Automatic streaming
with OBS.
OBS cannot schedule anything on its own — but one free plugin can. Here is how to make your service go live, change scenes and stop again on the clock, so it never depends on someone remembering.
Nobody has to remember
The one volunteer who knows to press Start Streaming is on holiday, or stuck in the car park. A schedule does not call in sick — the service goes live at the same minute every week.
Your scenes change themselves
Countdown up at 9:45, camera at 10:00, closing card at the end. The moments that happen on the clock stop needing a hand on the mouse.
The alert still lands on time
Start early and PealCast holds your go-live text and email until your scheduled start time — so people arrive to a countdown, not to a link that went out while the room was still empty.
The plugin: Advanced Scene Switcher
OBS Studio has no scheduler of its own. Advanced Scene Switcher is the free plugin that adds one — and a good deal more besides. Everything below was checked against the plugin itself in August 2026.
- What it is
- Advanced Scene Switcher — an automation plugin for OBS Studio
- Made by
- Warmuptill (open source, on GitHub)
- Price
- Free. We are not affiliated with it and receive nothing if you install it.
- Latest version
- 1.36.1, released 7 August 2026
- Needs
- OBS Studio 31.1.1 or newer — check Help → About before you start
- Runs on
- Windows, macOS and Linux (64-bit)
- How well used
- Over 1.1 million downloads, rated 4.65 out of 5 on the OBS plugin listing
Installing it, step by step
Check your OBS version first
In OBS, open Help → About. The plugin needs OBS 31.1.1 or newer. If you are older than that, update OBS and restart it before going any further — an out-of-date OBS is the most common reason the plugin never appears.
Download the installer for your computer
Go to the plugin’s releases page on GitHub and download the file for your system: the Windows Installer (.exe), the macOS universal .pkg, or the Ubuntu .deb. On Linux you can instead run: flatpak install com.obsproject.Studio.Plugin.SceneSwitcher
Run it (and expect one security prompt)
Windows will show a blue “Windows protected your PC” box — click More info, then Run anyway. On macOS, right-click the .pkg and choose Open, then Open again; if macOS refuses, run xattr -d com.apple.quarantine on the downloaded file and try again. These prompts appear because the plugin is free software, not because anything is wrong.
Restart OBS and find it under Tools
Close OBS completely and open it again. You should now see Tools → Advanced Scene Switcher. If it is not there, the install went to the wrong OBS (Steam and Flatpak installs have their own folders — the plugin’s installation wiki covers both).
Turn it on — it ships switched off
Open Tools → Advanced Scene Switcher and look at the General tab. The plugin starts out Inactive on purpose, so it cannot switch scenes while you are still setting rules up. Press Start (the status changes to Active) and, in the same Status section, switch on the option to start it automatically — otherwise it will be sitting idle next Sunday.
New to OBS altogether? Start with the OBS setup guide — it covers pointing OBS at PealCast and every encoder setting to use.
How the automation thinks
Everything the plugin does is a “macro” — and a macro is simpler than it sounds.
A macro is “if this, then that”
Every macro is a list of conditions and a list of actions. When the conditions are all true, the actions run — nothing else to it. Conditions are checked from the top down and joined with and / or.
The condition you need is Date
Pick a weekday (or “Any day”), tick Time of day, and type the time as hours:minutes:seconds on a 24-hour clock — 09:45:00. Leave the check set to At. The advanced view adds date ranges and repeats, which a weekly service does not need.
The actions you need are Streaming and Scene switch
Streaming starts and stops the live stream. Scene switch changes what is on screen. Wait pauses before the next action, and Sequence runs a list of them in order — useful, but see the note below on why we prefer separate macros.
Open the Macro tab
Tools → Advanced Scene Switcher, then the Macro tab (the second tab along). This is where every rule lives.
Add a macro and give it a real name
Click the plus symbol at the lower left and name it something the next volunteer will understand — “Sunday — countdown up”, not “Macro 1”. You are going to have four of these.
Add the condition
Press the plus in the conditions column and choose Date. Set the day to Sunday, tick Time of day, and enter 09:45:00 with the check set to At.
Add the actions
Press the plus in the actions column and choose Scene switch → your Countdown scene. Press it again and choose Streaming → Start streaming. Actions run top to bottom, so put the scene change first: it means the countdown is already on screen the instant the stream goes up.
Repeat for the other three, then test it on a Saturday
Build the rest of the table below, then prove it: set a spare macro to a time two minutes from now and watch it fire. Testing on a Saturday afternoon costs you nothing; testing on Sunday morning costs you the service.
