How To Use The Media Source, VLC Source in OBS - Dec 2021

OBS Studio Media VLC Source Tutorial Guide - A Beginners Guide on how to use the media source and VLC source in OBS Studio for live streaming.
More information on using OBS Studio can be found here obsproject.com...
OBS Studio can be downloaded at
obsproject.com/
00:15 - Media Sources
02:30 - VLC Source
07:00 - Conclusion
Music is N64 by Streambeats by Harris Heller
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Once you pick a name and click OK, Media source will come up with some options to go through. First, you can select a local file or an online or network file. Unchecking the box will give you some options to choose for locating the file, it’s format and what you want to allow for buffering and network connection issues.
You have many of the similar options you saw in the slide show source such as the option to loop and to close when inactive. If a source plays and then ends, you can choose to restart playback when the source is made visible again. You have the option to use hardware decoding when available. I would recommend selecting this option, as this can better allocate the workload of decoding certain types of video files to hardware that isn’t already busy with OBS or games. Choose to show nothing when playback ends makes the source go away when done, or if you uncheck it it’s gong to stay on screen.
Adjust playback speed with the slider.
Set your color range, and just like with the image source, you can set what color space your alpha channels work in.
Now, That’s great, but what if you need to be able to play more than one media file? You could add multiple sources and toggle them one at a time, but that would be messy. Instead, there is a better option still.
If you do any work with video files, or even watch video files on your computer, you have probably heard of a program called VLC Media player. If you have not heard of VLC media player, I’m very happy you chose to watch my video your first day on the internet.
Kidding aside, VLC is a free open source lightweight video player that is available on all major platforms. It’s also incredibly versatile. One of the things that has made VLC such a popular video player application, despite it’s less than friendly user interface, is its ability to play nearly any file you can find online. Over the years that I’ve used this program, I can count on one had the amount of files that it hasn’t been able to open for me. That was a long time ago, and file type support has only grown since then.
But, if you don’t already have VLC installed, check the link below to go to their site and download it. Once it is installed, open OBS and add a new source. You should see an option for a VLC Video Source. This is a bad name for it because you can use this for any file that VLC can open including music.
Once you select a name, the settings window is going to appear. Now at this stage, there isn’t anything new in here that we haven’t discussed earlier in the video. You can loop or shuffle the playlist, alter visibility settings and most importantly, add your files to a playlist.
Having the ability to add files to a playlist is one of the two major benefits to using the VLC source over the traditional media source. The other benefit of course is the aforementioned ability to open so many file types. After that, you can select your network caching. Leave it alone if you don’t think that’s applicable to you. Select an audio track. You’ll only need to adjust this if you have a source with audio that isn’t playing properly. Most files will have all of the main audio on track one.
Lastly, if your video files come equipped with a subtitle track, you can add that here as well.
Now, while the VLC source is very useful, there are times where you want to choose it and times when you want to choose media source. If you are having issues with transparency, you probably want media source. If you are needing a video or audio playlist to run, you want VLC. When I live-stream, I often have multiple VLC sources running both video files and background music. If your audio files are tagged properly, you can even find plugins that will display track info on screen for you. It’s very, very versatile.