How to Use the Scrolling Translation Marquee in OBS and on a Smart TV

February 2026

The scrolling translation marquee in Live Translate Live is a standalone web page that shows your live translations scrolling across the screen. It works in any browser — which means you can add it as a browser source in OBS so your stream viewers get live bilingual captions, pull it up on a smart TV for a big-screen translation display, project it onto a wall for a meeting or church service, or park it on a second monitor next to a Zoom call. One URL, many surfaces.

Why a Standalone Marquee Matters

Most translation apps are trapped inside a phone. You can see the translation, and maybe the person across the table can see it if they squint, but that's it. There's no clean way to hand that display to anyone else — no way to put it on a stream, a TV, a projector, or a second screen in another room.

The Live Translate Live marquee is different because it's just a web page. Its URL lives at /marquee.html with a token and some display parameters appended. Anything that can render HTML can render the marquee: OBS browser sources, Chromecast, Fire TV Silk, Apple AirPlay, Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, the browser on a laptop plugged into a projector. You open the URL once and the translations stream in over a standing connection. That single design choice — shipping the display as a web page instead of a native app view — is what unlocks everything in this post.

Getting Your Marquee URL

To get started, sign in to Live Translate Live and look for the "Open Standalone Marquee" button in the navigation bar. Click it, and two things happen:

• The marquee opens in a new tab — a full-screen scrolling translation display
• The URL is copied to your clipboard — ready to paste into OBS, a smart TV browser, or share with someone

Important: anyone with this URL can see your live translations. The URL contains a unique token tied to your account, so treat it like a password. If you ever need to invalidate an old URL, you can regenerate your marquee token from your account settings — this will break all previously shared links.

Marquee Settings Are Baked Into the URL

When you click "Open Standalone Marquee," all of your current marquee display settings — scroll speed, max speed, acceleration, font size, top/bottom row split, and vis-à-vis mode — are embedded directly in the URL as parameters. The marquee you open (or share) will look exactly the way you configured it.

This also means you can have multiple marquees with different settings running at the same time. Adjust for a fast, compact OBS overlay, grab that URL, then change to a larger font with slower scrolling for a TV display and grab a second URL. Each URL remembers its own settings independently. The marquee display can look completely different from what you see on your phone or laptop in the main app.

Adding the Marquee to OBS (Step by Step)

If you stream on Twitch, YouTube, or any other platform using OBS Studio, you can overlay the scrolling translation marquee directly onto your stream. This is the answer to "how do I add bilingual live captions to OBS" — a question with almost no direct tutorials online, so here's the concrete recipe.

The Full Setup

1. On the computer running OBS, sign in to Live Translate Live in a regular browser tab.
2. Start a session — pick two languages for translation mode, or use same-language mode if you only need captions for an English stream.
3. Click "Open Standalone Marquee" in the nav bar. The marquee opens in a new tab and the URL is copied to your clipboard.
4. Switch to OBS and select the scene where you want captions to appear.
5. In the Sources panel click + and choose Browser. Name it something like "Live Translation" and click OK.
6. In the URL field, paste the marquee URL.
7. Set width and height. For a bottom-strip caption overlay on a 1080p stream, 1920 × 200 works well. For a full-screen "second monitor" look, use 1920 × 1080. For a 720p stream, scale down to 1280 × 150.
8. Check "Shutdown source when not visible". This stops the browser source from running when you cut to other scenes, which saves noticeable CPU.
9. Leave "Refresh browser when scene becomes active" unchecked — you want the marquee to stay connected to your session across scene changes, not reconnect each time.
10. Click OK. Drag and resize the source into place.
11. Speak into your mic (or use push-to-talk — see below). Captions scroll across the overlay in real time.

That's the whole flow. Five minutes from sign-in to live captions on a stream.

Chroma Key, Color Key, and Transparent Backgrounds

The marquee ships with a solid dark background by default, which reads well for most streams. If you want it to blend into your overlay instead of sitting as a visible strip, you have two options in OBS:

• Color Key filter (simplest): right-click the Browser Source → Filters → + → Color Key. Pick "Custom Color" and match the marquee background. OBS drops pixels of that color and leaves only the text.
• Chroma Key filter (stronger, with softer edges): same path, choose Chroma Key, pick the background color, and tune Similarity and Smoothness sliders until the background disappears without eating text edges.