The four macros for a Sunday service
A 10:00 service, with the countdown up at 9:45. Change the times to yours — the shape is what matters.
Sunday — countdown up
If
Date · Sunday · At 09:45:00
Then
- Scene switch → Countdown
- Streaming → Start streaming
Why
Fifteen minutes early. People who arrive ahead of time see a countdown and hear music instead of a dead page — and PealCast holds the go-live alert until your scheduled start, so nobody is texted early.
Sunday — service starts
If
Date · Sunday · At 10:00:00
Then
- Scene switch → Live camera
Why
The countdown hands over to the room at the top of the hour, whether or not anybody is at the desk.
Sunday — closing card
If
Date · Sunday · At 11:20:00
Then
- Scene switch → Closing card
Why
A “thanks for worshiping with us” slide with next week’s times, a few minutes before the stream ends. Never cut from a sermon straight to nothing.
Sunday — stop the stream
If
Date · Sunday · At 11:30:00
Then
- Streaming → Stop streaming
Why
Generous on purpose. A stream that runs twenty minutes long costs you nothing — PealCast bills the minutes people actually watch — while one that stops mid-sermon is the worst thing automation can do to you.
You can do all of this in one macro using Wait actions or a Sequence. We would not: a chain of waits drifts if the first step runs late, and anything that interrupts it stops every step after. Four macros pinned to four absolute times each fail on their own.
Which scenes to automate — and which to leave alone
The rule of thumb: automate the scenes that happen on the clock, and leave the ones that follow a person to a person.
Countdown
A countdown timer over a still image or a looping slide, with a music bed. This is the scene automation exists for: it goes up before anyone is in the booth, and it is what an early arrival sees.
Live camera
The service itself — your camera, or your switcher’s program feed. The macro brings it up at your start time; a person can still cut back and forth from there.
Lyrics and sermon slides
These follow a person, not a clock — nobody knows in advance which minute the third song ends. Leave these on the operator, or on your presentation software’s own output.
Holding slide
“We’ll be right back.” The one scene worth binding to a hotkey so a volunteer can reach it in a second when a camera drops or the sound goes.
Closing card
Next week’s service times, how to get prayer, where to connect. It runs for a few minutes after the amen — and on PealCast, the people still watching it are people you can now follow up with.
What PealCast does while this is running
Four things worth knowing before you set the times — two of them change what the macros should look like.
Start early — the notification still waits
Schedule the broadcast in PealCast (your channel → Broadcasts → Schedule a broadcast, with a Scheduled start of 10:00), and let OBS start at 09:45. You are live, watchable and recording from 09:45, but the text, email and push all go out at 10:00. Going live and telling people are two separate things here — that is deliberate.
One recording, not two — mind the five minutes
If your stream stops and comes back within about five minutes, PealCast treats it as the same broadcast and keeps it as one recording. That is what saves you when the internet blips mid-service. It also means two services should be more than five minutes apart, or the second gets joined onto the end of the first.
Turn on Automatically Reconnect
In OBS: Settings → Advanced → Network → Automatically Reconnect, retry delay 1 second, maximum retries as high as it goes. An automatic start is worth very little if a two-second blip ends the whole service.
Nothing changes on our side
Same SRT or RTMPS address, same stream key, same watch page. The plugin only presses the buttons a person would have pressed — PealCast cannot tell the difference, and does not need to.
Before you trust it with a Sunday
Automation fails quietly — which is the one failure a Sunday morning cannot absorb. Work through this list once and it stops being fragile.
- The computer has to be awake and signed in. Turn off sleep and hibernation on the booth machine — a sleeping computer runs no macros, and this is the number-one reason an automatic stream does not happen.
- OBS itself has to be running. The plugin lives inside OBS, so add OBS to the computer’s startup items and leave it open.
- The plugin has to be Active. It starts Inactive by default; switch on the auto-start option in the General tab so it is never one forgotten click away from doing nothing.
- Macros use the computer’s own clock and time zone. Check them after the clocks change, and after any long power cut.
- If you rename a scene, open the macro and pick the scene again. A macro points at a scene by name, and a renamed scene is a macro pointing at nothing.
- Test with a throwaway macro two minutes out, on a weekday. Never let Sunday be the first run.
- Keep a person in the room for the first month. Automation removes the forgetting, not the camera, the audio, or the judgement about when to cut.
Common questions about automating OBS
Related: the OBS setup guide, the universal stream settings, and the five encoders we recommend if you would rather not leave a computer running at all.
Let Sunday start itself — and still know who watched.
Automate the stream, and PealCast turns the people who show up into names your team can follow up on.
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