Ninja Streams Everywhere: Technical Hurdles

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@Ninja's "streaming everywhere" experiment is a _really_ interesting exercise for a whole lot of reasons. I'm gonna cover each of them (technical logistics, audience engagement, and whether you should try it) in separate threads. 🧵

First, let's take a look at the technical setup required to make this whole thing work. If he's using the typical software that indie streamers use, we're looking at home built PCs, capture cards, and OBS.

FWIW, I haven't been able to find much about his setup online but I've reached out to his team to see if I can get more details. For now, I'm just gonna make some educated guesses for now. I'll come back and make corrections if they get back to me.

The biggest challenge is that he actually needs to output (and produce!) 2 separate streams: 1 in landscape format for desktop platforms (Patreon, Twitch, Twitter, Youtube), and 1 in portrait mode for mobile platforms (Instagram, Tiktok).

OBS simply doesn't do this. It's designed to have 1 stream output to 1 RTMP destination. You can output to multiple RTMP servers with the Multiple Output plugin, but you still have to send the same stream to all of them.

Even if OBS _could_ do this, controlling it would be wild. You need to be able to tell both outputs which scene to use when.

There are probably some tricks you could use (like having a small picture-in-picture scene for both streams and having them both sync'd when scene swapping), but in general this is a pretty significant technical feat.

The only options I've come up with are: 1. Run 2 instances of OBS on a single machine 2. Run OBS on 2 separate machines Both of these are tough, but still doable.

I threw together diagrams of what @Ninja's setup might look like in each of these scenarios. Here's the version where we're running 2 OBS instances on a single machine.

...and this is the version where we're just using 2 separate machines to run OBS.

Now, I could be _totally_ off. There are probably both hardware and software tools that can handle this multiple output setup that @Ninja is using, I'm just not familiar with them.

Other folx with more intense stream tech experience might have more insight, so I'll tag in @heccbrent and @EposVox. ❤️