Topic: Live Stream

[92merc]

I'm probably jinxing it by posting this.  But I finally have a live YouTube stream up and working somewhat stable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfuNbvjIt00

I have OBS Studio injecting:
1: Radar GIF.  Have a plug in to OBS so that file refreshes every minute.
2: Created my own NOAA Radio image to reflex my WXL78.  That is a static image.
3: My current webcam image.  I have that refreshing every 5 seconds.
4: Script to put in current date and time.  For something simple, that caused me the most headaches.
5: I have CumulusMX making me a simple TXT file with Weather data.  That auto refreshes when the file updates every few seconds.
6: When you have VLC installed on your PC, you can ingest a VLC Stream to it.  I'm using my local Icecast server stream of the weather radio. So I don't even have a radio hooked to the PC like I thought I'd have to do.

I'm using an old Dell Optiplex 5050 with integrated video.  I was concerned that wasn't good enough.  I kept getting a generic OBS error of "encoder error".  Made some tweaks to Windows.  OBS needs to "Run as Administrator" like some of our weather apps.  That hosed up my image creation I had to fix.  It finally has now run from last night about 7:00 pm to now.  Previous I was lucky to get a couple of hours.

Not sure if I'll keep it running.  Have to see if it's going to be a PITA to maintain and keep running.

[Adrian23]

Dude.. this is awesome! 

[92merc]

Funny thing is this is an old i5 7th gen, 7500T.  So it's even a lower end i5.  And being a micro PC, no video card slot.  I really didn't think it would have the processing/video power to handle OBS.  Video drivers from Dell haven't been updated since 2021.  However I did find a driver from Intel from 2025.  OBS said encoder errors are usually from video drivers.

But being this old, i still got Windows 11 installed.  CPU is only running 6-9 percent.  GPU is running 35 percent.  So I wouldn't call this being taxed.

I did go in and limit the stream to 30 frames per a second instead of default 60fps.  No need for high frames when it's just pictures.  And I limited bandwidth to 5 meg instead of default 10.

Now if it'll just stay stable, I'll be happy.  Not bad for a old PC I had just laying around anyway.

[92merc]

Updated my certs to Icecast.  Made me have to restart OBS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB4hOW8IsH8

[SoMDWx]

Would love to understand how you accomplished this....   

[92merc]

First crash since my changes.  https://www.youtube.com/@bismarckweather  Click on Live.

OBS studio is free.  I installed that.  Then the items I mentioned previously are "sources".  Image sources, text sources, and a VLC source.  Took a bit of playing around before I understood myself.  All new to me too.

[92merc]

I thought I'd do a little update on this project.  Tell you what I've learned so far.

First, you're going to need a decent recent PC.  Processor wise, you'll need to run basically what Windows 11 recommends.  That's because the OBS Studio I'm using has dropped support for the older processors that Windows 11 doesn't support.  I kept getting encoding errors.  That was because the Intel integrated video just didn't work well enough on the old PC I was testing with.

I changed from my old 7th gen Intel i5 PC to my actual Weather PC.  That's 14th gen i5.  It works just fine. OBS only takes a couple of percent CPU power, and about 10% GPU.  I think if I added a low end NVIDIA card, it would work better yet as OBS has built in support for that.

Since I'm running OBS on the same PC as my Cumulus and IPTimeLapse, I can use "local" files.  I have Cumulus making a simple TXT file for the live data.  OBS just detects file changes and updates it automatically.  Same for my IPTL webcam image.  It just points locally.

For the audio, I was using my ICECAST stream.  But I'd still occasionally get an encoder error I think may be related.  Even with ICECAST running on the same PC.  So I plugged in my weather radio to the mic in port of the PC.  Took me a while, but I figured out in the Control Panel Sounds area, you have to check the box to "listen" to this microphone feed.  Then OBS started playing it.  What is really nice is OBS has some audio filters.  First, the noise filter got rid of pretty much all the static and hiss.  Then I added a 3 level EQ.  Killed all low, dropped the mid, and added to the high.  That really helped with the voice.  It's much clearer now.

I think the only other issue is I can only stream about 12hours at a time.  Google searches have varying reasons.  But that's about as long as my stream would last, and I'd have to fire up a new one.  So far, I don't know of a way to automate that.  I may have to play with scheduling, see if that's a possible solution.  Start a new stream every X hours.

The PC I have is Windows 11 25H2.  I've done some of the AI and debloat scripts to clean Windows up.  It's a PC I built.  Gigabyte motherboard.  32 Gigs RAM.  i5 14500.  Just using integrated video for now.  With CumuluxMX, WD, ICECAST, IPTL, OBS, NGINX, and Synology Drive backup, it still only runs 4-9% CPU, and 10-11% GPU.

The one thing I'm waiting on is a device that will convert the Midland WR400 audio headphone levels to microphone levels.  Technically headphones run a bit too high.  This device may drop it down and make the audio even better.  And I'm hoping that device will work on another project I'm still testing for the NOAA weather streamers.