Changing Your Stream Background

Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) Studio is a free and open source software for recording and live streaming. One of its most powerful features are so called “scenes”. Each scene can have one or more sources, such as videos, games, webcam feeds…etc. You can then switch between these scenes to show different things on your stream.

One of the most requested feature by the Twitch community is the ability to have a graphic overlay on your stream. This enables you to have graphics either permanently shown on top of your stream, or being displayed for certain games instead of showing the game itself.

How to change your steam background

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to change your stream’s background using OBS Studio. Note that this feature is not currently available in the official release version of OBS Studio. Instead, you have to download a snapshot from the development branch .

The following is only tested on Windows 10, but should work with previous versions of Windows as well. I recommend downloading the development snapshot, since this functionality might not make it to the final version.

Find an image you like or create your own.

Open OBS Studio and create a new scene that will serve as your background. Also add an image source to it ( Image -> Image ) and select your image. You can also use text sources in the same way, however in this tutorial we will focus on images.

Drag the scene to your desired position on screen and add a camera for it ( Add -> Camera -> Screen Region ). Make sure that “Capture Cursor” is enabled in both the scene and the camera. If you want, you can also enable webcam feeds for each of these cameras by pressing “Add New…” beside their name.

Save the image to your computer.

Open the scene you created and go to “Scene Properties”. You will find a tab named “Stream N Playback” there. Click on the button next to it and select your saved image from your hard drive.

That’s all! Your background should be changed now. If you want, you can create scenes for different games or titles and select between them depending on what you are playing.

Go to Google Chrome and open a new tab.

Browse to chrome://extensions/ and make sure that “Developer mode” is checked. If it isn’t, click on the slider to enable it. In the left sidebar of the page, click on “Load unpacked extension…” and open up your OBS Studio folder.

In this folder you should find a file named “background_browser.html”. Click on it and select “Open”. This should add a new button to your Chrome address bar, next to the URL bar. Click on the button and select your scene from OBS Studio. If you did everything right, your background should be changed accordingly.

In the address bar, type in “chrome://settings/” (without quotations)

Type in “media” (without quotations) into the search bar that appears at the top. Click on “Media playback”. Check both boxes next to “Allow remote control of media playback” and “Play videos in HTML5 mode by default”.

Now, whenever you play a video on Youtube or another website that allows HTML5 videos by default, the stream should automatically switch to your scene. Note that this also works with Amazon Instant Video and Netflix.

Conclusion

Broadcaster Software (OBS) Studio is a free and open source software for recording and live streaming. One of its most powerful features are so called “scenes”. Each scene can have one or more sources, such as videos, games, webcam feeds…etc. You can then switch between these scenes to show different things on your stream. This tutorial will teach you how to add a background for your stream by using an image or YouTube video.