How to stream on Twitch with Xbox and laptop

If you don't want to spend money on a capture card, you can still stream your Xbox One using a windows PC.

Table of Contents Show

How to stream your Xbox One gameplay without a capture card
👉 Next steps
👍 Keep exploring
Can you stream on Xbox and PC at the same time?
Can you stream on Twitch with just a laptop?
How do I use my laptop camera while streaming on Xbox?
How do you connect your Xbox to your PC and stream it?

Written by Mihail Turusov
Updated over a week ago

It's easy to start streaming your Xbox One gameplay to several platforms with Restream even if you don't have a capture card. To do this, you'll need to capture Xbox Companion App on your computer and stream it with any software, like OBS. It will allow you to add overlays to your stream, and also to stream to Restream to send your video to several platforms at once.

How to stream your Xbox One gameplay without a capture card

To begin, you need to enable streaming on your console. Go to Console Settings.

Next, navigate to Preferences - Xbox app connectivity.

For other devices enable streaming only from profiles signed in on this Xbox. Also, make sure to enable both streaming options on the right for this Xbox.

After doing that download and install an Xbox Console Companion App for your Windows computer. Log in to the same account you use on your console.

After logging in navigate to Connection and select your Xbox One. Press the Stream button on the top. A window with your console screen will be opened.

Note: You don't have to connect Xbox Gamepad to your PC. If you have a warning - just click Continue to avoid latency issues.

Add this window to OBS as a Screen capture or Window capture in your main OBS Sources area.

Note: for the best quality, both devices should be connected to the same network with Ethernet cables. Having them connected over WiFi may result in a quality loss.

👉 Next steps

Guided flow to start streaming with Restream

👍 Keep exploring

How to set up Twitch with Restream!
How to stream PlayStation 4 games on PC without a capture card

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I tried searching through but didn't find anything that specifically answers my question.

I've been streaming PC games for awhile now, but I'm wanting to turn my Xbox One back on and play a bit. I figure I can stream this too, but am wondering the best way to do it.

I know you can stream directly through the Xbox One, but from my understanding that uses the Twitch app so all the overlays from OBS and whatnot wouldn't exist. Plus don't you have to use the Kinect cam? I don't have that.

I have the Xbox App for my Windows PC, and in the past I've been able to play my Xbox One through that app wirelessly on my PC. Would this make the most sense? Display capture that? How would you stream Xbox Live chat? (Or is that against TOS?)

I tried searching YouTube but didn't find a how-to video that spoke about the app I'm talking about. I assume it's a lot easier than I'm making it out to be, but with my disability, I do a lot better with a set of instructions as opposed to figuring things out myself.

Thank you!

UPDATE 4/11/2019: I've been randomly getting an influx of messages about this and finally realized it's because the thread is now a top search result for the question. The timing is impeccable and I just started up streaming again and am specifically streaming an Xbox game. So I just went through a whole bunch of trials and tribulations of different setups.

I specifically wanted to stream my Xbox via PC because I was originally (and still am) a PC streamer, so I am used to all the bells and whistles of OBS and overlays and interacting with Twitch chat and all of that. To not have that would have sucked. As far as I understand, streaming via the Twitch app with a Kinect (or any other webcam, you don't specifically need the Kinect plugged into the XB1) doesn't give you a ton of options... other than which corner you want your face in -- but it gets the job done.

Going my route is a bit trickier.

First I tried the setup that I posted about, using the Xbox app on my PC and display capturing that on stream. I had a few people in the thread telling me it was suboptimal but I wanted to at least try it. Suboptimal is putting it lightly. A big part of the setup is being able to play on my PC monitor so I don't have to move my webcams around and can easily adjust scenes in OBS, etc. So I was playing on the Xbox app on the PC as well -- and it just wasn't pretty. There was a lot of lag and stuttering and it was making the game borderline unplayable. As you can imagine, this also didn't make for a pleasant stream experience.

I believe it'd be possible to play the game on your TV/Xbox and set up your PC to stream the Xbox app window on your computer and you'd have a better time playing the game... but the stream itself would still look subpar and then you're not right in front of your PC (unless you have a laptop you can easily move right by you). This is a setup that someone else PM'd me about. So it would work for some people... just not for me.

I eventually just had to bite the $160 bullet and get an Elgato Game Capture Card. I got the Elgato HD60 Pro. I have my Xbox going to the Capture Card and the Capture Card going to one of my monitors. When I'm ready to play Xbox on stream I switch my monitor input from DP to HDMI and I'm ready to go. I use my second monitor as my streaming monitor where I have the Twitch Dashboard up, Streamlabs Chatbot, OBS, etc. Some setup tutorials may tell you that the delay between the Capture Card Software and the Xbox is negligible, but I disagree. In some games those milliseconds matter. The easiest game to tell this on is a game like Rocket League where you can just tell that the response isn't 100% instant. Any other fast paced shooter would also be telling. So that's why I go the extra step and actually plug the capture card into my monitor.

You can of course check out videos of my stream on Twitch. They should be labeled as [XB1] if I'm playing on Xbox One so you can see the quality.

It was an investment but it's the only thing that worked for me. Let me know if you have any questions!

Can you stream on Xbox and PC at the same time?

The game streaming function has as one of the limitations that the Xbox and the PC that is accepting the game stream need to be on the same network. This also has the limitation of only allowing one PC at a time to connect to the stream.

Can you stream on Twitch with just a laptop?

If you're using a desktop computer or laptop, you cannot install the Twitch app, so you'll need live streaming software to broadcast on Twitch. If you're new to streaming, we recommend using a software encoder rather than a hardware encoder.