need using standard network switches.

To get that signal running, right-click anywhere on main OBS screen and select: Fullscreen Projector Preview NAME OF YOUR VIDEO DEVICE.

Then we discovered that this output from OBS doesn’t include, you know, sound. What? Go figure, but anyhow I happened to have an HDMI Audio Inserter box. This small device takes an HDMI input, has an audio input jack, then outputs a combined HDMI signal. So, connect an HDMI cable from the OBS computer to this device, route an audio cable from the mixing console to the device, then connect an HDMI cable from it to your CAT5 extender box (or wherever you want to feed the stream). Again, this part has nothing to do with Facebook streaming…that’s all internal to OBS.

Let me know if you need clarification on any of this or suggestions on how I can improve on it for my church. More brains are better than one!