OBS, FFSplit, XSplit

Back in April of this year, gaming streamer Pewdiepie made waves when he announced he was moving his live streams off of Twitch and exclusively onto the burgeoning blockchain-based service DLive. Overnight, the little known community made headlines from its high-profile new creator driving massive traffic to the young site. This move shed some light on the community of lesser-known streaming services and tools.

From Facebook, DLive, Youtube, and Twitch, content creators and business people alike are leveraging Livestreams as a tool for content creation and community engagement. Continuing off of last week’s blog post, we’re going to briefly explore several pieces of live-streaming software a new streamer can use right now to start building a community around their brand.

Open Broadcaster Software(OBS) – Windows, OSX, Linux

Pros: OBS is likely the most used broadcasting software. It has an accessible layout, it’s open-source, and it’s free. It also supports plugins to add features to its already comprehensive set of tools.

Cons: OBS doesn’t natively support multiple stream outputs, and changing scenes mid-stream can be a little clunky.

FFSplit- Windows

Pros: It is free and supports streaming to multiple services at the same time. It can also be used to record video from multiple sources and will output in three available formats (.mkv, .flv and .mp4.) It is also lightweight compared to the potentially CPU heavy OBS.

Cons: FFSplit is only supported on Vista and later, and it is often noted with having poor stream quality that’s hard to troubleshoot.

XSplit – Windows

Pros: It has the most intuitive interface of the three, and is best suited to the non-technical streamer. It also supports multiple streams and can receive video directly from a Skype stream. A major distinction of XSplit is its ability to run custom JavaScript and interactive Flash files(allows loading .swf files.)

Cons: The full set of features are behind a paywall(starting at $24.95/3-months,) and the free version will include adds. Addition, it can be resource-heavy, and can’t stream above 1080p.