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Multistreaming from OBS without a plugin

OBS multistream plugins run inside OBS, which is exactly why they're risky. Here's the approach I use instead.

Jay Rogers Jay Rogers

The usual way to send your OBS stream to a bunch of platforms at once is a multistream plugin. I'd skip it. Here's why, and what I do instead.

The problem with multistream plugins

A plugin loads inside OBS and runs in the same process as your scenes, your sources, and your encoder. So when the plugin has a bad day, it doesn't fail off to the side somewhere. It can take OBS down with it, right in the middle of your stream.

Anyone who's stacked a few OBS plugins knows the feeling. A scene switch hangs for no reason, at the worst possible moment.

There's a quieter problem too. A plugin ties your whole multistream setup to OBS. Move to vMix or a hardware encoder later and none of it comes with you. And plenty of people don't use OBS at all.

Point OBS at something else

The setup I like keeps the fan-out completely outside OBS.

OBS already knows how to send a stream to an RTMP server. That's how it talks to YouTube or Twitch directly. So instead of pointing it at a platform, point it at a server running on your own machine. That server takes your one feed, re-encodes it once per destination, and forwards each one on.

OBS  ──►  rtmp://localhost  ──►  ┌─ encoder ──► YouTube
                                 ├─ encoder ──► Twitch
                                 └─ encoder ──► LinkedIn

Nothing loads into OBS. As far as OBS knows, it's streaming to one place.

That separation does two things for you:

  • It can't crash OBS. The fan-out runs in its own process, so a problem there never reaches your scenes.
  • It isn't married to OBS. Anything that speaks RTMP, SRT, or WHIP works the same way: vMix, a hardware encoder, a camera, your own script.

Where Polycast fits

Polycast is that separate process, built for exactly this. You point OBS (or any RTMP, SRT, or WHIP source) at it, and it runs a dedicated encoder per destination on your machine, each one tuned to what its platform accepts. It's a desktop app you own, not a plugin and not a cloud relay.

Keep producing in whatever you already use. Let something independent handle getting it everywhere.

Polycast is in pre-launch. Join the waitlist → and I'll send you the launch email.

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