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OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

obsproject.com

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Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#61
post #41
post #20

If you're running a modern Linux desktop you're probably running Wayland, and screencasts on that have long since been a complete pain in the neck with per-compositor "solutions" that mostly don't work quite right. Fortunately someone who works on Gnome wrote the obs-xdg-portal plugin that should fix this, at least for Gnome and hopefully soon for wlroots and KDE once they fully support the underlying portal API. Unt…

Does Wayland do anything better than Xorg? Every time I see it mentioned, it is about how it does not support this or that core feature of Xorg (e.g multiple displays with custom pixel densities/scaling, screen sharing apps being broken, etc...). What is Wayland's reason for existing?

It actually works in a way which makes sense for modern compositors and GPUs, which means the rendering is much smoother without tearing issues and so on. Issues with getting this to work reliably in Xorg is what lead to the maintainers abandoning it to work on a replacement. It just turns out shifting a bunch of software built around a core and complicated interface to another system is quite difficult.

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#64
It may be just me, but I don't find the project's main page clear and intuitive; the first screen capture looks scary and there is nothing in that page that suggests (shows) the software is easy to use. Maybe it is easy to use, it's just not showing it.

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#65
post #39
post #6

There’s one feature of OBS that’s missing for me, and that’s recording sources to separate files. I believe this is called “multicording”, and it something I’ve only found in paid software, like screen flow. Here is the multi year discussion in the OBS forums: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/recording-sources-to-se...

I wasted a good chunk of a day looking into this. If you start multiple instances of OBS (you need to do this on the command line otherwise clicking will just foreground the current instance) then "multicording" should work fine, though perhaps using lots of system resources (the fan goes nuts). This was on macos. Overall, I realized it's better to just use OBS and have it mixed into one file/stream. You trade off a…

It's not better--you're just not paying for tools that do it. When it works it solves entire categories of problem and it's one of the reasons I pay a lot of money for vMix. (In fairness, the OBS developers I know are super sharp and I'm pretty sure that this is somewhere on their to-do list.)

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#66

College professor here. This software has been a big help in the current situation. Applause for the developers! (Anyone know how to fix that it changes red to blue and blue to red, when grabbing Firefox? I'm using Ubuntu MATE, Bionic Beaver.)

Give this a shot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbnLtc63XJQ&feature=youtu.be

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#67
post #6

There’s one feature of OBS that’s missing for me, and that’s recording sources to separate files. I believe this is called “multicording”, and it something I’ve only found in paid software, like screen flow. Here is the multi year discussion in the OBS forums: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/recording-sources-to-se...

If you are using any of the many hardware-accelerated encoders available on desktop today the CPU is not at all limiting. Quicksync can run 9 HD h264 encodes, NVENC can run 4 to 17 depending on the card, etc. Most OBS users don't configure software encode because of the resource issues.

This is very true, but it's worth noting that NVENC requires a Quadro card for more than one or two streams (depending on the model).

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#68
post #35

If you are looking for a more robust solution Streamlabs OBS[1] is more popular in the livestreaming community, it's OBS on steroids. It is also open source, and just released a beta on Mac like this week. [1]: https://streamlabs.com/

Is this a fork of OBS or another project. If it's a fork, why not work on the OBS project to implement these enhancements there? Is there backlash to that sort of thing from the OBS maintainers?

I think one of the reasons why is because Streamlabs sells premium add-ons https://streamlabs.com/goprime

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#69

It may be just me, but I don't find the project's main page clear and intuitive; the first screen capture looks scary and there is nothing in that page that suggests (shows) the software is easy to use. Maybe it is easy to use, it's just not showing it.

I don't think many people would describe OBS as 'easy to use'. I think that typically comes with the territory of very powerful software like OBS though. Steep learning curve and all that.

Re: OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming

#70
post #35

If you are looking for a more robust solution Streamlabs OBS[1] is more popular in the livestreaming community, it's OBS on steroids. It is also open source, and just released a beta on Mac like this week. [1]: https://streamlabs.com/

I wouldn't say Streamlabs is more robust - it's the same core of OBS Studio, with Electron instead of Qt for the frontend and better Streamlabs integration.
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