Lightstream Studio on Mixer
PART 1: GETTING STARTED WITH LIGHTSTREAM
This is part 1 in a series of tutorials covering the basics of setting up and streaming using Lightstream. I’ll be adding more tutorials to this series each week as we get into some more complex setups and 3rd party integrations.
PART 2
Lightstream is a web based broadcasting platform, similar to OBS / Xsplit, that has recently been integrated directly into the Mixer streaming platform, allowing streamers that broadcast directly from their Xbox to add scenes, overlays and notifications directly to their Xbox broadcasts.
The system is currently in Open Beta and is available to all Mixer Pro users via the Broadcast Settings page in your Mixer account.
In this series, we’re going to look at how to get up and running with Lighstream, add your first scenes and integrate some standard 3rd party applications for follow, host and donation alerts.
I’ll be referencing the 3rd party platforms that I use specifically on my own stream, however the principles and integrations are the same across most of Lightstream’s supported 3rd parties.
Enabling Lightstream through Mixer
Getting Lightstream enabled on your mixer account is an extremely simple process, there’s only 1 limitation being that you must have an active Mixer Pro subscription on your account.
If you don’t currently have Mixer Pro, you can purchase a subscription at https://mixer.com/pro
Once you’ve purchased your Mixer Pro subscription, you’ll see the Lightstream (BETA) section in your Broadcast Settings at https://mixer.com/me/channel/broadcast
Simply click the checkbox to enable Lighstream for your broadcasts. This option will now automatically send your Xbox feed to Lightstream before it gets sent back to your Mixer broadcast when you go live.
By default, Lightstream will simply send your default Xbox feed straight back to Mixer, so you won’t see any difference with your stream. That’s where Lightstream’s Scene Customization comes in!
Creating your First Scene in Lightstream
When you first visit https://mixer.golightstream.com, you’ll be asked to authorize your Mixer account, once done you’ll be sent to the Lightstream Studio Scene Editor.
Scene creation in Lightstream is made incredibly easy. Lighstream Studio will create your default scene for you and add in your Mixer Feed by default.
You’ll see your created scenes at the bottom of the screen beneath the “stage” area, and a list of visual and audio layers in the sidebar on the left of the screen.
One caveat of the scene editor right now is that your default “Starting Soon” scene can’t be removed and the Mixer Feed layer must remain in this scene, I believe it’s to do with the way the Lightstream system detects that your broadcast has gone live and as a way to make sure your Xbox feed is always returned to Mixer. Hopefully a future update will enable us to change this scene or select a different “default” scene.
For now, we’re going to turn this scene into our “Starting Soon” scene by disabling the Mixer Feed layer and hiding it with a full screen image.
Disabling the Mixer Feed is as simple as muting the audio output for the layer in the Audio Mixer in the bottom left of the screen.
Next, we’re going to be overlaying a “Starting Soon” image over the Mixer Feed to hide that layer from our output.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we’re going to be using a static, pre-made Staring Soon scene available from Streamlabs.
We’ll cover adding animated scenes in another tutorial.
We’ll be using the Portals Scene Theme from Streamlabs (available here) and we’ll be starting with the Starting Soon static image:
Once we have our image saved, we’re going to head back into the Lightstream Scene Editor and add a new layer by clicking the “+” icon in the left sidebar and selecting “Image” from the dropdown menu.
Next, in the left sidebar, we’re going to click on the “Upload Image” option.
In the Media Uploader popup, we’re going to select “Choose File” and upload our Portals Starting Soon image that we saved earlier.
Once Lightstream has processed the image, it will add it to your Media Folder and create a new Image layer in your scene. The uploaded image should be automatically resized to cover the Scene and placed above the Mixer Feed layer for you.
Now, the next time we start a broadcast through Mixer, Lightstream will kick in and display our Starting Soon image instead of our Xbox feed.
Next up, we’re going to want to add a scene that pulls in our Xbox feed that we can switch to once we’re ready to start playing some games!
Adding Your Gameplay Scene
By now, we’ve integrated Lightstream with our Mixer broadcast and set up a Starting Soon scene that will be automatically displayed when we start broadcasting.
At some point during our broadcast, we’re probably going to want to show some gameplay though, right?
So now we’re going to add our Main Gameplay scene to Lightstream.
In the Scene Selector at the bottom of the screen, we’re going to click on the “Add Scene” button.
Once we add a new scene, Lightstream will automatically select the name of the new scene ready for us to type in our scene name. We’re going to call this scene Main Gameplay for now.
Once we’ve done that, we can click on the pencil icon above our scene name to make that the “active” scene.
You’ll notice that, unlike our default scene, our new scene doesn’t have any layers automatically added. Considering this is our gameplay scene, we’re going to want to add our Mixer Feed into this one and leave the audio enabled.
Just like we did before, we’re going to click on the green “+” button in the left sidebar and this time we’re going to select “Mixer Feed” from the dropdown menu.
There’s no options for the Mixer Feed layer, it will simply add a placeholder into the scene containing the Mixer logo as well as adding a new Audio Layer into the Audio Mixer in the bottom left of the sidebar.
And that’s it! We now have a scene set up that will display our Starting Soon image and another scene that will show our Main Gameplay.
You can add as many scenes as you like to Lightstream for different themes, be right back and stream ending scenes or anything else you like all by using these basic techniques.
In Part 2 of our Lightstream Studio on Mixer series in this series we’ll look at the basics of adding 3rd party alerts and widgets to our Main Gameplay scene so we can show notifications on screen when things happen during our broadcasts.
If you need any more help setting up your Lightstream integration with Mixer, feel free to join The Real World community on Discord here. We have channels set up for Streamer Support and Lighstream integration.