For readability over busy gameplay footage, keep the background. A solid dark bar with white text wins every time against transparency over motion. Reserve the chroma-key trick for streams where you already have a lower-third graphic and just want the text itself to ride over it.

Font Size, Scroll Speed, and Safe Zones

Two settings drive legibility on a stream: font size and scroll speed. Tune them from the Live Translate Live settings menu before you grab the marquee URL, since the values are baked into the URL you paste into OBS.

• Font size: larger text is easier to read but less fits on screen. For a 1080p stream in a 200-pixel-tall strip, font sizes around 48–64px hit the sweet spot. For 720p, drop to 36–48px.
• Scroll speed: fast scrolling keeps up with live conversation but gives viewers less time to read. Slow scrolling is more readable but falls behind during rapid speech. Start in the middle and adjust after watching a five-minute test stream.
• Safe zones: Twitch, YouTube, and Kick all overlay their own chat/UI elements on top of streams (chat badges, follower alerts, the "LIVE" badge). Keep your caption strip away from the top-left (where most platforms put live indicators) and the bottom-right (where chat overlays often sit).

Use Push-to-Talk on Stream — It Saves Real Money

Live Translate Live uses translation credits while your microphone is active. If you leave the mic on for a full four-hour stream, you'll burn credits for the entire session — most of which is just you talking to chat in your own language.

The solution is push-to-talk. Only activate the mic when you're actually interacting with a guest who speaks another language. A 4-hour stream with 20 minutes of foreign-language guest time costs you about 20 minutes of credits, not 4 hours. The math below assumes you're using push-to-talk.

Smart TV and Casting Setup

Want a big-screen translation display for a living room, conference room, classroom, or event? The marquee works on any TV that can reach a web page. Concrete steps for the most common setups:

Chromecast / Google TV

1. Open the marquee URL in Chrome on a laptop (easier than typing it on a TV).
2. Click the three-dot menu → Cast.
3. Pick your Chromecast target, then choose "Cast tab" (not "Cast screen"). Tab casting is higher quality for static pages like this one.
4. The marquee takes over your TV. Close the Chrome tab and it stops — leave it open and it keeps streaming.

Amazon Fire TV / Fire Stick

1. From the Fire TV home screen, open the Silk Browser app (install from the App Store if not present).
2. Enter the marquee URL. The easiest path is to send the URL from your phone via a paste-to-TV app or a URL shortener, since typing long URLs with the Fire remote is painful.
3. Once loaded, press play on the remote to go full screen.

Apple TV / iPad / iPhone (AirPlay)

1. Open the marquee URL in Safari on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
2. Swipe down from the top-right to open Control Center and tap Screen Mirroring.
3. Pick your Apple TV. The marquee mirrors to the big screen. On iPad, rotate to landscape first so the aspect ratio matches.

Samsung and LG Smart TVs

Samsung Tizen and LG webOS both ship with native browsers. Open the browser, paste the marquee URL (use the TV's phone-pairing feature if available — typing long URLs with a TV remote is miserable), and leave the tab open. These browsers aren't as smooth as Chrome or Safari but they render the marquee fine for a kept-open display.

Second-Monitor Companion for Zoom and Google Meet

A growing use case: streamers, educators, and anyone running a bilingual Zoom or Google Meet call pops the marquee open on a second monitor next to the video grid. You talk through your usual video call, the marquee scrolls translations alongside, and everyone in the call can see both the original speech and the translation without Zoom needing any translation plugin at all.

If you want the other call participants to see the marquee too, share the marquee window as a specific window via Zoom/Meet's screen share — not your whole desktop. That way you're sharing only the caption feed, not the rest of your screen.

Projector Setup for Meetings, Classrooms, and Churches

For a meeting room, classroom, or house of worship, the hardware is simpler than you'd guess: a laptop, an HDMI cable (or wireless dongle), and the projector. Here's the setup that actually works in practice:

1. Plug the laptop into the projector via HDMI or cast wirelessly.
2. Extend (don't mirror) your display so the laptop screen and the projector are independent surfaces.
3. Open the marquee URL in Chrome on the projector screen and press F11 (or Ctrl-Cmd-F on Mac) for full-screen browsing.
4. Before the event, bump the font size up in the Live Translate Live settings — projector throw distances mean the back row needs bigger text than an OBS overlay does. 80–120px is reasonable for a 100-person room.
5. Slow the scroll speed down. People reading from the back have to re-focus their eyes on moving text — scroll too fast and the room just can't keep up.
6. Do a ten-minute dry run from the back row. If you can't comfortably read it from the furthest seat, go bigger or slower.

