Streaming from the Steam Deck
I did it just to see if it could even handle such a thing. First up, you have to switch it over to desktop mode and install OBS. Then you set up OBS as you would on desktop, then hit stream and open your game and start playing. Simple enough.
But I wanted to use my mouse and keyboard to play Skyrim. So I had to dig out the 3rd party docking station for the Switch and plug the Steam Deck into that then my monitor. But the docking station only has one usb port so I had to plug in a breakout usb adapter to it for the mouse and keyboard. THEN I had to change the power source for the docking staton to a laptop charger with usb c rather than the Steam Deck charger because it didn't have enough juice to power all the things.
THEN I got on my Macbook and logged into Youtube to grab the stream key to put in OBS on the Steam Deck. But I've never streamed on Youtube so it's currently making me wait for 24 hours before I can do so. So I logged into my dusty old Twitch account and tried it there. At least Twitch doesn't record or save streams so I didn't have to worry about what I was doing.
Because most of my time was spent troubleshooting the microphone situation. The onboard mic on the Steam Deck sounded horrible and distorted. So I grabbed a set of cheap earbuds that had a mic and tried those. No dice. Not even a sound. I tried a lav mic. Again, nothing. I attempted all the settings, according to OBS it could see the mic, and the Steam Deck could see the mic but it just wouldn't output the sound while playing the game. Apparently it's an issue with the LCD generation of Steam Decks not letting you use headset mics and defaulting to the onboard. Which is crazy, but they supposedly fixed that in the OLED versions.
Anyway, I messed around with it, and made it out of Helgen before I had to make dinner. I don't see how people can live stream with such a huge buffer of time. Like, ten seconds is forever. I'd say something, then wait to listen for it on the laptop. But it is cool that the Steam Deck can handle it.