We’re using a RICOH THETA S to live stream 360 events to Facebook Live 360. The live 360 events can be viewed in VR headsets, on a mobile phone, or in a web browser.
What You Need
RICOH THETA S in live streaming mode
Mac or PC connected to the THETA S with a USB cable
THETA UVC FullHD Blender software from RICOH. Called Live-streaming app on their site. download
Set up UVC FullHD Blender. We’re assuming that you have the THETA working with THETA UVC FullHD Blender in live streaming mode. If you do not, refer to the live streaming guide for detailed instructions.
Set up Facebook Live 360
Configure OBS with information from Facebook Live 360 event
@gerosan The resolution depends in part on your network speed. I know @codetricity doesn’t have a super fast connection at home when he was testing. Even so, I wouldn’t have high expectations for video quality. RICOH THETA video is not 4K. It’s 1080p but wrapped around a full photosphere.
It should stream at 1920x1080 @ 30fps if you have 4Mbps uplink speed. Remember that the visible portion in the video window will be less than 1920. The entire sphere is 1920x1080. So, the visible portion might be 1/3 of that. At max resolution, it may look more like 640x480 SD resolution. It’s usable to get a feel for an event.
I have issue with the video after STOP live stream. While lived, the streaming is 720p quality and actually look better than 1080p with youtube 360. But after STOP, the automatic generated video just SD 360p. Do we have any work around for this?!?
I was able to get this working briefly with the new Theta V at 3840x1920 OBS does not need UVC Blender and can recognize the Theta V as a standard video input. Lucky thing because it seems UVC isn’t compatible with the Theta V.
still need to do more testing to get the settings right though…
thanks for posting this guide!
Great, thanks for sharing those files for UVC 4K! I’ll give that a try on PC. I used it again today on a Mac and OBS, worked pretty well. 4K quality was good and I’m going to be testing out audio options next. Any word on spatial audio in the stream? I don’t see any options for it in OBS…
At the current time, I do not believe that spatial audio works with either YouTube 360 Live Event or Facebook 360 live event. It will work from a file with converter software from the Ricoh site.
See this article for spatial audio for video from file.
As the converter simply converts format, I imagine that Ricoh will be able to support live streaming with spatial audio in the future. I have heard no statement from Ricoh about this. I am just speculating because it seems like it is technically possible to me.
I believe that the Mac will work with mono audio for live streaming.
At the current time, audio does not work at all with UVC 4K. You will need to mix it with your laptop microphone or external microphone.
What type of upstream bandwidth do you have? Were you able to check that it was streaming at 4K on Facebook Live Events? You’re one of the early implementers of 360 4K live streaming on Facebook. Good to know that it worked.
I’m getting ~35Mbps up. Viewers were only able to view it at 720p or 1080p though. It still looked a lot better than other options. I only had a few minutes to test today but will do more next week after some traveling. I’ll be a little more scientific next time and save the results too.
