How to stream horizontal and vertical at the same time on YouTube

YouTube can show one broadcast to landscape viewers and to phone viewers in portrait at the same time. It calls this dual stream. There are two ways to do it and they are very different, which is where most people get stuck.

The two ways YouTube does it

Auto crop takes your landscape picture and crops the middle out of it for the vertical view. Nothing changes in Beamd, it is one click, and it works immediately. The catch is that it keeps roughly the middle third of your frame and throws the rest away, so anything important near the edges is cut off.

Encoder gives you a second stream key and expects you to send a real 9:16 picture to it. This is the one that looks right, because you decide what is in frame rather than YouTube guessing. It is what the rest of this page covers.

Setting it up

1. In YouTube Studio, press Create, then Go live.
2. Before starting the broadcast, turn on Dual stream and choose Encoder as the vertical source. YouTube shows a second stream key next to the first.
3. Copy both keys at the same time.
4. In Beamd, add two destinations: one for the horizontal key, one for the vertical key. Both use YouTube's normal server address.
5. On the vertical destination, turn on the vertical setting and choose which part of the frame to keep: left, middle or right.
6. Add both destinations to the same stream and press Start once. Beamd sends both pictures from the one source.

Playing different content in each window

Cropping works when the vertical view is the same programme, framed differently. Sometimes it is not: you have a landscape video for the main feed and a separate portrait cut for phones.

Beamd handles that as two streams rather than one, because a stream plays one source. Make one stream for the horizontal video pointed at the horizontal key, and another for the vertical video pointed at the vertical key. Start both. They feed the same broadcast and run independently.

This costs two stream slots instead of one, and the same two destination slots either way.

What catches people out

The wrong kind of key. A key belonging to a scheduled broadcast works once, for that broadcast. The reusable one is labelled Default stream key. They look identical, both around twenty four characters, and YouTube will accept a connection on a dead key and quietly show nothing, so it does not even look like an error. If a stream worked yesterday and shows nothing today, this is almost always why.

Going live in the Shorts feed needs 1,000 subscribers. Below that the vertical feed still exists and still works, it is simply not surfaced in the Shorts feed. That is YouTube's rule and nothing in Beamd changes it.

Vertical belongs to the destination, not the video. You tick it when editing a destination, not when creating a stream. The framing control only appears once a vertical destination is selected, because it is a meaningless question before then.

A vertical source needs no cropping. If the video you upload is already portrait, point it at a vertical destination and Beamd sends it as it is.

What it costs

A vertical destination counts as one destination against your plan, the same as any other. Two destinations on one broadcast means two of your allowance.

Stream 24/7 with your computer off

Other guides

Where to find your stream key, on every platform.