How to play YouTube & video clips live on stream

Launch Video Player and copy your overlay URL

From your dashboard, click LAUNCH on Video Player, then hit COPY on the overlay URL at the top of the page. That URL is tied to your account and never changes — one source, every clip, for as long as you use the app.

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Add it to OBS

1. Sources → + → Browser, name it "Video Player".
2. Paste the URL.
3. Set it to your canvas size — 1920 × 1080 — and click OK.

The source is invisible until you play something, and it stays transparent around the clip as well: a 40%-size clip anchored top-right leaves the rest of your scene fully visible, with no black bars filling the gap. Settings you change on the page reach the overlay instantly over a live connection, so once the browser source exists you never touch OBS again.

Add your clips as slots

Click + ADD SLOT, give the clip a label, and pick one of three source types:

• YOUTUBE — paste practically any YouTube address: a normal watch link, a youtu.be short link, an embed URL, a Shorts link, a live stream link, or the bare 11-character video id. The editor prints the detected video id underneath so you know it parsed, and it refuses to save a link it can't read rather than failing silently on air.
• MP4 / URL — a direct link to an .mp4, .webm or .mov file, not a share or landing page. If the host blocks the request (hotlink and referer blocking are common on CDNs, and plain http links get blocked as mixed content), the overlay automatically retries the same file through a same-origin proxy that strips the referer and re-serves it over https. You don't have to do anything — it just plays.
• UPLOAD — pick a file straight off your computer. Uploaded clips are stored inline with your overlay settings, so they carry real limits: 12 MB per clip, and roughly 22 MB of inline storage across the whole app. Files are held base64-encoded, which inflates them by about a third, so in practice that's a handful of short stingers rather than a video library. The app blocks a save that would blow the budget instead of quietly dropping the slot — for anything longer, host the file and use the MP4 / URL source, which those caps never touch.

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Shape it, size it, place it

This is where a clip stops looking like a video window and starts looking like a broadcast insert. Four controls do the work:

• Aspect Ratio — 16:9 Landscape or 9:16 Vertical. This locks the shape of the box the clip fills, so a Shorts clip stands tall instead of being cropped into a wide frame. Pick the one that matches the source: the video fills its box, so a vertical clip in a landscape box loses its top and bottom.
• Scale — a single slider from 10% to 100%, measured against the screen-filling box for that aspect ratio. 40% is a comfortable picture-in-picture; 100% fills the screen edge to edge, which is how you get a full-screen takeover. There is no separate full-screen mode to hunt for — the slider is it.
• Position — a 3 × 3 anchor grid: nine spots from top-left to bottom-right. Combined with Offset X / Y (pixel nudges, negative values move left and up) you can park a clip snugly above a ticker or tuck it just inside a safe margin instead of hard against the edge.
• Frame — None, Hairline (a 1px rule), Broadcast (3px border, rounded corners and a drop shadow that lifts the clip off the scene) or Glow (a lit edge). Any frame but None reveals a Frame Color swatch — set it to your brand color or a team color. At 100% scale the corners square off automatically so a full-screen clip never shows rounded edges.

Edit a slot that's currently on air and the overlay updates as you work — drag the scale slider or switch the frame and you see it change on stream in real time, which beats guessing and re-firing.

Decide how the clip behaves

Below the source field, three toggles set the defaults for every trigger: Loop (repeat forever instead of stopping), Start Muted and Autoplay (leave this on unless you want to hold on the first frame). Start at (seconds) skips the intro of a long video — set 74 and the clip opens right on the moment you actually want.

Hide When decides how it leaves: Manual keeps it on screen until you stop it (right for a clip you intend to pause and talk over), When video ends clears it the moment the video finishes, and After a timer gives you a duration in seconds — useful for pulling out of a long video after a fixed window.

Finally, Transition In and Transition Out each offer thirteen options — none, fade, four slide directions, scale, flip, bounce, blur, and three wipes — and run about a second each. Directional slides leave the way they're named, so a slide-up exits upward rather than rewinding its entrance.

Play it — then drive it live

Every slot row has a ▶ Play button. Click it and the clip animates in on your overlay; the row picks up a cyan PLAYING badge and its button flips to ■ Stop, so you always know what's on air and can pull it from the same spot. From that moment the LIVE TRANSPORT card at the top of the page acts on whatever is currently on screen, not on a slot you have to select first:

• ⏸ Pause / ▶ Resume — freezes the clip on the exact frame you're about to break down, then rolls again. Resume only lights up when something is genuinely paused, so you're never firing a dead button mid-show.
• Seek to (seconds) — type an absolute time and hit SEEK (or just press Enter). 95 jumps to 1:35. It works identically on YouTube clips, MP4 links and uploads, which is the point of a single transport: you don't think about which kind of source is playing.
• Volume and the Audio toggle — a live 0–100 volume slider and a mute switch that override the slot's Start Muted default while it plays. Duck a clip under your commentary, then bring it back up for the call.
• ⏮ Prev / ⏭ Next — step through a queue (greyed out until you have one), and ■ Stop to clear the screen, which is also duplicated in the page header so it's reachable no matter how far you've scrolled.

Every one of these commands travels the same live connection the overlay is already holding open, so the clip responds as you click — there is no refresh, no save step, and no browser-source reload.

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Queue a reel and let it roll

Press +Q on any slot row to add it to the queue; rows show an amber QUEUE #n badge in play order, and the QUEUE card lists them with a NOW marker on the one currently playing. −Q pulls one out, Clear empties the whole thing.

Turn on Auto-advance and the queue behaves like a produced segment: when a clip ends, the next one starts on its own. The swap is deliberately not a normal transition — the outgoing clip holds its last frame while the incoming one dissolves over it in about a third of a second, so you never see the scene flash between clips. A fresh ▶ Play still uses the slot's own Transition In; only queue advances crossfade.

Two behaviours are worth knowing before your first show. A clip set to Hide When: Manual inside an auto-advancing queue treats Stop as "next" — hold on it as long as the conversation needs, then hit Stop and the following clip rolls straight in. And pressing ⏭ Next on the last item ends the segment properly, playing that clip's Transition Out instead of cutting to black.

Build the library once, drive it from anywhere

The ⧉ button duplicates a slot, dropping the copy directly beneath the original. It's the fastest way to keep one clip in two forms — a 16:9 corner version and a 9:16 full-height version, say, or the same video with different start times for two different segments. (Duplicating an upload copies the video data too, so it counts against that inline budget; duplicating a YouTube or MP4 slot costs nothing.)

Once the library exists you rarely open the settings page again during a show. The Command Center board gives you one button per clip plus Prev/Play/Next/Stop, mute, loop, auto-advance and a volume slider on a single screen. The StreamSlayers Stream Deck plugin (v1.18.0) covers the same ground on physical keys: fire a specific slot, play/pause, next, previous, stop and toggle mute.

For the shorter stuff — reaction GIFs, stingers and celebration hits with audio — the GIF Player is the sibling app in the same pack, and it runs on its own browser source so the two never fight over the screen. Pair either with lower thirds to title the clip while it plays.