TL;DR ――We will share the knowledge of live game distribution on Arch Linux. --The Nintendo Switch screen will be delivered to YouTube Live using a driver-free capture board. --The distribution software uses OBS Studio. --Contains version-dependent information about OBS. Please be careful if the posting date and time is old.

Things to prepare

Arch Linux (also available on other Linux distributions)
HSV321 (capture board)
OBS Studio

Capture board selection

I chose the following products because there are many people who have confirmed the operation on Linux. Since I am not familiar with the capture board, it looks like a suspicious Chinese product, but it is an HDMI pass-through compatible device that does not depend on the OS and does not require a driver. Anything that works on Linux will do.

Mirabox HSV321

Distribution software

The OS is Arch Linux for everyday use. Of course, Windows has more convenient tools for distribution, but Linux also has distribution tools in the repository.

This time, we will use the well-known OBS Studio. It can be installed not only on the Arch Linux Community repository, but also on Ubuntu and other major distributions.

On the other hand, the current version (24.x) of OBS Studio for Linux does not have the browser plug-in installed, and comments and subscription notifications cannot be displayed on the distribution screen. In the past version (23.x), it seems that you can install it just by placing the plug-in (obs-linuxbrowser) in the directory. It doesn't seem to work properly on x system.

Looking at issues etc., it seems that it will work if you build the development version 25.x system including the plug-in, so AUR's development version -git) build and install. Below is an example of installing the AUR helper with yay.

yay -S obs-studio-git

The development version of AUR includes obs-linuxbrowser.

On the contrary, if you don't need the browser function, you can use 24.x series. There is Installation procedure on GitHub, so please install it according to your own OS. With Arch Linux, you can install it as it is with pacman. sudo pacman -S obs-studio

Delivery initial settings

When you start it, there are ** Source ** setting items at the bottom of the large preview screen. Right-click and select Add, select ** Video Capture Device **, and set the Device field to ** MiraBox Video Capture **.

That's all for the basic capture settings. If you need voice input from the microphone, set the voice input from the source in the same way. I think this depends on the audio settings on the Linux side, so I will omit the explanation.

Detailed settings can be made by opening the settings from the toolbar. For live distribution, select YouTube Live from the distribution tab and enter the stream key. The stream key can be obtained from the YouTube Live distribution screen. If you've read this article and want to imitate it, activate your YouTube Live account before you start. It takes about 24 hours to use it.

After completing the above settings, you can distribute by pressing the distribution start button. It is necessary to start distribution on both the OBS side distribution and the YouTube Live side distribution. In OBS Studio, you can record at the same time as distribution, or you can operate it only by recording. Since the distribution is also archived on YouTube Live side, it may not be necessary to record at the same time as the distribution unless you make detailed edits later.

View comments and notifications

Stream Labs, which is an extended version of OBS, supports comment display during live distribution as standard, but this software only exists for Windows. On the other hand, Stream Labs provides comment display etc. as a widget function, so refer to this in OBS Studio.

Here, we will utilize the browser function that we wanted to use until we built the development version above. Create a Stream Labs account, log in, and open the Alert Box page. The URL is provided as shown below, so paste this URL into the browser source of OBS Studio. The browser source is set by selecting ** browser ** from ** source ** in the same way as the capture board selection earlier.

You can test notifications from Stream Labs. If you select ** Test Subscriber ** under the Widget URL, you can see the notification displayed on the distribution screen. You can add a comment field etc. by the same operation.

Also, if you find it troublesome to create an account, you can display the comment on the distribution screen by pasting the URL after popping up the comment field of YouTube Live and playing with the CSS.

Read aloud the comment

You need to prepare it separately, but Sticky Reader, which is famous for reading aloud, does not work on Linux. There seems to be a service called YouTubeLive comment read aloud, but after delivering it for a while, it stopped reading aloud due to a mysterious error (API acquisition restriction?). It seems that it is quick to hit the YouTube Live API by yourself and have some software read it aloud. If you feel like it, consider making your own.

Game distribution to YouTube Live on Arch Linux (Nintendo Switch)