For houses of worship that already run ProPresenter or similar software for lyrics, the marquee can run in a parallel browser window on the same output, or on a second projector dedicated to captions. Same-language mode works well for captioning an English service for the hard of hearing, while translation mode serves a congregation with multiple languages in the pews.

Styling Tips for Streams and Broadcast Overlays

A few small things separate a marquee that looks amateur from one that looks like a production overlay:

• High contrast wins. White text on a dark background (or black on light) beats any decorative palette for legibility. Skip the colored text unless you've tested it over actual stream footage.
• Match aspect ratio to your stream canvas. A 1920×200 bottom strip sits well on a 1920×1080 stream. Don't stretch — let OBS resize the source without changing the underlying browser dimensions.
• Choose a readable font size for the viewer, not the producer. What looks fine on your 27-inch monitor will be unreadable to someone watching on a phone. Check on the smallest screen your audience uses.
• Scroll speed is a trade-off, not a preference. Fast means more content visible; slow means more time to read. Match the speed to your typical pace of speech.
• Keep the caption strip out of platform UI territory. YouTube's chapter markers, Twitch's chat overlay, Kick's badge — all of these can obscure a caption placed too close to the edges.

What It Costs — Real Numbers

Using the marquee costs the same as any other Live Translate Live session — it's just a different window onto the same translation pipeline. You're charged for microphone-active time. Concrete examples at $1 / 15 minutes or $3 / hour:

• 30-minute Twitch stream with English-only captions (same-language mode, push-to-talk on for the full stream): about $1.50 in credits.
• 2-hour bilingual church service in translation mode with continuous speech: about $6 in credits.
• 1-hour classroom session with a bilingual teacher: about $3 in credits.
• 4-hour stream with a 20-minute foreign-language guest appearance (push-to-talk): about $1 in credits.
• 45-minute Zoom call with a bilingual client and the marquee on a second monitor: about $2.25 in credits.

Credits don't expire and there's no subscription. Try for $1 — no subscription and see whether the marquee fits your use case before committing to more.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use the marquee for a Twitch or YouTube stream?

Yes. The marquee is a standard browser source in OBS Studio or Streamlabs Desktop — paste the URL into a Browser source, set dimensions, and it overlays onto your stream. It works the same way on Twitch, YouTube Live, Kick, Facebook Live, or any other platform that accepts OBS-style output. Use push-to-talk to keep costs down during long streams.

Does the marquee URL work on any TV?

Any TV with a web browser or casting support, which is nearly all smart TVs made in the last five years. Chromecast, Fire TV, Apple TV via AirPlay, Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, and Android TV all work. If your TV doesn't have a browser or casting, plug a laptop or a $30 streaming stick into an HDMI port and point that at the marquee URL instead.

How do I make the background transparent for OBS?

Use a Color Key or Chroma Key filter on the Browser Source in OBS. Right-click the source → Filters → + → Color Key → pick the marquee's background color. The background drops out and only the scrolling text remains. For most streams, keeping the solid dark background actually looks better — transparent text over busy gameplay footage is hard to read.

Does using the marquee cost extra credits compared to the normal view?

No. The marquee is a different window onto the same translation session. You pay for microphone-active time regardless of which view you're looking at — the phone display, a laptop, the marquee on a TV, an OBS browser source, or several of them at once. Running three marquee windows on three screens still costs the same as running one.

Can I run the marquee and a face-to-face session at the same time?

Yes. The marquee reads from your live translation session, so you can run it alongside the vis-à-vis face-to-face display on your phone while also casting the scrolling marquee to a TV for a third person watching. Same session, multiple simultaneous windows.

Get Started

The scrolling translation marquee is included with every Live Translate Live session. Sign in, click "Open Standalone Marquee" in the nav bar, and you've got a URL ready to paste into OBS or cast to your TV. Try for $1 — no subscription, credits don't expire.

Start translating · View pricing · See all features

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