How to Stream 24/7 on YouTube Without OBS

Start with the good news, because almost nobody says it plainly.

YouTube does not cut you off. There is no maximum broadcast length. If your encoder keeps a stable connection, a YouTube live stream can run for days, weeks or months without the platform ending it.

This is the opposite of Twitch, which ends every continuous broadcast at exactly 48 hours and gives you no warning. On YouTube, that problem does not exist.

So if 24/7 on YouTube is technically the easy case, why do most of these channels quietly stop working?

The four things that actually kill them

1. Your computer

This is the real one, and it is boring.

A 24/7 stream from OBS means a machine that never sleeps, never installs an update, never drops its internet connection, and never gets used for anything else. Every Windows update, every power cut, every time someone closes the lid — your channel goes dark and stays dark until you notice.

There is also a cost people rarely calculate. A modest streaming PC drawing 150 W runs 108 kWh per month. Multiply that by your electricity rate to see what your "free" setup actually costs. In most of Europe it lands somewhere between €20 and €35 a month — before you count the machine itself, or the fact that you cannot use it for anything else.

2. Your keyframe interval

YouTube's own encoder guidance asks for a keyframe every 2 seconds, and states it must not exceed 4 seconds. It also expects H.264 video, AAC audio, and constant bitrate.

Most video editors export with keyframes much further apart than that. If you push such a file straight to YouTube without re-encoding — which is what -c copy does — YouTube accepts the connection and reports you as live, while playback quality and startup time degrade badly for viewers.

Nothing in YouTube Studio warns you. Your dashboard looks perfectly healthy.

3. You lose the archive at 12 hours

This one costs people months of work, and it is documented in one line on a support page nobody reads.

From YouTube's own help:

"If your live stream is less than 12 hours, YouTube can automatically archive it for you. […] We recommend recording a local archive as a backup. Note: If your stream exceeds 12 hours, it may not be captured at all."

A 24/7 channel produces no VOD. Everything that plays is gone the moment it plays. No watch time accumulating on an archive, no search traffic from old sessions, nothing for a sponsor to look at afterwards.

If the archive matters to you, the only real workaround is to end and restart the broadcast before the 12-hour mark — which is a job for a script, not a person at 3am.

4. The concurrency limits, new in 2026

YouTube now applies 10 active streams per channel and 3 active streams per stream key, both at once. If you are running several 24/7 channels from one key, you will hit this.

⚠️ Two caveats worth stating: enforcement was reported as not yet applied to every channel, and the clearest write-up of these numbers we could find is published by a competitor, not by Google. Treat it as a constraint to design around rather than a number to quote.

None of these four is a rule about whether looping is allowed in the first place. That question has its own answer on each platform: is a 24/7 rerun channel against the rules?

If YouTube is not the only place you send this, Twitch adds conditions of its own — quality parity being the one that breaks always-on setups: streaming to all three at once.

There is a fifth, and on a music channel it is the most likely of all: the soundtrack. A loop plays the same track thousands of times, unattended — what that does to a copyright claim.

How to run one yourself, for free

You do not need us, and you do not need OBS. Here is what actually works.

Check your file first

ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries frame=key_frame,pts_time \
  -of csv=p=0 -read_intervals "%+#200" yourfile.mp4

Every line starting with 1 is a keyframe. Look at the time gaps between them. More than 2 seconds and you should re-encode.

Re-encode to YouTube's spec

At 30fps, a keyframe every 2 seconds means every 60 frames:

ffmpeg -i yourfile.mp4 \
  -c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -b:v 4500k -minrate 4500k -maxrate 4500k \
  -bufsize 9000k -profile:v high -level 4.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -r 30 \
  -g 60 -keyint_min 60 -sc_threshold 0 \
  -c:a aac -b:a 160k -ar 48000 -ac 2 \
  -movflags +faststart output.mp4

At 60fps use -g 120 -keyint_min 120. The rule is frame rate × 2.

The three matched bitrate flags give you constant bitrate, which is what YouTube asks for. -sc_threshold 0 stops ffmpeg adding extra keyframes at scene changes, which is what breaks the consistency YouTube wants.

Loop it to YouTube

Get your stream key from YouTube Studio → Go Live → Stream. Then:

ffmpeg -nostdin -stream_loop -1 -re -i output.mp4 \
  -c copy -f flv rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/YOUR_STREAM_KEY

-re reads the file at real-time speed. Without it ffmpeg sends as fast as it can and YouTube drops the connection. -stream_loop -1 loops forever. -c copy is safe now, because you fixed the keyframes in the previous step.

Keep it alive

while true; do
  ffmpeg -nostdin -stream_loop -1 -re -i output.mp4 \
    -c copy -f flv rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/YOUR_STREAM_KEY
  sleep 5
done

If the connection drops, ffmpeg exits and the loop restarts it five seconds later.

This works. It is also why you still need a machine that never sleeps — and why nothing above will tell you when it stops.

If you want the archive as well

To keep VODs, the broadcast has to end and restart before 12 hours. Roughly:

while true; do
  timeout 42600 ffmpeg -nostdin -stream_loop -1 -re -i output.mp4 \
    -c copy -f flv rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/YOUR_STREAM_KEY
  sleep 10
done

Be honest with yourself about the trade-off: every restart is a new broadcast, so your viewer count resets and anyone watching is dropped for a few seconds. You are choosing between a permanent stream with no archive, or an archived one that restarts twice a day.

What we do

PulseCast runs the loop from the cloud so there is no machine of your own to keep alive. Upload a file, paste a stream key, done. Since September 2026 it checks your file's keyframe interval on upload and re-encodes it if it is out of spec, because we learned the hard way that -c copy will happily ship a broken stream.

From $19/month. The free plan is 48 hours of streaming at 720p with a watermark — enough to test it, not a permanent free tier. We also published an honest comparison of 12 services including ours, which says plainly where competitors are cheaper than we are.

If you are on Twitch as well, the rules are completely different there — we wrote that up too: the Twitch 48-hour limit.

Sources

YouTube's archive behaviour and encoder requirements: YouTube Help, support.google.com, Archive live streams and Choose live encoder settings, bitrates, and resolutions. Concurrency limits: reported by third parties, not confirmed on a Google page — see the caveat above. Electricity figure: 150 W continuous for 30 days, multiply by your own rate.

Something wrong or out of date? Tell us: pulsecast.tv@icloud.com

PulseCast runs the loop so your own machine does not have to. See what it costs