HelSec.fi

Our first meetup was a success – it seems the audience liked it, and from my point of view, the stream setup was easy to use and we didn’t break it even once while the stream is running. Due to a few requests, I’m documenting our setup so that others can build on it and host their own virtual events with ease.

We couldn’t have got this right the first time if not with the valuable input from Dist, Jaroneko, and whois, who had prior experience in working with streams and setting up advanced features and bots on a Discord server. (For me, this was my first time streaming anything.)

The basic setup was: Zoom meeting --> OBS --> Twitch

1. Speakers connected to a Zoom call and shared their screen and video (whois and me were on the call too to host & stream it)
2. My streaming (=gaming) PC was running OBS. Said PC runs Windows 10.
3. OBS streamed to Twitch

User roles in the Zoom call:

• Whois acted as a meetup host
• Presenters did their thing
• I observed the Zoom call and streamed it, and admitted members (presenters) prior to the zoom call being live on the stream

Let’s look at these in detail.

Zoom call setup

We got a paid Zoom account so that we can run meetings longer than the 40 minutes on the free version. We likely got other useful features as well (I never hosted Zoom previously so I don’t know). I scheduled a basic Zoom meeting and sat on it with my streaming PC for the duration of the stream, as did whois the meetup host. By default, Zoom places call participants in a “waiting room” and can only be admitted to the call by the call host – so that while we were live with the stream, none of us who had the call details could just accidentally crash in the meeting.

OBS setup

The OBS setup was central to running the whole stream. It provided content to the Twitch stream at all times. OBS has a concept called “scenes”. An OBS scene has a number of sources which it mixes into an output. For example, the scene that had the presenter talking and presenting slides, the scene contained the following sources:

• Window capture, from the Zoom window
• Audio output from my PC
• Static image source – the layout that provided nice borders, the HelSec logo, so that the basic Zoom window looked like a nice HelSec-branded live presentation

We had a few other scenes as well:

• A few static images showing various messages, like: the programme/schedule
• A screen showing “continuing soon” I could have displayed if everything broke and would need some setting up again, etc.
• A few alternative layouts (borders and HelSec logos) for the Zoom call, if we wanted to present participant video without screen share (we didn’t)

We made switching screens quite simple. When a presentation was over, I switched the current scene to show the meetup schedule (static screen, no audio capture from the zoom call). Then, the new presenter joined the Zoom call and started the screen share, so that the layout within the Zoom call window matched the one layout we had to decorate the content. Then, when the presenter and host (whois) were ready I switched to the scene capturing Zoom window & audio. This was fully manual of course and I only had to keep a close eye on the Zoom call not breaking during presentations, and switching scenes between the presentations (and admitting the new presenters to the call).

There were a few gotchas while setting up the scenes:

• The Zoom window needed to be fullscreen at all times. Also the Zoom window has UI elements at the top and bottom edges of the screen that we didn’t want to include in the stream. To fix this, I added a “Crop/Pad” filter to the Window Capture source.
• The OBS “Window capture” source didn’t initially actually work and only showed a black screen. The Zoom application had an option in its Settings -> Advanced to switch the rendering output mode into something that worked.
• Zoom audio didn’t work initially either, that was due to my gaming headset having two audio output devices (audio and “voice chat”), and OBS actually captures audio from a specific audio device. Explicitly telling Zoom to direct its output from the correct audio device fixed this issue.
• I configured the source format for the OBS output to Twitch as 1920x1080. Also, both my screens on my gaming PC are 1920x1080. To avoid weird upsampling / downsampling fuzziness in the video, I virtually made the other screen with the fullscreen Zoom a higher resolution. Luckily the Nvidia GPU had a setting to show a virtual resolution than what the display actually had, and downsample on the (physical) display. This enabled OBS to capture a screen area larger than the OBS output, so that no upsampling occurred.

Other notes

The reason everything worked smoothly during the stream was that we actually tested and practiced everything before the actual event. We developed and tested the setup with our stream task force whois, Dist, and Jaroneko, and one of the presenters (joohoi) who happened to be around, a few nights before the meetup. Then, one night before the virtual meetup, I urged every presenter to do comms check with us when we thought we had the stream setup done. I asked every presenter to test screen share and video and do some talking while I took a local recording (an OBS feature) and checked that audio and video did indeed work nominally by checking the recording. (The local recording should look like the actual stream output.) During the comms checks I also tested the scene transitions. IMO doing a separate comms check is absolutely necessary – you all know how every zoom/Teams/google hangout meeting always starts with the “can you hear me? It should work? Oops I was on mute” and we didn’t want that on a live stream.

Also, we had Q&A sessions after the presentations. We had a Discord bot flagging and picking specially formatted questions from one text chat into another. Then, at the end of each presentation, whois the meetup host had all questions for the presenters nicely in one place so that he could present the questions.

Finally, the afterparty was a blast! We couldn’t do a virtual meetup without an attempt to have a virtual afterparty – a HelSec event without an afterparty is like a keyboard without mechanical switches.

The Discord server we built for this and future HelSec events in itself was an awesome setup built with love by members Dist and Jaroneko and will be documented in a future post.

Contact us if you need help running your own virtual meetups!