🎛️ OBS Tools

How this works

The complete explainer for all 6 OBS Tools — what each one is, how they connect, and the order to set them up in. Read this once before your first service; after that it's a reference.

The mental model — read this first

Control Panel is the only tool you actively operate — everything else here is either something OBS shows to your audience, or a feed that arrives at Control Panel by itself. Search or tap in Control Panel, and it goes live on Live Display (and Live Captions, if added) inside OBS. Nothing else on this page decides what's on screen — the other four tools are outputs or inputs around Control Panel, not separate control points.

Two tools feed into Control Panel rather than being operated from it: Listen, open on a phone near whoever is speaking, transcribes automatically into Control Panel's Transcribe tab (and into Live Captions, if you've added it) — you never read anything from Listen itself. Phone Camera is a separate system again: turning a spare phone into a wireless video source for OBS, with its own two links (fully explained further down) — it isn't operated from Control Panel and isn't a single paste-and-go link like the other five. Stage Display is a read-only confidence monitor for your own team — it mirrors what's live and what's coming next, and nothing feeds into it except what Control Panel has already sent live.

What you need before starting

1. 01Don't have OBS Studio yet? Download it free from obsproject.com and install it before continuing.
2. 02Get your 6 links on the Get Links page — one email verification unlocks all of them together.

These two make a service work at all — without them, nothing you search for ever reaches a screen. Set them up before touching anything else on this page.

1. Required — Control Panel + Live Display working first
2. 03In OBS, click + under Sources, choose Browser, and name it (e.g. "Live Display").
3. 04Paste the Live Display link into the URL field. Set Width/Height to match your canvas (e.g. 1920×1080), then click OK. This is what your audience/stream actually sees — never open this link as a regular browser tab for anyone to look at directly, only add it as a Browser Source.
4. 05Open Control Panel on the device you'll operate from — normally just a regular browser tab, on a laptop or tablet. It must never be added as a Browser Source inside a Scene — that would put your own operator controls into the actual video the audience sees.

Prefer to keep everything inside one OBS window instead of switching to a separate tab or device? You can optionally add Control Panel as a Custom Browser Dock instead — a different OBS feature from a Scene's Browser Source, since a dock lives inside the OBS Studio app window itself and never composites into your stream or recording. In OBS: Docks → Custom Browser Docks, give it a name, paste the Control Panel link, click Apply, then close the dialog. Make sure the dock is ticked under the View menu, then drag it to either side of your OBS window. This is entirely optional — a plain browser tab works just as well — and either way, Control Panel must never be added as a Scene Browser Source.

Do a full run-through before the actual service: push a verse and a song from Control Panel and confirm both appear correctly in OBS's preview.

Inside Control Panel — the 6 tabs

Everything you push live goes out through one of these six. Get familiar with them before your first real service — this is the page a volunteer actually runs, every week.

📖 Bible — type a reference (e.g. "John 3:16"), choose one or two Bible versions to show side by side, and tap Show live to push it. "Load whole chapter" switches into a scrollable verse-by-verse list so you can trace through a passage with Prev/Next instead of retyping each reference mid-sermon. ★ favorites a verse and 📋 adds it to your run sheet — both surface in the Plan tab below.

📢 Ann. — announcements for the screen. Write a title and text (select words and use B, U or A+ to make them bold, underlined or larger), pick a look, add a footer such as your church name, and watch the preview. Add up to 12 slides with + Add, then press Show on display: Live Display fills the screen with the announcement. Either step through the slides with Prev/Next in the footer, or choose "Every 8 s" (or another time) and the display changes slide by itself. Clear hides it. Your slides are saved in the browser you typed them in. Beside Slides there is a Lower thirds sub-tab: name banners, sermon banners, giving (M-Pesa) banners and a scrolling-text banner. A banner shows on its own: it never overlaps a verse, song or slide, and showing one of those takes the banner off. Pick a design, type the words, choose Opaque, Translucent or Transparent, pick your church colours (or save your own), set the logo shape and an optional hide-after time, then press the green ▶. The ✕ hides the banner.

🎵 Songs — your own song library (up to 7 per setup), split automatically into slides at each blank line, or built from labeled sections (Verse/Chorus/Bridge) with a custom verse order for repeats. Tap a song to push it live; Prev/Next in the footer steps through its slides. "Global catalog" underneath lets you search the shared, approved song catalog and import a copy into your own list.

🎨 Look & placement — no separate tab any more: at the bottom of 📖 Bible (verse style) and 🎵 Songs (song style) is a collapsible card with template, on-screen position, background, max font size (with an auto-fit option), text color and transition. Changes save automatically; press the green ▶ to apply them to what is on screen now.

🎙️ Transcribe — a live, read-only feed of whatever Listen is picking up nearby (see below), streamed in here automatically as it's recognized. When it detects a Bible reference inside the speech, it surfaces it as a tappable chip at the top of the tab — tap it to push that verse live immediately, no tab switch. You don't operate Listen from here; you only tap what it's already found.

📋 Plan — your run sheet for the service: items you ★ favorited or 📋 added from Bible or Songs, ready to go live on in sequence without hunting mid-service. Favorites sit alongside it for one-tap recall of verses/songs you reuse often. This is a service run sheet built from what you search here — it is a different feature from the separate "Bible Reading Plan" app; that one is for personal daily Scripture reading and has no connection to a live service or to OBS.

1. Optional — add these once the basics work
2. 06Repeat the Browser Source steps for Live Captions, as its own separate source, if you want spoken-word captions burned into the stream. It's fed automatically by Listen (next step) — there's nothing to configure on the captions side itself.
3. 07Open Stage Display on a separate screen or monitor facing your team, if you have one to spare — it mirrors what's live and previews what's next, for your operators only, never the audience.
4. 08Open Listen on a phone or tablet placed near whoever is speaking, and press Start. It transcribes automatically in the background — leave it running and don't read from it yourself. It feeds Control Panel's 🎙️ Transcribe tab, and Live Captions on the stream if you've added that too.
5. 09Set up Phone Camera — it's not a single link like the other five; the full two-link walkthrough is right below.

🎥 Phone Camera — the one tool with two links

Phone Camera turns a spare phone into a wireless video source for OBS. Unlike the other five tools, you don't hand out or paste "the Phone Camera link" itself anywhere — the link on your Get Links / Your Tools page is a setup page, opened once by whoever is doing the setup (you), which hands you the two real links this feature runs on:

Two links, two different places: the OBS link goes into OBS, on the machine running the service; the Phone Browser link goes only to the volunteer's phone. Swap them, or paste the original setup link itself into OBS, and neither will work — the setup page isn't a video source on its own, it's only the page that hands you the two that are.

If you ever need to start over

"Generate a brand-new set of links" (on the Get Links or Your Tools page) replaces all 6 links at once — use it only if a link was shared somewhere it shouldn't have been. Afterwards, every device (OBS, the operator's device, the camera phone) needs its link replaced, since they stop working together as a set.