How to stream on Discord

Starting a stream on desktop

Streaming on Discord happens inside a voice channel. You cannot broadcast to a text channel or to a server at large — people have to be in the channel with you.

• Join the voice channel you want to stream in.
• Look at the panel in the bottom left, where your connection status appears.
• Click Screen to choose what to share.
• Pick either an entire screen or a single application window.
• Choose your resolution and frame rate, then click Go Live.

A small preview appears in the corner. Anyone in the channel sees a Live badge next to your name and can click to watch.

There is a second route that is easier when you are sharing a game. If Discord has detected the game you are playing, its name appears in that same bottom-left panel with a screen icon beside it. Clicking that streams the game directly, which avoids the window-picking step entirely.

Whole screen or a single window

Sharing a single window is almost always the better choice. Viewers see only that application, so notifications, messages and whatever else is on your desktop stay private.

The exception is anything that opens new windows — some games, and most work involving several applications — where sharing the whole screen avoids the stream going blank every time focus changes.

The no-sound problem

This is the single most common Discord streaming complaint: the picture works, viewers hear your microphone, and they hear nothing from the game or video. It has three usual causes.

You shared a screen instead of a window

Full-screen sharing captures system audio less reliably than window sharing does, and on some setups not at all. Sharing the specific application window usually fixes it outright, and it is the first thing to try.

Discord is not running with enough privileges

When the application you are sharing runs as administrator and Discord does not, Discord cannot read its audio. Close Discord entirely, right-click the shortcut, choose Run as administrator, and start the stream again.

The application started before Discord

Discord hooks into a program's audio when that program launches. If your game was already running when Discord started, the hook never happened. Close the game, leave Discord running, and reopen it.

If none of these work, restart Discord fully before trying anything more elaborate. A genuine restart — not just closing the window, which leaves it running in the system tray — resolves a surprising share of audio problems.

Quality settings and what your plan allows

The resolution and frame rate available to you depend on your Discord plan. Free accounts stream at a standard quality tier; paid tiers unlock higher resolutions and smoother frame rates. Discord has revised these tiers several times, so the dialog that appears when you click Go Live is the accurate source for your account rather than any article.

The choice that actually matters is not resolution. It is frame rate versus sharpness, and it depends on what you are sharing.

For fast games, prioritise frame rate. Smooth motion at a lower resolution looks far better than a sharp slideshow, and viewers notice stutter long before they notice pixel count.

For code, documents, spreadsheets or design work, prioritise resolution. Text has to be readable, and nothing on screen is moving fast enough for frame rate to matter.

If viewers report lag, lower your own settings before blaming their connection. Your upload bandwidth is shared across everyone watching, and it is the usual bottleneck.

Streaming on mobile

The phone apps can share your screen too. Join a voice channel, swipe up to reveal the controls, and tap the screen share icon. Your device will ask for permission to record the screen, which is a system-level prompt rather than a Discord one.

Two things to know. Everything on your screen is shared, including notifications, so enable Do Not Disturb first. And screen sharing is demanding — expect the phone to get warm and the battery to drop quickly.

Sharing a recording instead of streaming

Live is not always the right format. When you want to show something that already happened — a bug, a clip, a walkthrough — a file in the channel is better than asking people to be present at the right moment.

The obstacle is Discord's upload limit. A minute of 1080p60 capture from OBS routinely lands between 80 and 200 MB, which the free tier rejects outright, with no partial upload and very little explanation.

The fastest fix is to shrink the file to the limit with compress for Discord.

Trimming first works better than compressing harder, because size scales with length — use the video trimmer.

For a short interaction that should autoplay inline, a GIF beats a video file — make one with video to GIF.

All of these run inside your browser, which means a recording of your screen never gets uploaded to a third-party server on its way to being made smaller.

Things worth knowing before your first stream

Check what is visible before going live. Sharing a whole screen exposes every notification that arrives, and browser tabs are readable to everyone watching.

Server permissions can block streaming. If the Screen button is missing or greyed out, the role you have in that server probably lacks the Video permission, and only a server admin can change it.

Viewers must open the stream themselves. Unlike a video call, Go Live does not push your screen to anyone — people in the channel have to click your Live badge, so it is worth saying out loud that you have started.

Common questions