I Just Wanted to Show My Work

I’ve been working on the [vagrant-wsl2-provider]https://github.com/LeeShan87/vagrant-wsl2-provider) for a while now, and I wanted to start showing what I’ve achieved with it. Maybe make some videos about it.

But here’s the thing - I’m not confident showing my face on camera anymore. And I haven’t made any videos in years. So I was thinking… what if I just stream instead?

I used to have a stream a while ago, but I was just playing games on it. It was like the only thing I was able to do after a long day. This time would be different - I’d stream actual development work.

The Mac Setup That Wasn’t Working

I have a streaming setup on my Mac Mini M2. Seems perfect, right? Except my current project is a Windows WSL developer helper tool. I need a working Windows environment to run it.

I have video capture cards… multiple of them. The plan was simple: capture my Windows desktop, stream it through OBS on my Mac.

Nothing worked.

The setup was outdated - badly. My Obsbot Tiny 2 camera wasn’t even working. OBS wasn’t responding to clicks on the menu. Everything was broken.

The Windows Pivot

I found an OBS plugin called StreamUP PlugInstaller V2 that could help update my old OBS plugins.

But it’s not working on Mac. 😄

I used to have Parallels on my Mac, but I’m not paying for it right now, and I’m not planning to install another virtualization solution. So I thought - if I’m going to stream things on my Windows GMKtec K6 Mini, why not use it to stream my content directly? That way I can use the Windows stack for everything.

Installing OBS and the Plugin Ecosystem

I installed OBS on my mini PC with Chocolatey and downloaded the plugin installer.

choco install obs-studio

I tried to install the recommended plugins with it:

StreamUP PlugInstaller V2 showing 109 available OBS plugins

It was very useful, but I wasn’t familiar with most of the new plugins. Then I noticed there were plugins called Aitum Multistream and Aitum Vertical - they seemed perfect for what I wanted to do.

And Here the Fun Begins…

Like always, OBS was not cooperating with me. 😄

The mic was not loud enough. All the same nightmare again. All the bad memories from when I tried to build my YouTube channel came flooding back. I made several test videos just to hear myself if I’m loud enough.

Starting multiple streams at once is not an easy thing to do. I spent almost all day doing research about it. I watched countless YouTube guides about:

  • Getting started with streaming
  • Setting up microphones
  • Configuring stream settings
  • Audio mixing
  • Scene composition

I’m still not done with it…

The Multi-Platform Chat Problem

But Aitum helped with the streaming part. Now what about the chat?

I can be signed in to multiple streaming sites and alt-tab between them to see if there are any activities… but I don’t want to do that. And it would probably leak some personal information.

There’s a plugin called Casterlabs Caffeinated that could help with unified chat. And it works perfectly.

Automating Stream Management

The next big topic I didn’t want to deal with was updating my stream information and starting streams on every platform. Currently I’m streaming on Twitch and YouTube (hey, say hi to the viewers! 😄). But who knows, I might stream to other channels as well.

I remembered there was a plugin for that too - maybe se.live from StreamElements? But it was too complicated for me right now.

I just want to stream, dammit. 😄 And figure it out on the way.

So I tried to find something else. And it was already under my nose - Aitum Stream Suite, still listed in the plugin updater.

But is it free? When I looked at the multistream plugin, there was a link to upgrade to… what? A new streaming experience? For $5/month… I’m not paying for that yet.

So I tried to avoid it. But actually, it IS free! 😄

OBS with Aitum setup showing vertical streaming, multi-platform chat, and stream outputs

You can see in the screenshot:

  • Aitum Vertical layout for vertical streaming
  • Unified chat from multiple platforms
  • Multiple stream outputs (Twitch, YouTube) running simultaneously
  • Stream info management all in one place

The Result

The rest of the day I was making test streams and checking the audio, playing with different settings. I got really tired after around 10 hours just to set everything up and be ready to start an actual stream.

But it’s working now. The setup includes:

Core streaming:

  • OBS Studio (installed via Chocolatey)
  • StreamUP PlugInstaller V2 for plugin management

Aitum ecosystem:

  • Aitum Multistream - stream to multiple platforms simultaneously
  • Aitum Vertical - vertical format streaming support
  • Aitum Stream Suite - unified stream info management and automation

Chat integration:

  • Casterlabs Caffeinated - unified chat from all platforms

Hardware:

  • GMKtec K6 Mini PC (Windows)
  • Obsbot Tiny 2 camera (when I get it working again 😄)
  • Multiple capture cards (still figuring those out)

What’s Next

Now that the setup is (mostly) working, I can actually start streaming development work on the vagrant-wsl2-provider. The goal is to show the development process - debugging, implementing features, solving problems - not polished tutorials, just real work.

If you want to catch the streams, you can find me here:

More platforms might come later as I figure out this whole streaming thing.

And yes, I’m still working on getting the audio levels right. And the camera. And probably a dozen other things.

But at least OBS is configured now. Only took 10 hours.