How to Live Stream a Pre-Recorded Video, and When You Shouldn't

Three things people call "streaming a recording"

Most guides use these interchangeably. They behave differently for chat, for rewinding, for what is left afterwards and, above all, for what has to stay switched on while they run.

The practical rule falls out of the table. If the video is new and the point is a shared first watch on YouTube, a Premiere does it with less risk: YouTube plays the file, so a crashed PC or a flaky connection cannot interrupt it. Stream the file yourself when you need it on Twitch or Kick, above 1080p, mixed with live elements, or sent to several platforms at once.

What each platform actually says

Read from the platforms' own help pages on October 28, 2026. Where a page is silent, we say so rather than fill the gap.

Setting it up in OBS

The streaming side is exactly the same as any other stream: stream key and server in Settings → Stream, as in the OBS setup guide, with a bitrate from the encoder cheat sheet. What changes is the source. Property names and defaults below are from OBS's own documentation.

1. Add a Media Source to its own scene and pick the file. One file, one source; for a playlist see the next section.
2. Leave "Restart playback when source becomes active" on (the default). Switching to the scene then starts the file from the beginning, which is what you want at the moment you go live.
3. Turn on "Use hardware decoding when available". It is off by default, which means the CPU decodes the file while it is also doing everything else. Offloading the decode to the GPU leaves headroom for the encode.
4. Decide what happens at the end. "Show nothing when playback ends" is on by default, so a single play finishes on a black frame. Either tick Loop, or end the scene on something deliberate — a still, a "thanks for watching" card — and stop the stream yourself.
5. Label it before going live: on Twitch, the Rerun box plus [Rerun] in the title and notification.

Looping without a visible seam

Ticking Loop works, but a Media Source closes and reopens the file each time it reaches the end, and on a stream that runs for hours viewers will notice the hitch at the join. Three things make it disappear:

• Make the file loop-friendly. If the last frame matches the first and the audio fades to silence at both ends, a short reopen gap is invisible. A hard cut mid-sentence is what makes a seam audible.
• Use a VLC Video Source for several files. It takes a playlist, loops it by default, can shuffle, and its visibility behaviour decides whether it stops, pauses or carries on when you switch away. It needs VLC installed on the same machine.
• Keep one codec and one frame rate across the playlist. Files from different cameras or exports switching mid-stream are where most stutters come from.

For a genuine always-on channel, a home PC is the weak point: updates, sleep and power cuts all end the stream. That is the job the scheduling services YouTube lists exist to do, and why people who run 24/7 channels rarely run them from their desk.

Two failures that only happen with recordings

Audio slowly drifting out of sync. The usual cause is a variable frame rate file, which is what phones and many screen recorders produce. OBS renders at a fixed frame rate, so the picture and its own soundtrack slide apart over the length of the file. Re-export at a constant frame rate before you stream it, and match the file's audio sample rate to the one set in OBS under Settings → Audio. If the file already plays in sync in a normal player, this is nearly always the reason.

The connection drops halfway through. In a live show you just carry on. With a file, OBS keeps playing it locally while the stream is down, so whatever played during the outage is gone for viewers. Automatically Reconnect (Settings → Advanced) brings the stream back, but to wherever the file has reached by then. If a section matters, pause the source before reconnecting. Whether the platform stitches the reconnect into the same broadcast or starts a new one varies, and none of the three documents an exact window on the pages we read. If drops are a pattern rather than a one-off, the upload speed guide explains how to tell a bandwidth problem from a routing one.

Sending one file to several platforms

A recording is the easiest thing in the world to multistream, because nobody has to read three chats. The bandwidth maths is the same as for a live show: each extra output in OBS is another full stream on your upload, while a relay takes one and copies it. The multistreaming guide compares the two, and what is RTMP explains why a relay looks exactly like a platform to OBS. Just remember the label is per platform: a Twitch Rerun tag does nothing for the same stream on Kick, where pre-recorded content counts against Partner status.