HowTo Do an OB From Your Laptop

Usually for an OB you'll be using the OB PC in The Rhino. Sometimes, however, The Rhino is totally overkill for your use case - sometimes a single laptop with a mini-mixer and one or two microphones is perfectly fine. This guide will tell you how to set up your laptop for it, and how to conduct the OB.

Things You Will Need

• A laptop (duh)

Note that this guide is written for Windows PCs - it can probably be adapted to work on macOS or Linux but you're on your own there.

• An audio interface (unless you're using a mixer with a built-in one)
• A mixer (not always necessary)

Setting Up The Laptop

This is a bit of a long section, but you only need to do it once.

To do an OB from your laptop, you'll need a couple pieces of software. The first is butt - it stands for "Broadcast Using This Tool" and its acronym makes it hilariously un-Google-able. Track it down and install it.

You'll also need OpenVPN to access the broadcast servers (because, for obvious reasons, Computing don't like it when anyone on campus can stream to them). Look for the Community Edition, not the new "OpenVPN Connect" app which is hopelessly crap and probably won't work. The Community Edition isn't much better, but at least it works, which is a major upgrade.

To set it up you'll also need some files from Computing (namely, the profile, CA certificate, and client certificate and key - if you're not sure what these mean don't worry!). Ask your nearest friendly neighbourhood compuneer for these. If they stare at you blankly, point them to this Ceedox page (you may not be able to access it, but they should).

Once you have everything you need, crack open the OpenVPN app, right-click on its taskbar icon, choose "Import File", and browse to the .ovpn file your friendly neighbourhood compuneer gave you. Now, right-click it again and choose "Connect". If everything went according to plan, you should see a success message and you should still have an internet connection. If it didn't go according to plan, ask your friendly neighbourhood compuneer for help.

Now it's time to crack open butt (ha!) and set up the profile. Click the settings button, and under "Servers" click "New". Fill it in with the following details:

Name: whatever
Type: IceCast
Address: dolby.ury.york.ac.uk
Port: 7070
Password: ask your friendly neighbourhood compuneer
IceCast mountpoint: OB-Line (caps matter!)
IceCast user: source

Save it all. While you're at it, head over to the Audio tab and set streaming bitrate to at least 192K.

Streaming

Now you're ready to start the stream, whether just to test it all works, or to actually go live! To fire it up, check you're connected to the VPN, and click the play icon in butt (not the record icon - common mistake). After a few seconds the "Stream Time" should start ticking up. To check that everything has gone to plan, go to [1] and check that the OB box at the bottom has lit up. If it has, you're good to go! When the time comes for your OB, just switch the studio (or, more likely, ask Computing to do it) and you're live!