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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

OBS is amazing. Half our faculty just went all-out and spent thousands of dollars on some commercial screen recording software.

Meanwhile I'm doing my online courses with OBS, and it works beautifully. I have multiple scenes set up in OBS that grab different parts of my screens, and I switch between them with simple key strokes, while narrating on my actions as I do them.

It's a very simple, and very effective setup, and my students love it.

To me, it is immensely powerful to be able to switch scenes and narrate live, instead of doing these things in post. This saves a ton of time, that I can instead spend on refining my content.

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Love hearing stories like this! Often, we only hear the negative or when people are having issues (it's rare for folks to speak up when everything is working well!), so it's genuinely heartwarming to hear how much people are able to use our program to keep their livelihoods moving.

I've been using OBS for quite a while now and I absolutely love it!

By chance, do you know what software your faculty purchased?

Probably any of the education-specific tools that are maintained similar to enterprise software platforms, where they add 'online video tutoring' capabilities to check off a feature/table-stakes box, but it has a painful UI that makes OBS look like a dream to use, and adds an extra few thousand dollars to the school's bill every year.

At the university I work for they use Teams, Blackboard and Echo360. I do know of some people in maths schools using OBS though.

Camtasia, I believe.

Which OS are you using?

Not OP but I can say that on Windows it may require a lot of fiddling. Hardware drivers appear to be a big factor.

Another concern is the many overlays that accompany game launchers and drivers, including: Nvidia, Steam, GOG, etc. These add latency and sometimes private notifications.

The fiddling step was what I hoped to minimize. Did you have better luck with Linux or MacOS?

Interface is similar across the platforms; I had to do a few test streams on macOS before I could find settings that didn't cause streaming hiccups or problems with other software. I also had to make sure the OBS app interface was on a monitor separate from the one I was streaming; otherwise sometimes it would have some weird stuttering issues.

No matter what, you'll probably need to spend a little time tweaking things to get it all working like you want. But the 'scenes' and preferences are pretty good about letting you lock things down once you do find something you like.

Linux. Kubuntu 18.4 to be precise.

What is a "Scene" exactly?

In OBS, a Scene is an arrangement of video inputs, images, texts written on the screen, ...

If you're a teacher and you're going through a PDF exercise opened on your screen while drawing things on a whiteboard behind you, you may want to have 2 scenes:

* One with the opened PDF in full screen, with your camera feed in the bottom-right of the video, in small.

* One with the camera feed in full screen, where viewers can clearly see what you're writing

You'd then be able to switch between those 2 scenes at will depending on what you're currently doing. You'd show the first scene when you're reading the exercise out loud and then switch to the second scene when you're resolving it on the whiteboard.

Great explanation, thank you kindly!

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