Setting up Discord for your table

Players: this page is for you. The rest of this site isn't.

You need Discord and a web browser. Nothing else on this site applies to you — the other pages are setup for whoever's running the game.

Why Discord and not something in BobbleHub#

Because you already have it, and it already works.

Voice chat is a genuinely hard thing to build well, and your table almost certainly has a Discord server already. Building a second voice system you'd have to learn — and that would be worse — isn't a good trade. So BobbleheadStreams carries your cameras, and Discord carries your voices, the way it already does.

If you're a player#

1. Join your GM's Discord call, the same as any other session.
2. Open the link your GM sends you in a browser. Chrome, Edge and Firefox all work.
3. Allow camera access when the browser asks.

That's it. Your camera goes to the show; your voice goes through Discord as usual.

You don't install BobbleHub. You don't install NDI, OBS, or anything else listed on this site.

A few things worth knowing#

• Face the camera and keep your head in frame. Your head is what appears on your character, so the framing that works is an ordinary video-call framing.
• Reasonable light on your face helps a lot. Backlighting — a bright window behind you — is the one setup that reliably looks bad.
• Your background doesn't matter. It gets removed.

If you're the GM#

You need Discord installed on the machine running the show, because OBS captures the call audio from it.

1. Install Discord from discord.com/download if you don't have it.
2. Have your players join the voice channel as usual.
3. In OBS, capture the Discord audio — most people use an Application Audio Capture source pointed at Discord, or a desktop audio source.

Your voices and your video are separate paths, and that's deliberate. If the show's video has a problem, your table can still talk. If Discord has a problem, the show still renders.

Troubleshooting#

A player's camera isn't showing up#

Have them check the browser actually got camera permission — the address bar shows a camera icon when it's allowed. A camera already in use by another app is the other common cause.

My players are asking what to install#

Nothing. Send them this page — it's the only one written for them.

The stream has no sound#

Voices come through Discord and OBS, not through BobbleHub. Check the audio capture in OBS rather than anything in BobbleHub.